Undisciplinary
Undisciplinary
Horseshoe Crabs: Unknown and abused guardians of global health?
**Below is AI generated**
What if the key to safer medicines lies in the blood of an ancient, alien-looking creature? Join us as we uncover the fascinating world of horseshoe crabs with our special guest, Richard Gorman. Rich's journey from human geography to animal ethics opens up a riveting discussion about the ethical implications of using animals in healthcare and the pivotal role horseshoe crabs play in pharmaceuticals. You'll be surprised to learn how these ancient creatures, often overlooked, are indispensable to the safety of vaccines and injectable medicines.
We take a deep dive into the ethics surrounding the collection of horseshoe crab blood, comparing it to laboratory animal practices and fishery management. Rich helps us navigate the complexities of managing horseshoe crabs as a wild species and addresses the public's lack of awareness about animal-derived products in medicine. From their unique biology to the cultural perceptions that shape our interactions with them, we explore the many layers of horseshoe crabs' significance in global health.
Finally, we examine the broader ethical and regulatory frameworks, discussing the "Three Rs" principle and the consequences of synthetic alternatives. Rich shares his insights on the hidden but crucial process of Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) tests and the challenges of balancing economic interests with conservation efforts. Reflecting on the importance of these incredible creatures, we encourage listeners to think more deeply about our reliance on them and the ethical dimensions involved. This episode promises to be both enlightening and thought-provoking, shedding light on the often-overlooked more-than-human world.
Undisciplinary - a podcast that talks across the boundaries of history, ethics, and the politics of health.
Follow us on Twitter @undisciplinary_ or email questions for "mailbag episodes" undisciplinarypod@gmail.com
Undisciplinary is recorded on the unceded lands of the Wadawurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation in Geelong and the Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation in Sydney. We pay our respects to Elders, past and present.
Speaker 2:So and the story is just so bizarre that once people start to learn about it, they're like okay, wow, this is going to grab the public attention.
Speaker 3:So I just totally grabbed my family's attention. To grab the public attention, I just totally grabbed my family's attention. We start recording for us, otherwise we're going to say interesting things. By accident, the world's first high-strung plant has been performed.
Speaker 1:Medical history has been made in South Africa, reports of systemic racism in the healthcare system and. Covid-19 has made the issue even more urgent. Welcome to Undisciplinary, a podcast where we're talking across the boundaries of history, ethics and the politics of health, co-hosted by Chris Mays and Jane Williams. Okay, so welcome to another episode of Undisciplinary. Jane, how are you?
Speaker 3:Very well, thank you, Chris you.
Speaker 1:Good good, I don't have much to report on, except I will say this about Geelong drivers. I've been riding my bike more and more commuting to work and Geelong, as some people refer to it, is like a big country town and it has got that sort of vibe between either some drivers want to ride you off the road and think that you do not belong on the road and will be extremely aggressive, and others will cause traffic accidents to ensure that you cross safely. Even though you're not intending to sort of merge or cross the road, they will just sort of panic around you. So within the space of like a minute this afternoon literally, I had one person do the masturbator gesture towards me.
Speaker 3:Knew it was going to be bad. Yep.
Speaker 1:And then another person. It was a green light for them. They stop confuse everybody and wave me to go across, even though it's a red light for me, which just confused everybody.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of the way.
Speaker 3:I'm feeling I guess in an extreme mood maybe uh, yeah, I would like to say that I just walked in the door from the gym and I mentioned this only to irritate our regular listeners.
Speaker 1:Basically, too much about the gym.
Speaker 3:Um yeah.
Speaker 1:However, I'm excited for today yes, I know, this is actually a first conversation I believe we've had, not only for the specifics of talking about crabs, but I think, uh, a blind spot. I know I gave it away. But also we haven't really given much attention to the ethical, historical, political dimension of the more than human world in relation to ethics and health, which is something we have neglected. So it's very exciting that we have with us today Rich Gorman from Rich did his PhD in human geography.
Speaker 3:I'm a fellow wannabe geographer at Cardiff University in 2017, investigating the social and ethical implications of incorporating animals within various caring and health promoting practices. Following this, he moved to the University of Exeter as a postdoctoral research fellow on the Wellcome Trust Animal Research Nexus Project. This work involved exploring practices of patient involvement around animal research, particularly working with patients and carers to explore their lived experiences of health and illness and what it means to be involved in research that they might find ethically challenging, which is cool. I agree, chris. Animal ethics, or more than human worlds, is a massive blind spot for me and, I suspect, for you, but I do have a cat and I love her very much. I guess people thought I hated animals.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, your cat every time I've been to your place hides a lot.
Speaker 2:But you know, I guess that's what cats do.
Speaker 1:So, before this derails further, rich, it's interesting to hear about your background in human geography and I think, as Joan says, a lot of us want to be geographers.
Speaker 2:I have a cousin who's a human geographer.
Speaker 1:I always find it very interesting that perspective on whatever issue really.
