Week in Review: Monkeys, Poker, and Prison Edition (June 12 - June 18)
We tried to find a unifying theme for this Week in Review -- really, we did! -- but ultimately, summer's here, and sometimes, a scattershot title's all you got. Without further ado, let's dive in to what happened last week.
1. MONKEYS!Princeton is in trouble again for its treatment of primates in lab research; this time, the university was cited by the USDA for six violations, regarding the feeding and water schedule for the monkeys. New PU spokesman Martin Mbugua, asked about the violations, said, “Princeton’s approach to animal care is based on a commitment ... to ensure that our facilities make use of established best practices. Only animals that are well cared for can provide beneficial scientific data and help achieve research goals and outcomes.”2. POKER!Matt Hawrilenko '04 is the subject of last week's Trenton Times feature on poker players after the U.S. government crackdown on online poker. Hawrilenko, a wrestler and Woody Woo major, won an online satelite tournament to the World Series of Poker his senior year and has been playing ever since, eventually leaving his job at the trading firm SIG to play poker full time, making millions in the process. Here's what he had to say about the shutdown of the online site:
“What is particularly grating to poker players is that over and over again, you see anti-internet gaming legislation as a provision in legislation designed to legalize brick-and-mortar gaming. A bill like this has been rejected twice in the last two years in my home state of Massachusetts,” he said.
“It just feels like a particularly hypocritical double standard,” he said.
3. PRISON!
NPR did a feature last week about a program in San Quentin prison in California that allows inmates to go to college, and who should get the dashing pictorial at the top of the online version of the story but Princeton's own Neuroscience professor Charles Gross! The twist? A quick Google search reveals that some of the professor's most impactful research came through his study of ... wait for it ... monkey brains! Which brings our Week in Review full circle!
Until next week ...