Makes Me Mad, Mad, Mad!

Scientific experimentation, that is.  To be specific, experimentation on animals and people.

I began listening to We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler last weekend (narrated by Orlagh Cassidy).  This was a really good book.  Cleverly done, and written in such a way as to slowly whip me into a froth about the subject matter, a family experiment: raising a baby girl and a baby female chimp together.  The story is not so much about the experiment but about the aftermath.  What happens to the subjects when the experiment is over? This is my favourite quote from the book:

      “The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true,
only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.” 

Around the same time as listening to this book, I watched a documentary on television called Three Identical Strangers. It is about triplets who are raised separately without any knowledge of each other who reunite when they are nineteen, by accident.  It is a sad, shocking story, with scientific experimentation at the root of it.  There was no reason specified for this study and no conclusion.  

I just finished a book yesterday called  The Pox Party: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson.  Another bizarre story about scientific experimentation.   

All of these mentioned above are just random choices I made to meet certain reading categories, but I am flabbergasted by the co-incidence.   I loathe this topic!  I did all the research when I first became a vegan and I already know what happens in the laboratory to animals.  When I was in college I took developmental psychology (briefly...I was so disgusted by some of the reading, about experiments performed on babies that I chose to skip the rest of the course).  I unsubscribed from PETA because I hated the way they felt they needed to shove this info in my face repeatedly.  That wasn't the only reason, but I don't want to get too deeply in to the politics of it here.  

Going back to We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, whilst Fowler's book rattled the mad-o-meter she wrote a clever, eloquent and uniquely graceful story about what makes a family. Her protagonist, Rosemary Cooke's  conclusions about the experiment were profound.  It gave me food for thought and stuff to get cross about...
At the root of it all experimentation for the sake of it, for intellectual curiosity, makes me angry in several ways, so while the book was a good read, I didn't like how it set me off on a ranty tangent about psychologists etc.,
I was scowling and anxious until the very end.