Speaker 1:I think, just space and place. But, yeah, it'd be interesting to hear how you got from there, um, to the kind of research that you're doing now, which, yes, as jane mentioned, or that I broke the uh, you know spoiler about that. Yeah, we're going to be talking about horseshoe crabs, so, yeah, how did you go from human geography to, uh, horseshoe crabs? And I guess that's, you know, part of the undisciplinary nature of the podcast, trying to sort of hear about people's different journeys into the kinds of research that they end up doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you and it's great to sort of you be talking to people, at least have an awareness of what human geography is. A lot of the time I spend myself, sort of you know, having to try and backtrack and explain what, what human geography is, why human geography might be interested in some of these topics and not just sat in a corner with maps and some colouring pencils, which you know I mean that would be great and I would prefer to do that.
Speaker 2:But I think geography, as you both sort of hinted at, is quite an eclectic mix to begin with, and there's a really beautiful quote and description that I'm drawn to by fellow geographer, eden Kincaid, who says when folks ask me what a human geographer is, I tell them I'm one third social scientist, one third philosopher and one third artist, and intellectually it seems everything is possible in geography. And so here me doing my sort of pitch for my discipline, but geography is sort of a bit of a magpie discipline of pitch for my discipline. But geography is sort of a bit of a magpie discipline. You would take things from different ways of thinking, different ways of working. That seems to sort of fit together and you can have geographies of everything, because geography is literally all around us. And I suppose for me geography is kind of rooted in the relationships, understanding the relationships between people and the environment, nature and society, and really I suppose trying to deconstruct these kind of unhelpful binaries in the first place. And one strand of human geography is sort of followed with sort of multi-species studies, with the environmental humanities, with post-humanism, to have a real interest in thinking about the more than human and you actually get some human geographers that have rebranded themselves as more than human geographers, because actually the discipline being named human geography instantly creates a sort of bias in in the kind of relations and thinking that we're interested in and trying to move away from this kind of human exceptionalism to really acknowledge a much more diversity of beings that come together in the making of worlds, like Jane's cat, for example.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so I started out doing a very basic geography degree, came to do a PhD. I was very interested in community farms and this idea of community and solidarity and how they use those concepts, the structure, their sorts of food making practices. But I noticed that a lot of the livestock on the farm, on the farms I was studying, were being used for sort of therapeutic and educational purposes and sort of witnessing this kind of animal turn that geography was going through. At the time I became very interested in sort of thinking about the social and ethical implications of incorporating animals within these kind of formalized caring and health promoting practices. Whose health is being centered there, whose welfare is important. Can the animals get anything out of this?
Speaker 1:or is it?
Speaker 2:just another way of exploitation. So that was my PhD, and then there is a strand here so um, at least I like to think there is.
Speaker 2:It says there is on my CV, so let's see if I can sell it here. So then I moved to work on the animal research nexus project, as Jane said, which is is it was a large program of work interested in the changing connections between scientific and social processes around laboratory animal research. So you know, I've been researching sort of nice cuddly animal assisted therapy hang out with the dog, maybe feel a little bit better, and then suddenly moved much further upstream to sort of people making health with animals in a very different way. So I was interested in in how animals are enrolled in that production of health much further upstream. So that that's the narrative thread.
Speaker 2:It it maybe works, yeah it works and cool, good, good that, that's great to hear. And so, extra, yeah, we were specifically interested in how people affected by different health care conditions like alzheimer's, cancer, parkinson's, for example felt about the use of animals within biomedical research, for people that are often positioned as the beneficiaries of animals of animal research and are often increasingly asked to sort of have more of a say on what kind of research gets funded and how that changes people's politics and things. So while I was doing that project I had the opportunity to apply for some some wonderful secondment funding from the Wellcome Trust Shout out to the Wellcome and we worked very closely with the RSPCA as part of the Nexus project and they were very aware of a kind of gap in the research we were doing around alternatives and replacements and there's a strange issue that had come up around horseshoe crabs. Now, at the time I didn't know what a horseshoe crab was I never, never seen one Still haven't actually seen a live one, which is a shame and how these animals were sort of enrolled again in the making of safe medicines.
Speaker 2:And they asked us you know, is there any social scientific expertise that could be leveraged here to help us understand why this is such a knowledge controversy, why different stakeholders are saying different things to us. We can't establish a policy position here. And the more I read, the more fascinated I became with this and put together a little bit of a project to explore this in more detail. Little bit of a project to explore this in more detail. Um, and the project took place in 2020 and I sort of credit it to me staying kind of sane during during all that was going on. Uh, or maybe not. Maybe I just got far too obsessed with crabs.
Speaker 2:Um, and you'll, as you'll find out over the next half an hour I will say rich.
Speaker 3:so so for the, for the listeners, I met Rich through a mutual friend in a loud place and he was saying you should talk to Rich about crabs and I was like about, yeah, I don't?
Speaker 1:You know, there was a lot of noise.
Speaker 3:There was a Euros game on, there was a lot happening. Really was pretty sure that I had in fact misheard this mutual friend of ours and had to very tentatively email Rich a week or so later, going did he say crabs? So yes, talking about horseshoe crabs, I did have to google it. I'd never seen one. They're're kind of cool looking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think they are.
Speaker 3:For the listener.
Speaker 2:They're huge.
Speaker 3:But they're not actually a crab. Can you tell us, what a horseshoe crab is?
