Quirks and Quarks - Moving beyond animal testing, and more…

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

There's been a growing movement to develop new technologies to replace at least some of the animals used in scientific research. Researchers across Canada are working to create these tools, to usher in a new animal-free era for medical science.PLUS:Harbor seals can 'talk' thanks to their parrot-like brains'Flaming hot' water ice may explain Neptune and Uranus' strange magnetismA thigh bone that could represent the oldest evidence of our human lineageThe ravens of Yellowstone remember where wolves typically kill their prey

If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, scientists recreate the extreme conditions inside icy planets and possibly discover a new kind of water. It is hot ice. That's exactly right. In fact, it's hotter than even the surface of our sun.

It's pretty incredible. And a 7.2 million-year-old thigh bone could be the oldest evidence of our human lineage. Well, we have mechanisms in our hips so that we don't waddle when we walk, and this femur has all of those mechanisms. Plus, why the Ravens of Yellowstone follow wolves, how seals can mimic human speech, and the technology that can replace animal testing in scientific research. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. Meet Hoover, the talking seal. Hello, dear. Hoover's limited vocabulary includes the phrases, Hello there.

Hello there. And get out of here. In the 70s and 80s, Hoover was a real sensation at the New England Aquarium, but he's far from the only seal with the gift of gab. Marine mammals in the Pinnopead group, which includes walruses, sea lions, and seals, can all be particularly chatty. Their vocalizations can range from Hoover's clear human mimicry to pure gibberish. And it was this wide range of vocal flexibility that inspired scientists to figure out what's driving it by looking in their brains.

Dr. Peter Cook is an associate professor of marine mammal science at New College, Florida. He led the research. Hello and welcome back to Quarks and Quarks. Thanks for having me, Bob. What made you want to look at what's driving the range of vocalizations in this group of marine mammals? When I was in graduate school, I was working in a lab, and we had multiple seals and sea lines at that lab. and we did all kinds of different interesting studies with them. One of the prior leaders of the lab,

who retired right around when I got there, had trained some of the animals to make interesting vocalizations. And there was one in particular, Spraughts the Harbor Seal, who was a very, very charming, kind of elderly, blind Harbor Seal. And he had been trained to make a very non-typical Harbor Seal sound, which was essentially the human sound, wah. And if you tipped his throat in just the right way, he would go wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

And he would just keep repeating the sound as long as you asked him to do it. which, you know, something we did quite a bit, because it was funny to listen to and he seemed to enjoy it. And I, you know, at the time, was studying animal behavior. And I knew that animal vocal flexibility was actually quite rare. And so, you know, at the time I wasn't studying vocal plasticity, but I did think, how can sprouts do this? Like, how come he can do this when so few other animals can easily learn to make atypical sounds? Well, what's the range of flexibility that the animals in this group have? It's quite broad.

So you have, on one hand, the sea lions and the fur seals, which are confusingly part of the same group, which is separate from the true seals. And they are very, very stereotypic. And they make that kind of canonical bark that anyone who's ever been sort of in a California coast has heard. The ro, oh, or, or. And if you've heard one sealine, you've essentially heard them all.

On the other hand, you have some of the true seals and some of the warruses, potentially, who just have a massive range of flexibility, where we're frequently surprised by the kinds of sounds that come out of their mouths. Which species did you look at? I looked specifically at three representative species across the pinniped. So I looked at California sea lions, sort of your prototypical sea lion member.

I looked at the northern elephant seal, which is a really interesting species in the males who are massive, you know, 4,000 plus pounds. And they make very particular vocalizations. Those ones I won't actually try to mimic. They're a little beyond my range. And then I included Pacific Harbor seals who are, you know, one of our most familiar penipeds. they're adorable. They're in zoos world over, and you can see them on the, on the beach. They are the species that has produced some of the best evidence in individuals of really, really high vocal plasticity, including mimicry. And then I had what we call in sort of

evolutionary comparisons, an out group. I also looked at coyote brains. Coyotes are caned carnivores, but they are not pinnipeds. They're not aquatic, right? And so they are related to the seals and sea lions somewhat distantly, and are not known to be particularly vocally flexible. A kind of a neutral baseline or a neutral control comparison. Well, how did you go about looking into their brains to see how they were vocalizing? When I was in my postdoctoral fellowship, I was studying dogs at the time. And my PI and I, who's a senior author on this new paper, Greg Burns, had some contacts at Oxford University who were real experts in technical brain imaging.

And one of them, Carla Miller, also an author on this paper, had just pioneered a new technique really for looking at dead human brains. this technique was developed for looking at Alzheimer's pathology. But it was a really, really excellent and refined technique that allows you to take a dead brain, scan it in a very particular way and reconstruct the circuitry, the network structure. And it works with humans and she was like, there's no reason it wouldn't work with other species as well. And so at that point, we had the tool to apply and then we just needed the brains. And I have a lot of contacts in the world of Pinniped research.

