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This paper identifies a common political struggle behind debates on the validity and permissibility of animal experimentation, through an analysis of two recent European case studies: the Italian implementation of the European Directive 2010/63/EC regulating the use of animals in science, and the recent European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) 'Stop Vivisection'. Drawing from a historical parallel with Victorian antivivisectionism, we highlight important threads in our case studies that mark the often neglected specificities of debates on animal experimentation. From the representation of the sadistic scientist in the XIX century, to his/her claimed capture by vested interests and evasion of public scrutiny in the contemporary cases, we show that animals are not simply the focus of the debate, but also a privileged locus at which much broader issues are being raised about science, its authority, accountability and potential misalignment with public interest. By highlighting this common socio-political conflict underlying public controversies around animal experimentation, our work prompts the exploration of modes of authority and argumentation that, in establishing the usefulness of animals in science, avoid reenacting the traditional divide between epistemic and political fora.

We undertook a functional dissection of chromatin remodeler BAZ1B in neural crest (NC) stem cells (NCSCs) from a uniquely informative cohort of typical and atypical patients harboring 7q11.23 copy number variants. Our results reveal a key contribution of BAZ1B to NCSC in vitro induction and migration, coupled with a crucial involvement in NC-specific transcriptional circuits and distal regulation. By intersecting our experimental data with new paleogenetic analyses comparing modern and archaic humans, we found a modern-specific enrichment for regulatory changes both in BAZ1B and its experimentally defined downstream targets, thereby providing the first empirical validation of the human self-domestication hypothesis and positioning BAZ1B as a master regulator of the modern human face. In so doing, we provide experimental evidence that the craniofacial and cognitive/behavioral phenotypes caused by alterations of the Williams-Beuren syndrome critical region can serve as a powerful entry point into the evolution of the modern human face and prosociality. ; This work was funded by the Telethon Foundation (grant number GGP14265 to G.T. and G.M.), the EPIGEN Flagship Project of the Italian National Research Council (to G.T.), the European Research Council (consolidator grant number 616441-DISEASEAVATARS to G.T.), the Horizon 2020 Innovative Training Network EpiSyStem (to G.T.), Ricerca Corrente granted by the Italian Ministry of Health (to G.T. and G.M.) Giovani Ricercatori granted by the Italian Ministry of Health (to G.T.), Daunia Plast (to G.M.), Fondazione Umberto Veronesi (to P.-L.G.), the Foundation IEO-CCM (fellowship to A.V.), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness/FEDER funds (grant FFI2016-78034-C2-1-P to C.B.), the Generalitat de Catalunya (grant 2017-SGR-341 to C.B. and doctoral fellowships to T.O. and S.S.), the MEXT/JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas 4903 [Evolinguistics: JP17H06379 (C.B.; PI: K. Okanoya)], a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant from the European Union (PIRG-GA-2009-256413 to C.B.), the European Social Fund (grant BES-2017-080366 to A.A.), and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (PhD grant number SFRH/BD/131640/2017 to P.T.M.). M.Z., A.V., A.S., and S.T. conducted this study as fulfillment of their Ph.D. within the European School of Molecular Medicine (SEMM), Milan, Italy. ; Peer reviewed