Speaker 2:So there's a few types of horseshoe crab, but the one I'm most interested in is the Atlantic horseshoe crab. So sorry to our sort of Antipodean listeners who might be more interested in sort of Southern Hemodean listeners who might be more interested in sort of southern hemisphere horseshoe crabs, but the Atlantic horseshoe crab, or Limulus polyphemus in the Latin, is a marine arthropod which is basically a kind of invertebrate that's found along the Atlantic coast of North America.
Speaker 2:The species dates back sort of 245 million years, possibly even further in deep time, depending on if you're interested in fossil classification, which I'm not. But it seems cool and these animals have remained virtually unchanged for 99% of their lives 65 million years. They've survived longer than 99% of all animals that have ever lived and they're sort of oxymoron. It describes living fossils, which kind of doesn't really make sense when you begin to think about it. But yeah, so they're called crabs. They're not technically a crab. Again, if you're thinking about biological classification, they're more closely related to a phylum of scorpions or spiders, which kind of always sort of is a bit of a U-turn when I'm talking about this, because people are like, oh, they're cool, oh wait, they're kind of underwater spiders. No, I'm out. But yeah, Google them, they look cool. So crabs, yeah, what have crabs got to do with ethics? What have crabs got to do with health? Well, I mean, yeah, who would think that these weird little animals are related to health and well-being? But they're sort of weird little animals are related to sort of health and well-being, but they're sort of intimately entangled with the supply chains of modern health and medicine globally, because the biomedical use of these animals has benefited pretty much every human. Since the 1970s, pretty much every human has benefited directly or indirectly from horseshoe crab blood or indirectly from horseshoe crab blood, because there's this little type of bacteria called endotoxin, which is a type of gram-negative bacteria, and if that gets into the mammalian bloodstream so humans it can cause fever, it can cause shock, hypertension, lots of really serious problems. And it's really hard to test for endotoxin, particularly when you're making vaccines and injectable medicines. If it gets into the water it's really hard to know. And then you're potentially making a vaccine that's contaminated with this really nasty bacteria that could potentially kill someone. So you need to find a way to test for this.
Speaker 2:Horseshoe crabs, during their sort of 65 million years of living in the oceans not exactly clean, getting less cleaner as humans go around have developed a response mechanism to cope with that. So their blood, which is bright blue, which is a whole other sort of kettle of horseshoe crabs, when their blood encounters endotoxin it clots, which is a sort of defence mechanism for the crabs. It sort of stops the bacteria spreading. For scientists, though, figuring this out, you've got a really handy instant reaction that you can sort of test a sample of your water or your vaccine and see, oh, has it clotted? Ok, there's something wrong here. We need to test this.
Speaker 2:So endotoxin testing is, is a regulatory, regulatory, regulatory requirement for the safe release of, of large, large swathes of what's called paratoneural medicines, so injectable medicines, so anything goes into the bloodstream. Um, it's something you have to do according to the FDA, et cetera, et cetera. Other regulatory bodies are available and sourcing this requires the collection of blood from horseshoe crabs, which are a wild species. They're just sort of swimming around in the wild. They come up onto the beaches of the Atlantic coast to sort of spawn Atlantic coast to sort of spawn and that's the only way to get this blood. That is the core ingredient of a reagent that holds up the entire pharmaceutical industry.
Speaker 1:I've got a lot of questions, some are and statements, and some of them are not as articulate as I'd like them to be. So, yeah, I mean it's incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I read one of your papers, or chapter, jane Shipp.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really interesting, and there's sort of more detailed things I'd like to talk about a little bit later, but I'm just looking at, like you mentioned, they're wild, so they're not bred for this.
Speaker 1:I'm looking at some of the pictures, which I will share. I guess, when we tweet this out and all through other, I was going to say milking, the bleeding of them is something out of sci-fi, which also, though and I guess my other comment is like you both are saying that they're cool-looking, and I guess they they are, but they also really remind me of um alien like the, the sort of not not the big alien, but you know the thing that comes out of the stomach, and so they are, and I'll come back to that with a different question later on, but, um, uh, I'm just interested, I guess, yeah, this just the process of them going from being in the wild to then these blooding, um, you know that, as I'll share. You know, there's just rows and rows of these crabs and and that looks like there's sort of liter plus bottles, um, underneath them, so that looks like quite a lot of blood as well that comes out of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean you've hit on some really interesting things here. So, yeah, I mean the aesthetics of them is really cool and we can talk about that. And interestingly the companies that bleed these animals are really quite conservative and controlling about the imagery that's produced.
Speaker 2:So there isn't a lot of imagery around this and what they always say is that the imagery that exists is outdated, but we won't release any, any new stuff. So your big paradigm of animal research, contemporary animal research, is about openness. The openness agenda and this doesn't seem to have sort of permeated here, um, because this isn't research, which is you know, it's, it's just testing, which is an interesting sort of discursive regulatory move, um, that maybe we can talk about.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's so much, so much we could talk so much I could talk about and my partner's really glad I'm talking to someone else about this today, not just her again um, so yeah, so the the amount they take about sort of four up to 40 percent of the crab's blood, which is quite a lot. I mean, if someone took 40% of my blood I'd probably not be standing upright talking on a podcast. So they collect them from the wild. They're not lab animals as we would think about. They don't live in a lab, which is, from a geography point of view, the kind of spaces that we associate um with with these animals.