And some of them were very able to provide brains from animals who had died either of natural causes or had to be euthanized for health reasons. So all the brains were opportunistic. We didn't sacrifice animals for this study. They were all just brains that we were able to acquire. So what did you see when you looked at the structures of the brains? We looked at multiple circuits, and I won't go too in depth on this, but there are multiple pathways in the brain that support vocal control.

So vocal control, there isn't just like a vocal control part of the brain that does it all. There's lots of different regions that play a role. And those have been mapped out to some extent in humans, and although the brains are different in great detail in birds. So we had an idea of where we wanted to look. And so for a lot of animals, the first line of vocal control is actually this automatic process where in certain conditions, this old part of the brain and the midbrain just sends out, triggers the evolutionary program for a particular type of call, and that's the call that comes out.

So what did you see when you looked at, say, the harbor seals that can vocalize and change their vocalizations? Yeah. So the first thing we looked for was what we colloquially call a bypass, so a pathway that goes around these midbrain control structures. And there's some evidence of this in humans and good evidence of it in birds, where we have the higher brain that's responsible for things like conscious or volitional or purposeful movement. And in humans and birds, there's a pathway that goes directly from parts of the higher brain right around the midbrain and right to the outpath to the muscles of the throat and the larynx and the mouth. that you use to make sound. So this is a way of kind of hijacking the vocal apparatus to produce flexible or learned calls instead of just producing what nature gives you. So the first thing we looked at was for this path, this bypass pathway. And we found it in every single pinniped. We found it in the

sea lions, the elephant seals, and the harbor seals. But we did not find it in any of the coyotes, which was quite striking. Okay. But you say the harbor seals, though, had the most vocalizations. So was anything different there? There was something different there. And so we looked at two other pathways. One of these involves connections between the auditory part of the brain, so the part of the brain that's responsible for hearing and the vocal production part of the brain. So in essence, it allows you to learn from what you hear, to learn to copy what you hear.

And we found in the elephant seals and the harvest seals quite strong connectivity between these regions, but we did not find it in the sea lions. The sea lions remember the ones who just bark and they all sound the same. So the sea lions had the first pathway, which is really interesting, but they didn't have this second pathway that connects the auditory to the vocal production or the vocal motor. And there's one other pathway, and this is where the harbor seals really stood out. And this is a complicated pathway that involves reward regions in the brain, sensory motor connections, and vocal motor connections. It's particularly robust in humans and parrots, and it was particularly robust in the harbor seals compared to all the other animals.

Wow. So why do you think this group of animals has evolved this wide range of vocalization capabilities? I think the big clue here is actually the sea lions, and they had that bypass that that allows some degree of conscious or purposeful control of the voice, but they didn't have those other types of adaptations in the brain that might let them very carefully shape the type of call. I think that's the biggest clue here. That wasn't in the coyotes. And what's the difference between a sea lion or coyote?

I mean, there's multiple differences. But for the purposes of this series of questions, I think the biggest one is that sea lions move in and out of the water. I mean, coyotes mostly don't. So what do all pinnipeds have to do? They have to manage their breathing. And breathing and speaking, I mean, if you stop and think about it for a moment, are inextricably linked. When we speak, we always have something happening with our breath, right?

We're pushing air past our voice box, our larynx, and that's creating the vibration, which we're then shaping with our mouth and our teeth and our tongue. So it's like, why do I think that some of the pinnipeds are so good at controlling their vocalizations? Because I think they had to evolve to control their breathing. and that gives you more plasticity for evolution to play with. Well, Dr. Cook has been a pleasure breathing and speaking with you. Thank you so much for telling us about it. Oh, it was great to talk to you too, Bob, and I appreciate your interest.

Dr. Peter Cook is an associate professor of marine mammal science at New College, Florida. You might remember in grade school how you learned there are three forms of water, how frozen water becomes ice and heated water becomes a gas. Well, according to a new study, scientists now have evidence that there may be a fourth mind-boggling type of water in our solar system, inside the ice giants, Uranus, and Neptune. And this may finally explain strange observations that the Voyager 2 spacecraft made when it swept by Uranus and then Neptune as it passed through the outer solar system back in the 1980s. Dr. Ariana Gleason and her team conducted an extraordinary

experiment in an attempt to recreate the extreme conditions inside the ice giants by combining pressures that are millions of times stronger than our Earth's atmosphere with temperatures hotter than lava. Their goal? To see if these conditions could give rise to this fourth type of bizarre water to figure out if it's behind the ice giant's unusual magnetic readings. Scientists call it superionic water, which is like ice, but it's unlike any ice. But it's unlike any ice. we've ever seen before. Dr. Gleason is a senior staff scientist and the deputy director for the High Energy Density Science Division at the Slack National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. Hello and welcome to our program. Thank you. Now, I have to admit that I was at

