Noooooo!

I was in the middle of typing up a long blog reporting on my trip to the OSC today and I just lost it all!!!!! I use Firefox as my browser and with it you can have several "tabs" open, each of which functions as its own browser window...except that if something in one tab goes screwy, you have to shut down the whole window (with all its tabs). Doesn't happen often, but I was using one tab to navigate to links that I wanted to include in my post, and a crash happened, meaning that I had to shut down Firefox and lose the entirety of the long post I had been working on. Crap. I cannot retype all that; it just won't be the same.

Let me just say that at the Ontario Science Centre today I saw a lot of interesting things...and a few that absolutely shocked and outraged me at how human beings (doctors and scientists even, who are supposed to uphold life and be unbiased) in North America have treated each other in recent history (as recently as the 70s)...with practices that Nazi leaders, when on trial at Nuremberg, cited as their inspiration. Ugh, my blood is boiling again now just thinking about it, so I'm not going to go through typing that up again because it just may give me a heart attack. Maybe later.

Okay, okay, I have to tell you just a little bit about a couple points I learned about in the "A Question of Truth" exhibit (which, contrary to the way I will depict it here, was not all about shock value, but the few things that were shocking were very shocking to me):

• to quote from a Wikipedia article on eugenics that supports what I learned through a video in the exhibit: "between 1907 and 1963 . . . over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States." Okay, that's not the "over 450,000 in less than a decade" that the Nazis sterilized, and at least the U.S. didn't kill their undesirables under this policy, but it's still upsetting...especially as the United States' sterilizations set the stage for the Nazis' sterilizations of others. Oh, before you go dismissing this as something only the Americans would do: "a few nations, notably, Canada and Sweden, maintained large-scale eugenics programs, including forced sterilization of mentally handicapped individuals, as well as other practices, until the 1970s." "Many First Nations (native Canadians) were unfairly targeted, as well as immigrants from Eastern Europe, as the program inevitably identified racial and ethnic minorities as being genetically inferior." Shame on us all.
  
• Notice I said above "at least the U.S. didn't kill their undesirables under this policy." Ever heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, "also known as the Public Health Service Syphilis Study"? Between 1932 and 1972, almost 400 black men with syphilis in Alabama were told that they were being treated at a particular clinic, when in fact treatment was withheld (many were given placebo treatments and "were also prevented from accessing syphilis treatment programs that were available to other people in the area") so that the fatal course of their disease could be studied. Just seeing how the arms of these people were affected in the video really shocked me. "By the end of the study, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. Twenty-eight of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis." "It is important to note that this was not a secret study, with several papers published throughout the study." When a whistle-blower got concerned about the ethics of the study, the Center for Disease Control, the National Medical Association and the American Medical Association basically said the study had to go on "until completion (until all subjects had died and had been autopsied)"...so the whistle-blower went to the press. Only after the press and the public reacted was the study stopped and measures established to ensure something like this would not happen again. Bill Clinton formally apologized to "five of the eight remaining survivors of the study" in a ceremony during his presidency (no, I don't know why the other 3 weren't there; choice? inability? lack of invitation?), so I suppose that's good, but it shouldn't have been necessary because this study should never have happened in the first place.
  

There, I feel a bit better now for getting that out. The video looked at a lot of different aspects of how we place values on others, so these two issues were only part of the bigger picture (and this video was only one part of the whole exhibit, which had many things to make you think and not react on such an emotionally shocking level), but together they really, really upset me.

I also saw some stuff in the MindWorks exhibit about chimps that can communicate with researchers through a special symbolic keyboard (which both the researcher and the chimps use as the particular chimps I saw don't understand verbal speech) and a bonobo ape named Kanzi that knows over 200 symbols on this keyboard and understands human speech (even complete sentences)...and, according to a Wiki article I looked at on him while writing up the blog entry that is now lost forever to cyberspace (I'm not bitter), may even be trying to speak perhaps original vocalizations. (Oh, he also plays Ms. Pac-man, apparently. ) Bonobo apes in general do use vocalizations and gestures with their own kind, and "are capable of passing the mirror-recognition test for self-awareness," so perhaps Kanzi's success is not surprising...but it does pose some hairy questions regarding non-human sentience and what it means to be created in the image of God.

Phew. Okay, I could say so much more about today's trip to the OSC (and in my other, now-lost post I was saying more and it was more obvious that the OSC is not just about shock value, despite my talking a lot about the things that did shock me), but I think that is more than enough for now. We can always talk about the lighter things (that's actually a pun as lights were involved in a music-creating experience I had, but I'm not going to get into that now) in person. Have a good weekend, everyone!

Edit: I just checked out the Kanzi page at the research facility's site, and Kanzi actually knows over 500 words now. "His comprehension of spoken language is at least equivalent to that of a two-and-a-half-year-old child." He can also make and use tools. The ape/human line does look pretty fuzzy, doesn't it? I still don't believe in evolution, but like I said, hairy questions...

Edit: Just a little more on Kanzi :)...you can see videos of him here...the necklace one isn't very good (though it's kinda cute), but watch the ones titled "Kanzi and Novel Sentences" and "Kanzi the Toolmaker." The Wiki article on Kanzi mentions a YouTube video of Kanzi playing Ms. Pac-Man, but when I followed the link there was a message on YouTube saying it had been taken down as it's copyrighted. Oh well.