Speaker 2:But because they're used in that kind of pharmaceutical production, this sort of ethics we just might expect are perhaps more aligned from from the public, with that kind of laboratory, laboratory animal ethics. But yeah, the wild animals so that they're sort of managed as a fishery. So they're managed in the same way as any other sort of wild fishery species that you're catching for sort of food consumption or bait. So it's all the kind of language of maximum sustainable yield, harvest, mortality rates, sort of licensed fishermen. It's really quite highly regulated and there's been some really interesting journalistic work done, that sort of shows that some of these regulations maybe aren't always followed.
Speaker 2:They're sort of more best intentions including where you, sort of foreshore crabs have been collected from sort of protected areas and nature reserves.
Speaker 2:Obviously that's not the standard, that's not what's intended, so they're collected. They're sort of foreshoe crabs have been collected from sort of protected areas and nature reserves. Obviously that's not, that's not the standard, that's not what's intended, and so they're collected. They're sort of taken to a bleeding facility and obviously you know these are, these are sort of marine, marine arthropods. You know they live in the water. They're not used to sort of chilling out on the on the bed of a flatbed, being driven around in the sort of South Carolina sun. So there's this sort of welfare impacts there, there's mortality rates. So the crabs are then taken to a facility bled up to 40% of their blood and then re-released.
Speaker 2:So the regulator suggests around 15% of crabs will die during this process. Other research so this is where it becomes kind of knowledge controversy other conservation researchers have gone. Well, we've looked and actually it's more like 30%. Other researchers associated with maybe certain interests have looked and said, oh no, it's even less than 15, it's probably only about eight. And so you, you've got this really sort of range of numbers, um, but it's also it's all focused on, on, on death. It's.
Speaker 2:There's very little interest in welfare as a concept, so it's about mortality, not welfare, um, which again interesting kind of separation, um, and then they're re-released and what happens to them afterwards? Again, there's not really a huge amount of research on what happens to the fitness of the crabs. Female horseshoe crabs are the bigger of the species, so if you take a big crab you can get more blood out of it. So there's a kind of perverse incentive to harvest female horseshoe crabs, um, which then has a sort of potential impact on long-term population dynamics. So there's all this going on at the same time, all this kind of conservation biology, and it's very hard to sort of be like well, which sets of facts, which sets of statistics am I going to believe, which is why it's a really interesting case study, I think, for social science and I'm assuming that the, the companies who are bleeding, these guys don't have to report anything, right?
Speaker 3:so so, in terms of estimating death rates, uh, I mean, is that like death while they're doing the bleeding, whatever? I mean, maybe they chuck them all back into the ocean and then they die.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah so, um, the reporting of this is is sort of it gets reported to the regulator but it's blinded in in this sort of public copy that comes out. Um, I mean, there's this, this is really interesting things like um, there's really interesting things like this.
Speaker 2:A few years ago, the regulator said you know, there's a mortality threshold that was established in, I think, in and and, of sort of 57 000 crabs um and it said if this is, exceeded, it would trigger the management board to consider taking action, and this is a direct quote from one from a 2019 uh regulatory report saying the threshold has been exceeded every year since 2007, with the exception of 2016 no management action has ever occurred so there's really, how do you begin to enforce this?
Speaker 2:um, because you know they're wild animals, they're invertebrates. Do do we care about horseshoe crabs? I mean, I do, but I'm kind of of weird, they're not cuddly. And then the other thing horseshoe crabs, they're not just used in this biomedical sector, they're also used as bait. So some fisheries take them and bleed them for biomedical purposes, and very expensive, the blood is worth a lot of money.
Speaker 2:And then other horseshoe crabs are captured, chopped in half and used as fishing bait to catch eels or conch or whelk, and so it's kind of really hard to establish an ethical position on something that is kind of you effectively use this fishing bait and you get a lot of people in the pharmaceutical sector who get really annoyed by the attention this case study gets, that their use of horseshoe crabs get, when there's other people that are causing 100 mortality and just using it as a sort of fishing bait. And I think that's where the spatial element comes in. Is it's about the expectation of care that that we owe these animals, that we are benefiting from? Um, and I don't think it's good enough just to say, oh well, things could be a lot worse for the horseshoe crabs, um. So yeah, they should be grateful that you know 70 of them make it back to the sea.
Speaker 1:But that's kind of the argument that does sort of seem to to have a lot, of, a lot of weight yeah, I mean, that's what interested me about in in saying that they sort of look like, you know, the alien, um monster, uh, and so I worked.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I've shared this on the podcast before I've talked, you know, but I worked at the World Society for the Protection of Animals, sort of in just administrative roles. When I say administrative, I would open the mail and process some of the donations. But what was noticeable was when we had a campaign around so I think around four campaigns a year or something like that when it was around sort of charismatic animals whales, pandas, you know the donations would flow in. When it was around thingsas, you know, the donations would flow in. When it was around things like, you know, de-sexing stray dogs in Indonesia or stuff like that, people weren't that interested and the donations wouldn't flow as freely. And I can imagine people not having a strong interest or care, not only just because they look a bit freaky, but also, you know there's longstanding prejudice against fish and do they even feel pain? Like? Are they the sort of Cartesian exemplars, of the sort of automaton? They're basically some kind of painless machine.