the NASA, Uranus, and Neptune encounters when Voyager went by them in 1980s. And at the time, those were really bizarre planets. Everybody was scratching the... their heads because their magnetic fields were not lined up with the planets, North and South Poles. They were off at weird angles and not even at the center of the planet. And everybody was going, wow, there must be something strange going on inside these planets. So how did you approach trying to figure out what was going on in there? Yes, such unusual magnetic fields often arise from a interesting and maybe complicated internal structure. We know from many, different kinds of observations that these are really water-rich ice and gas giants. And we understand

what the constituent components, basically the ingredients of the internal structure are likely to be. But we can't go excavate out a piece of Neptune and bring it back to Earth to study. We have to simulate those conditions in our laboratory using unique. tools. Now you're calling this unusual water super ionic. So just generally, what's it like? Yeah, great question. So it turns out that at these very high pressures, the oxygen atoms pack together in a way that sort of minimizes energy, meaning they pack together most efficiently. Think of sort of billiard balls or little spheres and you try to pack them as close as possible. and they end up stacking together in a way that forms what's called a cubic lattice.

And so these different cubic stacking arrangements actually lead to differences in the properties of the ice. And the best part, the most interesting part, is that this stacking arrangement enables the hydrogen atoms to flow freely, move around in a conductive fashion, and that leads to this novel property, superionic property of the ice. So it's a solid, but the hydrogens are zipping around. Okay. So you're saying it's a solid. It's under pressure. So is it hot ice? It is hot ice. That's exactly right. In fact, it's incredibly hotter than even the surface of our sun. It's pretty incredible. So how did you manage to create this? super ionic water in the laboratory.

It's really exciting. I love my job. I get to use really big lasers, and I basically blow stuff up. So what we do, there are many tools in the sort of condensed matter physics and mineral physics that we use to generate in the laboratory extraordinary high pressures. And I do that by sending a powerful laser, think about as much energy as is in a bolt of lightning. That much energy we deposit on a sample and we generate a plasma just for a brief nanosecond or so. That plasma blows off and launches a shockwave in the opposite direction.

The shock wave moves through the sample and momentarily generates the superionic state of water. And when we generated this high pressure state, actually we saw new so-called peaks of diffraction show up. in a few spots, and we were able to identify the structure. So what does that tell you about what's going on inside the ice? Yeah, well, it tells us that it's a little bit more complicated than we first assumed. We found that there's a layering of different cubic structures, and they're intimately integrated into one another. And this probably leads to a rich complexity in how the magnetic feel,

then develops. You're saying these can be cubic? Exactly right. Yeah. Think of a small cube like another cubic material we're familiar with is maybe rock salt. And so think of, you know, very dense, flaming hot ice in the shape of a cube, you know? Yeah. So how then does that explain the strange magnetic fields that we're seeing in the planet?

Right. Right. Well, it turns out when you have a conductive fluid, so like in our own planet and planet Earth, we've got a solid inner core and a liquid outer core. And that liquid outer core is actually convecting. So that molten iron is moving around. And that generates our geodynamo, our magnetic field. But on Uranus and Neptune, because of the, we think, the complex layering of superionic ice is, In the context of the other ionic liquid layers, right, there are briny, salty, water-rich regions that are also convecting. And the majority of the magnetic field is set up by this convecting, this moving ionic, salty liquid. But it's on sort of both boundaries, the top and the bottom, it's in contact with this very unusual form of ice, super ionic ice, that has the increased conductivity due to those very highly mobilized hydrogens. And so what we think is going on is the multi-pole, right, this unusual

magnetic field arises from the constant motion of both the ionic liquid and the location of these different forms of very dense superionic ice. So it sounds like it's much more chaotic on these planets. Yes. We're stuff just swirling around. So you get a magnetic pole sticking out one place and then another one sticking out somewhere else. Exactly.

And then it shifts around because of the interplay between these different layers. Exactly right. Dr. Gleason, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much. Wonderful to be here. Dr. Ariana Gleason is a senior staff scientist. and the deputy director for the High Energy Density Science Division at the Slack National Accelerator Laboratory in California.

Europe today is a bustling cosmopolitan mecca, where the old world and new world collide. But if you could travel several million years back in time to emerge in Europe, there would have been monkeys climbing and walking around on all fours all over the place. Imagine a primitive version of Planet of the Apes. Well, a new discovery of a 7.2 million-year-old thigh bone out of Bulgaria is hinting that at least some of the apes around Europe back then might have been walking on two legs. If this evidence bears out, then this gray copithicus, as it's called, could be the earliest evidence of our human lineage, possibly rewriting the history of how we came to be.

