In fairness to plum, as someone who works in drug research I kind of understand what he's getting at. Animal testing is a profoundly unpleasant thing that is nonetheless totally standard (and hugely important) in pharmaceutical research. It is also unfortunately inevitable that sometimes animals involved in animal testing will die - either because of drug side effects that you didn't know about, or because the rats/monkeys/dogs were already ill and your new drugs failed to cure them as you hoped. That is how you learn about your drug before you give it to patients.

So if the story was "dogs have died during animal testing in Oz's lab", plum would be completely right. The story would still seem horrible, but it wouldn't mean anything about his work in particular - only the nature of animal testing itself.

However! That's not what the story says. The specific stuff mentioned in the article is malpractice at best and animal cruelty at worst, and that's completely fair criticism. I could see a slight element of unfairness in that (as discussed above) this will always be a topic that gets people very emotional, and knowing how labs work it would probably have been his students rather than Oz himself who did the stuff in the article. But leadership has to come from the top, do I don't think that's completely unreasonable criticism at all.

TL;DR: plum's statement is worded hilariously poorly, but he almost has a point. Oz shares blame with his students and animal testing itself on this one, in my book.

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And if you don't know, now you know.

Politics Containment Topic 394: Espionage a Trois

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I got it from Steiner originally, to be fair.
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