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Research rebuke You had a brief article [summer 98, "Deadly Stress"] stating that you injected monkeys with the AIDS virus to study them under stress. The results were stated as "the animals in unstable associations did worse than did animals in stable associations in personally coping with stressful situations." Do you have to inflict harm and pain on any living creature to ascertain the obvious. . . . I assume (wrongly) that UC Davis is a progressive, compassionate and intelligent entity working within the new paradigm of peace, harmlessness toward all living entities, cooperation not competition and love toward all the planet, knowing we're all connected. What a shock that was to many people, I'm sure, to read of your blatant abuse toward animals. Margery Johnson Researcher John Capitanio responds: Had our study only established a causal link between social stress and shorter survival, it would still have been a major contribution to the literature, inasmuch as there are no data showing such a link in humans. What was absent from the article was discussion of our finding that animals in our Cortisol is a metabolic hormone implicated in stress. The traditional view is that stress leads to elevations in cortisol, which could increase viral replication, suppress some aspects of immune function and presumably accelerate disease progression. Our finding of lower cortisol but shorter survival in our animals, then, is counterintuitive. While we cannot control the behavior of individuals who contribute to the stress experienced by HIV positive individuals, understanding the physiological mechanisms by which stress affects disease, and why some individuals experience a certain event as stressful while others do not, can lead to interventions--medical, psychological, social--that can prolong and enhance the lives of people with AIDS. The "obvious" is a good place to start the search for such understanding, but it is not the place where a scientist should end the search. |