Dr. David begun as a professor of paleoanthropology at the University of Toronto who oversaw the study. Hello, Dr. Bigan, welcome back to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you, Bob. My pleasure. What do we know about the species that this bone came from? We don't know a lot, unfortunately, which is why we're continuing to excavate to try to find more fossils. But what we do know is that there's a jaw bone, a lower jaw or mandible from near Athens, actually. There's a isolated tooth, a molar tooth from North Macedonia, and then there are two specimens from this site in Bulgaria called Azmaca,

an isolated tooth and this new femur, and that's all we know. Well, tell me about the femur. What's it look like? So the femur, it's pretty small, comes from an individual that was probably somewhere around 24 kilos in size, but it has many anatomical features that are only found in bipeds. So the femur is not complete. We don't have the knee part, so we don't have the bottom end, but we have a pretty complete hip joint.

And that hip joint is very similar to the hip joints that we see in earliest bipeds like O'Rourin from Kenya and Australopithecus, from a lot of localities in Africa that occur quite a bit later. Well, what is it about this bone that convinces you that it came from a bipedal creature and not from a monkey?

If you know the anatomy of monkey femurra and ape femurra, it's pretty easy to distinguish this from a monkey. The hip joint, the top end of the femur, the part that articulates with the pelvis, is very robust. It has a large head.

It has a long neck. And it has muscle attachment sites that are quite unlike those we see in monkeys. And all of those attributes recall what we see in the earliest bipeds. And only humans among primates, at least, or bipeds. So are you saying that the hips would have had the legs pointed more straight down like ours rather than out to the side like chimps? Yes. So unlike quadrupeds that have all four limbs on the ground,

humans when they're walking only have one limb on the ground. We think it's two, but it's actually just one because the other one is off the ground. And when you only have one limb on the ground, what's to prevent your body from tilting in the opposite direction? Well, we have mechanisms in our hips to prevent that from happening so that we don't waddle when we walk.

And this femur has all of those mechanisms. So if I could go back 7.2 million years and one of these great copithicus was walking towards, me, what would I see? You would see something that probably would at first make you think of a chimpanzee, but then you would notice that instead of waddling as it came closer to you, you know, sort of shifting its body weight from one limb to the other limb as it came towards you,

it would be walking more or less like we walk without its truck vacillating from one side to the other. What kind of evolutionary pressures would have been around in this environment at Eastern Europe? at that time that might have led to walking on two legs. The Balkans is actually a place that we know very, very well for its paleoecology at this time. And we know that it was an environment that was open with grasslands and sparse trees, very similar to what you would see

if you went on a photo safari in Kenya. So the resources were scattered. The apes had to go to the ground to go from a clump of tree to clump of trees, so there was probably selection for a more efficient way of moving on the ground. We speculate in this article that there would have been an advantage

to those individuals that could rise up and look further towards the horizon to scout out sources of food and also to look out for predators. There might have been selection. We speculate to carry food from one clump of trees to the next clump of trees or certainly to carry all.

offspring. Boy. Now, we're talking 7.2 million years ago. So where does this creature fit into what

we know about the evolution of hominids or the humans? Around 9.5 million years ago, we have a group of apes

that look kind of like Australopithecines in their jaws and teeth. And those guys were around in Europe for at

least since 9.5 million years ago. And in our view, they slowly evolved into a biped, which is represented by Greco-Pythicus, and that this biped probably dispersed into Africa along with all the animals that make up, or many of the animals that make up the savannah woodland fauna of Africa today, like these antelopes and hyenas

and giraffes and all of those animals actually came from Eurasia. And the ape just followed along and dispersed into Africa along with those other animals. Now, wait a minute. We usually hear that all of our common ancestors, human ancestors, came out of Africa. Are you suggesting that they originated in Europe and then went down to Africa? Yeah, this is an idea that's been floating around for many, many years, that the African ape and human lineage actually originates in Europe and only disperses into Africa after about 7 million years ago. Well, how confident are you that this animal represents the oldest human that walked on two feet? I need more evidence to be completely confident about that. And that's exactly why in May I'm going to North Macedonia to excavate some sites of the same age as the Asmaca site. And in September, we're going back to Asmaca.

And we're going to keep trying until we find more fossils. Dr. Begun, thank you so much for your time. My pleasure, Bob. Dr. David Begun is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto. I'm Bob McDonald and you're listening to Quarks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, we take a look at some of the latest technologies that could replace animal testing in research labs around the world.

We are living through one of the most exciting transitions in the history of biomedical science. the world is no longer debating whether to move away from animal testing, the world is actually racing to get there first. I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is, until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen.

If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The Truish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real true. trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are. Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park is the science conservation gift that just keeps on giving. Wolves were driven out of Yellowstone by the 1920s, only to be reintroduced to the landscape in 1995.

