Our treatment of animals used for research, production, and consumption, has slowly been changing over time. Science has improved our understanding of animal cognition and their capacity to feel pain, making their use in research less acceptable. Breeding them for food is also being questioned more and more. In addition to ethical concerns, people are increasingly worried about the environmental impacts, and there has been a major rise in plant-based alternatives.
Our knowledge of this topic is generated through a field of study called animal welfare science, driven forward by our growing awareness of the cruelty of the meat industry since the 1960s. In the 1980s, the first academic discipline in the field was established at the University of Cambridge, UK, with scientific journals dedicated to the issue emerging in the following decade.
This relatively new field of study has been encouraged by pressure from citizens and consumers and has frequently been used to support legislation on animal protection and treatment. However, it also involves major economic interests, such as a drive to increase the industry’s productivity and sustainability. These interests make ethical questions inherent to the research even more complex. This issue’s cover story describes some of the key aspects of this multifaceted discussion in Brazil and the scientific knowledge fueling the debate.
The scientific and ethical complexity surrounding the use of animals to study diseases is the subject of another report. Scientists identified lesions typical of Alzheimer’s in elderly capuchin monkeys that died naturally. Considered one of the most intelligent in the Americas, these small primates could help us study the progress of the disease and search for treatments for the most common form of dementia suffered by humans. Giselle Soares describes how researchers investigating Alzheimer’s often rely on imperfect models, from cell cultures in the lab to worms, fruit flies, and rodents.
This issue features two profiles of prominent researchers who have made a mark on science in Brazil. Economist Maria da Conceição Tavares, who died on June 8 at the age of 94, was original and thought-provoking in both her intellectual work and her public persona. In a biographical article published in the journal Estudos Avançados in 2001, Maria Silvia Possas, also an economist, wrote that Tavares “became famous not only due to the strength of her ideas, but also for the passion with which she defended them.”
Psychologist Carolina Bori, who was six years older and would have turned 100 in January, became the first woman to head the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science in 1987, almost 40 years after it was founded in 1948. Active in the scientific community, she created a committee that drafted the organization’s “Constituent Assembly Proposal,” which resulted in article 218 of the 1988 Constitution, the first relating to science and technology in a Brazilian constitution. She was a central figure in the institutionalization of psychology teaching and studies in the country.
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