Animal Ethos ― The Morality of Human-animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science

What sorts of moral challenges do interspecies encounters engender in laboratory science?  Animal Ethos draws on extensive ethnographic engagement within and beyond academic labs, where the lives and deaths of a host of species deemed essential to experimental research enable broader imaginaries of scientific progress. Whereas much has been written on core bioethical values that inform proper and regulated lab behavior and decorum, Lesley A. Sharp lays bare the importance of attending to quotidian and unscripted responses to animals among lab personnel. Animal Ethos exposes the rich—yet poorly understood—moral dimensions of daily lab life, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox responses evidence concerted efforts by researchers, animal technicians, veterinarians, and animal activists to transform animal laboratories into moral scientific worlds.

Lesley A. Sharp is Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Senior Research Scientist in Sociomedical Sciences at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and Fellow at the Center for Animals and Public Policy of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine of Tufts University. Sharp is the author of several books, including Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self, which won the Society for Medical Anthropology’s New Millennium Book Award.