Since then, scientists have been diligently gathering data not just about the wolves, but about how all the animals in the ecosystem have responded to their reintroduction. Like ravens. Wherever you find a pack of wolves in Yellowstone having dinner, it's a good bet that ravens will be circling overhead, waiting for their chance to snatch whatever the wolves have just killed. And it turns out that ravens aren't just following the wolves around. Instead, it seems ravens can remember where wolves typically kill their prey.

And over time, they build up a kind of mental map of where these kill sites are located. Dr. John Marslove is an emeritus professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington and was part of the team that published this latest study. Dr. Marslov, welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Greetings, Bob. Pleasure to be here. What made you want to study the relationship between wolves and ravens? Well, I've studied ravens for a lot of.

a long time, and we've always wondered how they interacted with wolves. The stories from old Norse mythology or current science research suggested that they have a close symbiotic relationship and that ravens may follow wolves around and wait for the kill to be made and then be able to dine on the leftovers. So we were curious to see if that was true. Well, prior to this investigation, what was the thinking about how the ravens knew where to go to get their claws on a wolf kill? I'm sure they had thought there were many ways, but the primary way was that they kept tab of the wolves directly, watched them, listened to their howls, followed their tracks, responded to all those local cues that indeed they probably do respond to. But that was the way that they would find kills. Well, tell me about this study. How did you investigate how the Ravens know where to go to get a ready-made meal taken down by a wolf?

We have a really unique situation in Yellowstone where many of the wolves are radio tags, so their position can be known precisely at any given time. And we took the same approach with Ravens. We radio tagged 69 birds and followed their movements every half hour over the course of several years and related their locations to the locations of wolves at the same time. Wow. How do you get radio callers on ravens? Yeah, that was a challenge, and especially to get as many as we did.

The first few ravens are always pretty easy to trick. We put out food, we lure them into that food on the ground, and we shoot a net over them. And we can be away from that net as remote controlled, so the birds shouldn't know that we have anything to do with this other than, oh, we might have dropped a handful of bread or maybe a deer leg that they would be interested in. But after you catch a few ravens anywhere, the words out quickly, and the next ones are very difficult. So it took several months for Matthias Loretto, my co-worker in this investigation and I had to catch all the birds and then put little solar-powered, long-lasting radio transmitters on their backs. Wow. Well, what did you see when you put all your data together about how the ravens were moving around compared to the wolves? Well, we found right away that they were not simply following the wolves. Rather, ravens were going back to areas where wolf kills were likely to have been made in the past and looking in these areas.

We only had one instance where ravens flew in and encountered a wolf pack, stayed with it for over an hour, follow them for about four kilometers, and did not, those wolves did not kill anything during that time. So the raven went back to where it had come from. what are the ravens actually doing then to actually find the wolf kills? Well, what we found is that they're most likely to go to areas where wolves have made kills frequently over the past. So we made a map of kind of a contour map of abundance of previous wolf kills. And our ravens tended to fly into those areas. And if a kill was made in those areas, more of our ravens found the kills in those places. So it really appears that rather than following

the wolves and waiting, hoping for a kill, the ravens just go and check the area that kills are most likely to be made by any number of packs, not one particular pack at all. And go back, check those areas. And indeed, often they are rewarded. And at other times, like the event I just described, the birds aren't rewarded. And they go back to where they might have come from. Wow. So the ravens have kind of a mental map of where the kills might take place. They do, and this map that they have in their head includes more than just where wolfgills are likely. It also includes all the places where human food is likely to be found. For example, where elk hunting occurs and when elk hunting occurs, and where grocery stores are and sewage treatment plants where they get fat that floats up on the settling ponds.

So all of these important areas to the bird seem to be stored and used in the same way. A wolf kill area is no different than a supermarket that might have burritos one morning. And a wolf kill area might have a wolf kill that next morning. And the birds check in on all these sites and, you know, play between the two. How do they know when to go to these kill sites? Because there may not be a wolf kill there at that time. Yeah, that's correct. And we don't know exactly when they know to go.

