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From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre,misc.legal,talk.politics.misc,misc.jobs.misc,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Are Animals Patentable?
Message-ID: <21974@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 23 Apr 88 16:56:36 GMT
References: <97500013@prism> <4872@xanth.cs.odu.edu> <9915@tekecs.TEK.COM> <3447@gryphon.CTS.COM> <2924@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 29
In-reply-to: kevin@chromo.ucsc.edu's message of 21 Apr 88 03:42:01 GMT



I remember a serious research article hanging on a bulletin board at
the Vet school at Cornell. Basically a researcher had taught a bunch
of chimps to do some sort of assembly line work in trade for "chimp
money", tokens they could use in a "chimp store" to trade for bananas
or whatever. They understood the abstraction and worked hard for the
tokens.

After a while he noticed a marked drop in the productivity of the
female chimps. Further investigation revealed that many of them were
obtaining chimp money in exchange for sexual favors back at the chimp
dorm at night.

I can't vouch for its accuracy or even come up with the reference (tho
it might be findable in the SCI without too much work, early 70's.)
Fascinating, however.

A similar thought was a proposal to use prosthetic technology which
consisted of implanting electrodes in limbs to allow paralyzed people
to walk or use their arms by stimulating the muscles. The proposal was
to simply use that on assembly-line workers turning them into cheap
robots, they could chat or watch TV while their limbs uncontrollably
did the work needed under direction of a machine. No robots currently
proposed can turn McDonald's hamburgers into assembled toasters as
well as these could.

To quote Blue Velvet, "we live in a strange world".

	-Barry Shein, Boston University