Speaker 1:They've got no social life, they just sort of go about doing their thing, and so that seemed to me like a real challenge to like for any kind of um garnering sympathy. You know, not that that's even really what you want. You want people to do the right thing. But, second best, you might as well have them at least think it's a cute cuddly animal. So it shouldn't, you know, cause population collapse among them. But yeah, that clearly is the challenge, yeah.
Speaker 2:So you've hit on two really interesting things there. So, yeah, first of all, that, the sort of sentience thing like you, to what other animals do we sort of privilege the sort of ascription of sentience? They're invertebrate, so no sort of CNS, so can they feel pain? Yeah, that's obviously one of the big questions. You know, a lot of people in the industry would say this isn't a harmful procedure, they don't feel pain, it's not invasive, it's not viewed as part of an experiment, which is the sort of language that often matters when you're working with animals in this context. It's not a procedure, it's not regulated in this way. You know it's not a procedure, it's not regulated in in this way.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, there's, there's some literature, some sort of promotional literature, that says oh well, you know it's. It's like, it's like a spa day for the crabs. They get a manicure because we, we scrape off all the barnacles on them as well while we're we're taking their blood. Um, you know, it gets compared to human blood donation, you know this, this sort of gift, which is again interesting, because I think when we donate blood we don't donate up to sort of 40% and we don't get thrown in the sea straight afterwards, and so there's this whole issue about sentience. But we're seeing in some of the sort of other literature you sort of philosopher, jonathan Birch, his work around sentience and insects. You are seeing sort of sciences slowly advancing towards recognising different ways of sort of species. You're feeling pain being harmed and pulling apart what sentience might mean. So there's all of that.
Speaker 2:Then in terms of the species kind of hierarchy. Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting. But, the horseshoe crabs are really interesting part of a food chain where there's a bird called the red knot which has a sort of migratory range from the sort of South America to the top of North America.
Speaker 2:And on its migratory range, it stops off on the Atlantic coast to eat its favourite high calorie snack horseshoe crab eggs, its favourite high calorie snack horseshoe crab eggs. So this is where the sort of public interest in horseshoe crab kind of stems from, because red knot numbers started to sort of plummet and drop because we'd sort of broken that food chain web.
Speaker 2:Again, you pharmaceutical companies would say well, is it us that's broken the horseshoe crab food chain web or is it you? Marine pollution, is it the bait fishery, is it habitat degradation, et cetera, et cetera, all these other things, is it pharma taking you?
Speaker 2:a million crabs a year, or is it everyone else that's just sort of built condos on the beach on the beach, um, and you that? That's another sort of debate that can be had. But the sort of public, public concern for crabs emerges at the level of this other, much more charismatic bird and you get a lot of ornithological associations that are really putting in the work to campaign on behalf of the horseshoe crab and campaign for sort of replacing it with a synthetic variant in labs.
Speaker 2:And that's really interesting because I think again you get a very different kind of ethic that emerges when it's being driven by conservation organisations who are interested in sorts of populations at a much bigger level, versus kind of perhaps animal rights organisations that have maybe campaigned for and driven some of the policy and regulation around the use of animals in laboratories and in science, where perhaps welfare is the kind of much more operative kind of concept there.
Speaker 1:There are two things I'd like to talk about, and we can take them, I guess, one at a time, but one, like you've alluded to, I guess, the, the corporate interest, and you know it always works well for corporate interests to have other people to blame, uh for, uh, you know, anything to do with the species or the environment, um, but so there's the, I guess, the regulatory framework, and and so one being the sort of three r's, and whether you could talk a little bit about the three R's and both the hierarchy within you know what different people advocating for the three R's would be talking, you know, wanting to prioritise, and then you know, I guess the secondary thing is this idea of corporate social responsibility and how that fits into the, I guess, regulatory mix around here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah so the three.
Speaker 2:R's not reduce, reuse and recycle, but very similar reduce, refine and replace the use of animals in research. So originally conceived by Russell and Birch in the 1950s. Each of these sorts of three concepts emphasise different ways of minimising harm to animals used in research.
Speaker 2:So it's a framework that's specific to research, animal dependent science. So research and science, again the kind of the concepts that matter here horseshoe, crabs, not research, just testing, um, so sort of outside of this framework. Um, but the three r's, you know they're not without their critics but they're sort of established and accepted worldwide as one of the better frameworks for governing animal dependent science.
Speaker 2:Um you, some people would say, oh, it's kind of minimal ethical constraints, but um it, it, it's, it's really really taken hold within laboratory research and seen as a really valuable way to think about things embedded in ethical review committees and so yeah, but but you know, horseshoe crabs not really, not really part of that three hours framework not seen to to to apply here, traditionally, and but there's growing, growing interest in in interest in using these concepts as a way to advance conversations about horseshoe crabs.
Speaker 2:Different stakeholders see different value and possibilities in each of the individual Rs, where there's almost substantial friction between those who would focus on replacement over reduction, and again, again, it becomes quite, uh, controversial and wrapped up, you know, in sort of corporate financial interests. Um, so that, yeah, the sort of people are opposing you. Can we think about reducing horseshoe crabs? Um, you so can we, can we use less blood, which would mean, um, you're having to harvest a lot less crabs? Um, and obviously, that that would be ideal, simply, so well, you know, is, is that, is that ethical to sort of you were still using some crabs at the expense of, you know, saving you some but still using others, um, you have. So there's, you can use much more kind of effective design of the systems we used and your technology has improved. So I think one pharmaceutical company started using new tech that reduced their annual crab blood consumption from 7.5 litres to just a few hundred millilitres.