But what we do know is that when a raven wakes wakes up in the morning, wherever it's at, it's got some decisions to make. If it's a territorial bird, it will go to a wolf kill that's close to their territory if there is one right away. If there isn't, it might leave and go to a human resource. On the other hand, if it's a bird that doesn't have a territory and is roosting with another group, maybe they'll hang at the dump for a while and forge on refuse and then decide later in the day, oh, I'll go in and check for a wolf kill in the wolf kill areas and flying 30 or 40

or 50 miles one way for these birds is really not a big deal. They're extremely efficient at flight, and they cover huge areas and check them all. Wow. How do the wolves feel about having the ravens around? Yeah, I'm sure the wolves aren't really happy with this at all. For the wolves, it's kind of like us with mosquitoes. They have got to swat these pests away. They chase them from the food. They occasionally catch and kill them, but mostly they just defend their food from these scavengers, which include not only ravens, but golden eagles and coyotes and foxes. They're all in there trying to get a piece of the meal, and it all takes away from the wolf. And so the wolf is put in all the effort to find and chase and catch and open up this food, and everybody else is trying to get their own

little piece of it. How do your findings mesh with what was known about raven intelligence? Well, it just shows another dimension of their intelligence. I mean, ravens, we do know they're they are well-adapted scavengers from wolves and other carnivores. And so to keep in their mind all these different locations make sense. And we know from other studies of Corvids that their brains are large. Their forebrains are especially large. And these are the areas where these sorts of spatial and temporal memories can be formed and held and relied upon for the next decision of where to go to look for food.

You give new definition to the term bird brain. Oh, yeah, it's a compliment for sure. Dr. Marsloff, thank you so much for your time. You bet, Bob, my pleasure. Dr. John Marsloff is a professor emeritus of environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington. We reached them in Montana. For centuries, scientists have turned to animals to understand how the human body works. In Canada alone, between 3 and 5 million animals are used every year in scientific research.

and while countless discoveries, life-extending procedures, and medical breakthroughs have happened because of research done on animals, it's no secret that animal testing has a dark side. Not only the obvious issues with ethics and animal rights, but there are also many reasons why animal biology isn't a reliable predictor of human outcomes. In recent years, there's been a growing movement to develop alternative technologies to replace at least some of the animals used in research settings. And more importantly, there's been growing interest by governments and regulators in supporting their development. Researchers across Canada are working to create these tools and prove they're up to the job,

to not only improve animal welfare, but change medical science as we know it. Producer Amanda Buchowitz met up with some of them to hear more about this exciting new field. Hey, how are you? Nice to meet you. I'm at McMaster University, getting a behind-the-scenes tour of Dr. Boyan Jung's lab, where he works with pharmaceutical companies to test potential drugs before they go into human trials. Down a labyrinth of hallways, through several locked doors, I meet his hundreds of test subjects. And I happen to be visiting during feeding time. So just now we're maintaining them daily.

just changing out their old food for new food, so they remain happy and healthy. Well, as happy and healthy as clumps of cells can be, in a rectangular tray, no bigger than the size of two credit cards side by side, Dr. Zhang and his team can grow over 100 human tissues of any type to see how they react to different medications. This is where we do the cell culture,

so adding the cells into the device, and these are incubator. He opens his incubator, which mimics the conditions in a human body, complete with a rocker that simulates a circulatory system, going back and forth to let fluids flow between the cells. Oh, okay. This is actually a good one. He can model any organ with a barrier, from the skin to the blood-brain barrier to the placental barrier

that protects babies in the womb. Today, they're working with lung cells and colon cells. What you're seeing is the colon cells form a barrier. They cover the entire surface of the well. But at the same time, you have these invaginations that you find in the human colon lining. And we're trying to mimic that structure here. And you can add drugs on top of these cells to look at how drug gets transported through the colon barrier and gets absorbed. This technology is part of a fleet of non-tenths.

new technologies called new approach methodologies, or NAMs. These tools are animal-free ways of conducting research using human biology, which are completely transforming the way science is done. We are living through one of the most exciting transitions in the history of biomedical science. The world is no longer debating whether to move away from animal testing. The world is actually racing to get there first. Dr. Charu Tandra Sakra is the founder and executive. director of the Canadian Institute for Animal Free Science. She founded Canada's first and only

center for alternatives to animal testing. I'm absolutely in love with these in vitro methods. For example, organ on chip and 3D bioprinted tissues and even simple cells in a petri-dish. But the animal free science toolbox is very versatile. So it is not about taking one animal test and replacing it with one human test. It's really about taking the best possible technologies we have at our disposal, asking questions that are relevant to our biology and answering them using very creative methods. She got into this line of work because she saw the limitations of animal testing firsthand.

I was doing animal research myself. I was working on mouse models of heart failure research, and it became very evident early in my career. that animal testing is not what it's really hyped up to be. After all, I didn't go into science to cure mice of heart failure. I wanted to help people like my father. And this was a realization that actually happened while I was sitting at my father's bedside at the Halifax Heart Center

after he had quadruple bypass surgery. I looked at him and all the other people in that ward, and I asked myself, is the work that I'm doing in mice ever going to help patients like these? and the answer was a resounding no. That resounding no is because the information learned using animal testing often doesn't pass muster once that testing moves into humans. Human beings are not 70-kilogram versions of mice, rats, snakes, rabbits, cats, dogs, sheep, or monkeys.

