ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Canaries in the laboratory: silent voices of neuroscience

• In Event: Invisible Actors in Biomedical and Environmental Sciences (I) & (II)

English Abstract

It is one of the classic tales of neuroscience. In the early 1980s, Fernando Nottebohm asked why canaries sing a new song every year. In order to answer this question, Nottebohm raised twenty male canaries over the course of the year, strategically killed them at varying moments during their song cycle, and examined slices of their brains. The result was astonishing: over the course of a year, nearly 30% of a male canary’s brain appeared to die and regenerate.

The classic tale, however, is incomplete, for it is missing critical voices. These include the canaries’ songs, which were ostensibly the original subject of the study. Years later, those songs fueled Nottebohm’s regrets about his dead canaries. On closer inspection, his regrets are complicated by yet another missing voice, that of a young woman who was struggling to succeed in his laboratory at the time of the study. In this talk, I draw on the theme of silenced voices shared across our panel, suggesting in counterpoint with Marion Thomas that the emotional conflicts exemplified by animal laboratory science provide a compelling model for re-thinking the relationship between discovery, reason, and emotion in scientific knowledge-making.

Author

• Rachel Mundy, Rutgers University-Newark