Speaker 1:So if you think, if everyone started to do that.
Speaker 2:It's going to be a lovely, nice curve down in the number of horseshoe crabs that need to be harvested.
Speaker 2:Other people are kind of sceptical about that, saying well, what happens to the crabs? And the same goes for replacing them. Some people say, well, the problem is the horseshoe crab gets a lot of protection at the moment because it's a valuable asset within the biomedical economy and actually if it's not valuable like that, then the protection comes off and actually it's available for exploitation by things like the bait fishery, where it's just 100% mortality, things like the bait fishery where it's just you 100 mortality. And there's a great quote from um, someone's called alex magical, who says you being valuable alive has obviously hurt the horseshoe crab in some ways, but perhaps having no economic value at all is worse and and that's a really depressing uh state of our relations with nature. Um, and the idea that horseshoe crabs are only afforded protection and conservation by an ongoing exploitation of their species is one that I think you will probably rankle with a lot of people. But it's interesting. It's a message that, from my research, seems to have purchase, with lots of interviewees in the pharmaceutical settings saying you're being quite reassured by this messaging that actually they're doing a good thing, because a lot of the pharmaceutical companies will say oh, we invest in conservation, we invest in habitat restoration. You know the lots of big wads of cash you give us to buy this lovely blue gel liquid, whatever we spend some of that on restoring mangroves and and anyway, it allows the horseshoe crabs to thrive as a population. So again, it's like what, what level do we care about animals? Is it the individual or is it the population? So that's the sort of reduction angle.
Speaker 2:And the really interesting one is around replacements. Uh, can we replace this with a synthetic? And there's been a synthetic. It would really help if I researched stuff. I could actually say um, there's been a synthetic on on the market since around uh, 2001. Uh, becoming commercially available much later.
Speaker 2:Um, a lot of, again, controversy from from pharmaceutical scientists, who are much smarter than me, about whether the synthetic is as good. Does it do the same thing? This is obviously a you, you don't want to release a dodgy vaccine. No one wants to do that. You, there's no sort of physical harm that would cause as long with sort of your public trust is just not worth doing. So a very, very conservative sector here, not interested in taking on new technology. But the main problem is the way regulation is written. So the pharmacopoeias, which is effectively the big books that tell you what you have to do, how you are allowed to make medicine, and the what you have to do, how you're allowed to make medicine and the steps you have to follow, specifically state you have to use the limulus amoebicite lysate test.
Speaker 2:It doesn't say look, you've got to do an endotoxin test. It says you've got to use this version. So when someone brought on a new version that's synthetic, it's not lute-less mucosal lysate, it's recombinant factor C, it's not the same chemical effectively. So regulatorily you can't use it, and this has been the case for a while. You could use it as an alternative, which meant you had to do lots of extra timely, costly validation work.
Speaker 2:Some can what some companies did choose to use the alternative because they felt it was part of their corporate social responsibility, because it was part of their sort of ethical offer or, in some cases, because some of their guys at the top were really avid birders. And, going back to this, there's a lot of logical link, so a sort of personal taking on that sort of work, of doing that. This is slowly changing. The EU pharmacopoeia European pharmacopoeia sort of approved the synthetic as being like for like last year or two years ago, and the US has finally, as of last week, decided to come in and say they will do the same starting from, I think, about 2026, which will slowly allow you to use it. It will allow you to use it, though.
Speaker 3:It won't force you to use it.
Speaker 2:And again, because of the way a lot of regulation around drugs are written, individual product licenses will probably have. We will develop this product and we will use LAL, limbless, mupeset, lysate at the end to test it's fine. So to suddenly switch, you're going to have to do all your paperwork again lots of validation, lots of standards, checking. And what's the incentive for doing that? And and that's where I think you as a social scientist culture becomes really important um, what? What is the incentive? Is it? Is it public demand? Is it? Is it ethics? Is it cultural change? What is going to make these companies make the switch?
Speaker 2:Because when I was doing my research in 2020, everyone said, oh, rich, you know, we we'd love to use the synthetic, but we can't because the regulator says we can't. And then, a few years later, the regulator said, and you at least said, don't worry, lads, you can. And suddenly, okay, well, but also, the adoption hasn't really happened. In fact, the use of horseshoe crab blood's gone up and so kind of. What is the barrier here? Yeah, everyone said it's the regulatory barrier. That's been removed. So what is going to be the incentive? Could it be economic? Could it be cultural? I don't know. That's what I'd be interested in finding out more.
Speaker 3:I mean maybe the incentive will end up being necessity. Right, there aren't enough horseshoe crabs, or you can't you can't bleed enough of them.