Biology is complex. In such complex systems, small differences in biology add up to dramatic differences in response to drugs and chemicals and how our overall physiology responds to certain adverse events. Over 90% of drugs tested to be safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials. Throughout the history of science, animal testing has been the gold standard of research. And in the middle of the 20th century,

it became part of the regulatory landscape for governments around the world to ensure the safety of drugs before they moved. into human trials. But at the same time, ethical concerns grew. In 1959, two British scientists, William Russell and Rex Birch, proposed what became known as the Three Ars principle to perform more humane animal testing, replace animals where possible, reduce their numbers, and refine how they're used. For decades, that first R replacement seemed aspirational. There simply weren't tools sophisticated enough, to model the complexity of a living body.

But that is beginning to change because of the work of scientists like Dr. Militza Radisik. For the entire human history, that's the only way we could do things, animal testing, that's what it was. This is really the first time in human history that we can change that. Why is that so?

This is the first time in human history that we can get stem cells from anybody. And that was a land. landmark discovery by Shina Emonarchy in 2006. Now we can guide themselves from any patient in an ethical way. We can mimic anybody's disease. And such a big community, we are making tissues out of these stem cells. That was never possible before. Dr. Radisic is a professor at the University of Toronto and also Canada Research Chair in Organ on a chip engineering. She has developed a way to grow living heart tissue, complete with muscles and blood vessels, that beats rhythmically like a real heart

in a petri dish. So with organ on a chip, we can measure how strong that little heart muscle is beating. So we would take patient stem cells, and out of patient stem cells, we would derive heart cells, and then from heart cells, we make the little strength of heart muscle. And we actually have tiny small electrodes also that go into the heart muscle, that go into the heart muscle that take a little ECG. So we know how strong this little heart is beating and we know that it's electrical activity is disturbed or not. The old way to test the effects of heart attacks was to induce a heart attack in an animal. But now this organ-on-a-chip technology means that the same research can be done without animals, using these little cells instead. So we can give

this heart muscle, even a little heart attack by placing it in an environment that doesn't have enough oxygen. Usually when we do that, we see it really slows down and stops beating. Then we can apply molecules, biologics or drugs that we believe will help rescue this heart muscle. That can all be done in the lab right now. It's not the future. We have it, train now. In Montreal, Dr. Margaret Magdezian has developed over 50 organ on a chip systems to replicate the most complex organ in the human body, the brain and nervous system. Here we go. It's a plate like this.

So this one has 28 wells and could replace 28 animals. If the tests are performed in monkeys, it replaced 28 monkeys. Imagine trashing 28 monkeys and thrashing a recyclable plastic. She developed neurons on a chip while working at McGillian. and is now CEO of a startup called Ananda Devices. They are currently working with the FDA to replace neurotoxin tests performed in animals. Her motivation for this work also goes beyond animal welfare. I experienced personally as a child the challenge of having someone with an incurable disease in the family.

And I clearly saw that, you know, we need better medications for patients with neurological diseases. It's essential that they have access to medication that do something. I don't know if you know anyone with a neurological disorder, but, you know, there's no cure. As it stands, animals don't make for a good test subject for these diseases, so she hopes her technology will help move the dial towards finally finding a cure. Animals do not naturally develop Parkinson, Alzheimer's, ALS, autism. but what we're offering is not necessarily like no animals can offer anyway like we're offering an alternative method that can give more insights into human biology it's independent of testing in

animals or not so far animals have not given any good data 99.6% of all the tests performed in animals for neurological diseases did not work in humans so we're giving an alternative for that And these tools are already being used by research agencies and pharmaceutical companies. Back at McMaster University, Dr. Jung is currently collaborating with drug developers to compare their results with those from animal models. What we hopefully will be able to achieve is to minimize failure in clinical trials. So that would minimize a lot of waste. And so hopefully that will bring down the cost of developing each approved drugs.

Across Canada, many research, researchers who have long worked with animals have been reducing the amount that they use, like University of Manitoba professor, Dr. Michael Schubert. We haven't been able to replace the animal animals themselves, but what we have been much better at is doing preliminary studies in cells and dishes and understanding what the restrictions are on using those cells as well as what the benefits are from using those cells so that we can go in with a fairly educated guess as to whether we're going to be successful when we do move into an animal model. But he says he's doubtful these tools will replace all.

animal testing anytime soon. He still needs some mice for the work he's doing in cardiovascular medicine to get a clear picture of how the whole body reacts to heart disease. I will say if I did not 100% believe in the value of the research that we do, I would not be doing it in animal-based models. I would be finding another way to do it. But I also know that for the kinds of questions that we're asking, at present, this is the only way that we can do it. As it stands right now, the Canadian Council for Animal Care, or CCAC, oversees how scientists use animals in their research. They act as a kind of peer review system to ensure that animals are treated ethically and that they're only used when there are no suitable alternatives.

