Well, I won’t be as explicit as CPP but that’s about how I feel about them right now. I got an email from them the other day (well, I get an email from them every single day but this one was special) asking me to comment on whether a mouse pain study at McGill was compliant with IACUC rules. That caught my attention just a little bit since I was a pain researcher at McGill for 3 years. I headed on over to the page and was more than a little surprised at what I saw.
I suppose that the purpose of such posts on their site is to help sell their products, whatever those are, and they think their products are going to be helpful to PIs such as myself. Safe to say that I wasn’t interested before and I’m certainly not interested now. The post is about whether the development of the mouse grimace scale, a method to measure affective components of pain in mice, was compliant with McGill’s Animal Care and Use Committee (ACUC) rules. I’m not sure exactly what they’re arguing but it appears to be a pretty one-sided affair and the comments are fairly vitriolic with some threats leveled against the McGill researchers. Great way to sell products to basic scientists doing animal research…
The thing that really gets me about the whole thing (aside from the fact that they are putting my friends and colleagues in danger) is that they completely ignore the scientific findings of the report and the rationale for doing the study in the first place. All of this is straightforward if you take even a glance at the paper. Continue reading
JUNIORPROF 