Speaker 1:And yeah, all of a sudden you're like are there any other cultures around the horseshoe crab, like you mentioned, the fisheries and the using them for bait? What about even the people who are harvesting them, like I? I'm assuming that these are not people who are also, you know, part of the pharmaceutical, you know directly part of that biomedical pharmaceutical economy. But yeah, who's doing the actual harvesting of these?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. So there's a lot of subcontracting layers, of obfuscation why do I keep using words, I can't say Around how this works and there's been some really interesting investigative journalism work by Chiara Eisner that's looked at how I think I mentioned earlier, some of the horseshoe crabs that have been used by pharma have actually been harvested from protected nature reserves which you shouldn't be taking them from, and your farmer said oh well, it wasn't us, it was our subcontractors who subcontracted. You subcontracted and so you get this kind of outsourcing of supply chains and I think the the sort of very concept of outsourcing here is really interesting because I think it explains the sort of story of horseshoe crabs as a whole, because what I've not mentioned just another thing to sort of throw in and complicate the story is we talked about replacements, we talked about alternatives. So the horseshoe crab is a replacement, it is an alternative. So the initial test for for endotoxins, um, that was used up until the sort of 70s was what's called the rabbits rabbit pyrogens test.
Speaker 2:So we used to have huge colonies of rabbits and you want to test if your product was contaminated with endotoxin. You take a sample of it, inject it into the ear of a rabbit and then measure the rabbit's febrile response. Does it develop a temperature? Does it get a fever? By sticking a thermometer in a place that a rabbit probably doesn't want the thermometer stuck. Leave it at that. But a rabbit probably doesn't want the thermometer stuck, leave it at that.
Speaker 2:And so when LAL came along, it was seen as this is great, we don't have to stick needles into rabbits anymore and then euthanize them afterwards. We can suddenly do this thing using a test tube. So you get this really complicated thing where it's positioned as an in vitro test rather than an in vivo test, so in in life, so in an animal, in vitro, in glass, in a test tube. But it's kind of this weird in vitro test because it still relies on animal products, it's it's animal blood in a test tube. So where, where does it fit? But it becomes outsourced. So again, sarah Sarah Zhang, in a piece in the Atlantic, wrote the LAL test still requires the use of animals, but the grisly process of sticking needles into animals becomes hidden and outsourced to a different part of the supply chain.
Speaker 2:So it's not like the horseshoe crabs in your lab with you, which is again very different to laboratory animal research at large, where there's an opportunity to perhaps develop relations with those animals, to sort of develop a culture of care. It's, you know it's. It's a vial of blue goo that comes in with all your other chemicals, that sits in the fridge and you know some, some interviewees said you actually it's you probably sort of 80, 90 percent of pharmaceutical scientists using this don't really know where it comes from. It's sort of invisibilized in that supply chain, something that social scientists like Michael's calls distanciation, a sort of deliberate move to sort of horseshoe crabs are over here, the use is over here. So where do you develop those ethics? Whose responsibility is it to develop the ethics of care? Is it the people using the sort of product of horseshoe crab blood? Or is it the people bleeding the horseshoe crabs and everyone's sort of blaming everyone else and no one's doing anything?
Speaker 3:you know, yeah, so, so it makes me think about the whole animal testing thing more broadly, which is usually with products that can be avoided. So you know, you can choose products that are not tested on animals say and also those products tend to be sort of optional extras.
Speaker 3:Right, you know there might be particular cosmetics or or or whatever. They're not vaccines, you know they're not saving lives, um, so I'm really interested in whether there's a different ethics involved when the outcome is arguably more important, you know so. So if it's all injectable medicines did you say so, so it's vaccines it's, I guess, injectable insulin it's. It's things that sustain lives and save lives rather than, you know, like your body shop.
Speaker 2:Yes yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't opt out of being a consumer of horseshoe crab blood. Well, at the moment anyway, I mean, maybe this is this is where there is an opportunity for kind of I mean at least in the US, where kind of you can do marketing and adverts for pharmaceuticals. You can say look our insulin is made horseshoe crab free.
Speaker 2:Very good, yeah, I mean, would anyone care? I mean, there's also other sort of weird animal products in medicines that we just don't really talk about Lots of different adjuvants that come from animals in terms of things used for cell cultures, something called squalene that comes from sharks, and it's this whole kind of invisible realm of sorts of animal derived products that end up in medicines that we just don't really talk about. And there's been a huge focus on animal research and not perhaps on the animal products that are used in medicines development. But there is this kind of you you've probably seen a few of the sort of social media. Well, the news news articles.
Speaker 2:It's a really good piece for journalists to do because people read it and like this is, this is, wow, this is what a cool story, what, what a weird. So you get your science. It's a good one for science journalists to have in their back pocket on a on a sort of slow news day, and especially with the sort of regulatory change that's been happening, uh, recently. Um, and you get comments on social media being like that. People are really annoyed that they don't have an option, especially when there is a replacement and they see pharmaceutical companies choosing not to use it because it involves a bit of work. I mean, it would involve a lot of work, um, you know, and I you have a lot of sympathy for the guys in the labs who would suddenly have to you spend a lot of hours recalibrating and and revalidating everything, but you people do seem to get really frustrated that there isn't, there isn't, isn't, isn't more being done?
Speaker 2:Um, and I think you some of the comments I've seen, it's like, okay, well, if we're going to do this, what are the opportunities to at least express a little bit more care for the crabs that are used? You know is, is there a way to, to make that process less harmful? Uh, you could. Can we take um less blood more often? Well, maybe that. Maybe that's not ethical either. Um, you know, is there a way to? You know, there are experiments with trying to aquaculture crabs and keep them in in a lab, and obviously you've got ethical arguments.
