Davos Newbies

Derek Lowe: “The anti [animal] testing people seem to have visions of drug company employees cackling at the thought of getting to use more animals, when the truth is that we’d dump them in a minute if we could. But here’s the hard part: we can’t. Not for now, and not for some time to come. We don’t know enough biology to do it. As it stands, if you were able to model every relevant system in a rat, well enough to use your model for predictive screening, you’d have basically built a rat yourself. We get surprised all the time when our compounds go into animals, and every time it happens, it shows how little we really know.”

Even in left-wing Berkeley, people can’t imagine how huge an issue animal testing is in England. I’ve met scientists who have had serious death threats because of their involvement in Alzheimer’s research, with animals involved in the testing. Britain has the strictest regulations on the planet in this regard, but that hasn’t stilled the sometimes-violent protests. That’s part of what makes the creation of Pro-Test by teenager Laurie Pycroft so remarkable and courageous.

My seven-year old son knocked on the bathroom door this morning while I was shaving. His mother had sent him up to show me the shocking headline on the front page of The San Francisco Chronicle: Cody’s Flagship Closing Down. Contrary to expectations, I didn’t slit my throat with my razor. But I was saddened.
One of the great joys of Berkeley is its healthy supply of good, independent booksellers. Cody’s stands at the top of the tree and, as my wife said this morning, “I thought that’s why we moved here.” Fortunately, the loss of one Cody’s doesn’t mean the loss of Cody’s. Their Fourth Street branch is very close to my office and has received the bulk of my (considerable) book-buying custom. And my experience is apparently typical. Cody’s flagship branch of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley has lost the trade of the comfortable professional classes in Berkeley: too grotty, too hard to park.

There’s another issue at play, which has wider implications than the parochial concerns of Berkeleyites. I’ve started reading Daniel Gilbert’s absolutely wonderful Stumbling on Happiness (Tyler Cowen: “He takes Proust and turns it into social science.”). After raving about it, one of my colleagues stopped in Cody’s (Fourth Street) on the way home. “We don’t have it yet,” a bookseller said. When my colleague said he knew it was out, they lamented that they get books as much as five days later than Barnes & Noble or Borders. That’s what a big chain and clout with the distributors does. And that in turn makes it much harder for an independent like Cody’s to fight the giants and Amazon.com, particularly in a clued-in market like Berkeley.

That kind of story re-energizes my determination to continue to patronize local independent booksellers. Even if I sometimes have to wait five days. (And it makes me wonder why I include links to Amazon.com here rather than something else. Need to think about that.)

Update Without prior consultation, my wife wrote more eloquently about the same news.