Gere Verro, the executive director of the CCAC, says that it's Health Canada who ultimately is responsible for saying which methods are suitable alternatives in Canadian research institutions. If a researcher decide, I think it can do the first part of my study on a chip, that's good. We're very happy about it. But on the idea, when we're really talking about testing, which is often regulatory, that would be Health Canada, I would say this is an acceptable method. On this, no, you still have to use animals or you may replace animals, but at the end, you still need. So they do it for public safety, so they're the ones deciding which replacement or alternative methods.

is valid. Over at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center, Dr. Lucy Cote is a veterinarian who works with research animals to ensure their care, and the president of the Canadian Association for Laboratory Animal Medicine. She's also supportive of using fewer animals for research purposes, but she wants to make sure that everyone involved proceeds with caution. Science is based on standards. Standards change all the time. We need to adapt. But I think the important point is that science should guide us.

It shouldn't be politics or personal opinion that guide us in this so important discussion. We all have a loved one that benefited from the advancement in biomedical research. And I think everyone can understand that we need to advance in a very cautious way. we can't say we're just to stop what we're doing and without having tested new methods. And in order to test these new methods, that takes money. Dr. Chero Chandrasakra from the Canadian Institute for Animal Free Science says she'd like the government to step up their support

for developing these new alternative technologies. The bottleneck really isn't scientific at this point. It's more structural. We have a lot of technologies at our disposal, and the science is continually evolving, and we are developing more technologies and validating them and seeing that they are able to reproduce human biology much better than animal models. So the bottleneck is really translation, taking what works in the lab and getting it trusted by regulators, adopted by industry, taught in universities, embedded in decision-making, and in the culture of science in general. Around the world, support for these new approach methodologies has been growing. The UK government recently announced their replacing animals in science strategy, including 75 million pounds of funding,

toward developing a research and innovation system that uses alternative methods instead of animals over the next five years. In the U.S., which is cutting scientific funding in many other areas, the FDA and the National Institutes of Health have recently announced 150,000, $50 million toward the cause, including a new office dedicated to reducing the use of animals in federally funded research. So now the U.S., U.K., EU, all have designated roadmaps to phase out animal testing, with federally funded centers for alternatives to animal testing in places like Brazil, Korea, and the Netherlands. But the only national lab in Canada dedicated to this work

was Dr. Chandra Sakeras, which she ran out of the University of Windsor. Back in 2024, she was forced to shut it down due to a lack of ongoing funding. So I built an unprecedented initiative, Canada's first national hub for animal-free science, from a back of a napkin sketch to international recognition in just a few years. It was embraced by academics, industry regulators, and Canadians coast to coast. The center's work changed the animal testing conversation in our country. And then it disappeared. Not because the science failed, not because the need disappeared.

but because, and only because, unlike in other comparable countries, our government didn't see it as a priority to fund it. And while in Canada, progress on this issue has been slow for biomedical testing, which accounts for 40 to 60 percent of animals used, it has inched forward in other areas. In 2023, the federal government passed Bill C-47, directly banning cosmetic testing on animals. And later that year, Bill S-5 was passed,

shaped in part by Dr. Chandra Sakura, which opened the door for non-animal models to be used in toxicity testing. In an email, Health Canada said that their departmental scientists continue to collaborate with researchers in this field, and they will still require animal testing to demonstrate safety in pharmaceuticals until internationally accepted alternative methods become available. Dr. Melisa Redisic from the University of Toronto says that it's in the government's best interests to help Canadian researchers prove their alternative technologies to become internationally accepted once and for all. And that's where all of the work is going right now,

to prove to them without any doubt that we are saying we are better, we are not as good, we are better than animal model. So hopefully government of Canada can also help us out by putting more money behind validation so that ultimately we can fully eliminate animal testing. This will also save money in the long term, right? By investing into validation now, you're going to save money because these 3D tissue models are going to be ultimately cheaper in an animal study.

It's not just that they're less cruel, but they're also cheaper. So the technology to replace animals and research exists, though in many cases there's still a lot of work to do. And regulators are slowly getting on board. All of this points to a future with fewer animals spending their short lives in research settings, and better science for all. For Quarks and Quarks, I'm Amanda Bukowitz. That was Quarks and Quarks producer Amanda Bukowitz.

And that's it for Quirks and Quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca. Our webpage is cbc.ca.ca. slash Quirks, where you can listen to our audio archives and find more information on the research we covered in the show. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quarks and Quarks is produced by Sonia Biting, Rosie Fernandez, Livia Dyering, Dionne Sudial, and Dan Falk. Our intern is Sarah Hamilton.

Our acting senior producer is Amanda Bukowitz. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC. www.ca slash podcasts.