Speaker 2:Well, that would remove sort of freedom from from horseshoe crabs to live their sort of crabby little lives swimming around in the atlantic doing what they do. Um, but you, perhaps, if it's in a lab, you can optimize other parameters. You can rather chuck it back in the sea. You can sort of care for that animal afterwards. Um, either, there's been experiments with you.
Speaker 2:Okay, if we're going to take 40 of it with crab's blood, can we feed it afterwards? Can we replace that with a, with a blood filler? Um, to sort of do all this? And you know, obviously all of these are, these are ethical choices, they're economic choices. Uh, and again, what? What is the incentive for doing that? You know it's a very high value product. So I'm sure there is some room in in the, in the margins, for doing some of this stuff, but it's, you know it's it's a catch and release asset in a, in a fishery, fisheries economy, and it's there is a. There is a huge sort of distanciation again between the sort of how the animals are treated and the values that are created from their blood products just in terms of the consumer dimension.
Speaker 1:It just it made me think about whether, um, you know, there have been different religious groups, uh, who have been, like you know, jehovah's witness, obviously with blood transfusions, but, uh, and I guess, whether these are crabs or not, but you know, from what I understand of Jewish, kosher dietary laws, I believe crustaceans something not to be consumed. I don't know where you know, maybe we need to get a rabbi on to talk about, you know, the status of blood from a crustacean, but I would assume that there would be a decent-sized group of people you know whether it is Jewish or Islamic, or Jehovah's Witness, I mean, you know, who may have concern around this idea that this connection with human blood and then these, what do we call them? Invertebrates, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean I think yeah, so I think so.
Speaker 2:I suppose again, it depends on your different consumption.
Speaker 1:It's not in the vaccine, it's just used to test the vaccine before it goes out, and I guess just the other thing about that like in australia and I'm sure in the uk initially around the covid vaccine there was a real, a restoked, some, uh, catholic anglican anxieties, I think, around the use of fetal line.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, fetuses and the vaccine and stuff like that, yeah, so yeah, whose lives are involved in a product that you're going on on to consume. I mean, so this, this is all interesting. What started the the sort of interest for me? So I I have a health condition which means I need to use injectable medicines on a sort of fairly regular basis, sort of intravenous stuff, and have done my entire life so I sort of realized, you know reading this I was like I, I I benefit from, from horseshoe crabs and, and I wanted to understand you, to what?
Speaker 2:what do I owe? Oh, the crabs. You know how am I entangled with these creatures and you know I I feel conflicted. You know that. Um, you, these crabs are being bled. You know, someed I've been bled by phlebotomists often enough in hospital. I can empathise with these little animals.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting to begin to unpack the multiple animals that we're entangled with. I think it is such an invisibilised issue. The companies that do this there's only three or four companies in the us that bleed crabs. Um, so it's not quite a monopoly, but it's a very um, closed conversation. There's not a huge amount of transparency. I said earlier, I knew that they're very reluctant to let journalists and photographers in. Um, very well, you know, they'll tell you. We, we use, we, we take good, really good care of the crabs. We have a, we have a best practice, we do training for all our handlers and so, oh, that'd be really interesting as a ethnographer. What, what do you do? Can you tell them? Oh, no, no, it's trade, trade secrets. So it is.
Speaker 2:This is really you know, and when you you've got other in other aspects of animal research. You have, like things like the comporter on openness, um, you know, organizations like understanding animal research in the uk and understanding animal research in oceania that are working on on these things, and then horseshoe crabs are sort of being left in the dust, um, because the companies don't want to talk about it and there isn't public demand. And I think, again, there's something really powerful for journalists to do here in really trying to open up those, those stories, a lot more, um, but I think, yeah, there's a huge opportunity to have a conversation about what, what is in our medicines, but how to do that in a kind of careful way, without triggering kind of vaccine anxiety, vaccine resistance, fueling, anti-vax stuff. I mean, if I were to do this project again, I think that would be heightened.
Speaker 2:I think, in thinking about some of this, you know, is I don't know, is testing with a synthetic, is that better in in those kind of political views than testing with something that's ostensibly natural? If, if we can kind of say that in inverted commas um, there's lots of these other dynamics that could come into this conversation. Um, I mean, yeah, I can talk for this for hours, for.
Speaker 1:Well, it's been really great talking with you and I've learned a lot about a lot of things, particularly these, yeah, incredible invertebrates that I did not know. I depended on so much for vaccines and medications, so it's been fantastic talking with you. And, yeah, it's the evening here. So the other night I had dreams about orcas, so maybe tonight I'll be having dreams about horseshoe crabs, and if you're a listener who knows how to interpret dreams, let me know what that orca dream might have meant. As well, you can tweet at us, send us an email. But, yeah, thank you very much, rich, it's been great talking to you, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the opportunity. It's a real privilege to sort of just ramble about this and I hope I've not made you both feel guilty about being reliant on this animal.
Speaker 3:I just ate a sausage, so I'm fine, I'm just looking at more pictures, I would say and if you're listening, go Google this, because it looks so kind of lo-fi, right, these crabs are like strapped to things with bunchy cords essentially Same as what you'd get at Bunnings. Thank you, bye.