Animal Research​—Blessing or Curse?

IF YOU are among the many millions of persons who first breathed the breath of life toward the beginning of this century, you may well know that your longevity has far exceeded the expectations of your parents and the doctor or midwife who delivered you. If you were born in the United States, Canada, or Europe, your life expectancy in the year 1900 was about 47 years. In other countries life potential was even less. Today, in many countries life expectancy is over 70 years.

Whatever your age, you are living in a paradoxical time. Your grandparents or great-grandparents witnessed the uncontrollable effects of the numerous maladies that decimated their generation. Smallpox, for example, took the lives of countless thousands yearly and scarred millions of others for life. Influenzas took their toll​—one epidemic alone spelled death for 20 million people in one year (1918-19). Following World War I, epidemic typhus killed three million people in Russia. Typhus epidemics occurred in many other countries during World War II. It is estimated that 25 of every 100 people infected during typhus epidemics died.

The dreadful disease infantile paralysis, known later as poliomyelitis, reduced the world population by some 30,000 persons yearly and crippled thousands of others, especially children. There were those of tender years who did not survive their first bout with typhoid fever or diphtheria, scarlet fever or measles, whooping cough or pneumonia. The list seems endless. Of every 100,000 babies born in 1915, approximately 10,000 died before their first birthday. Brain tumors were inoperable. The ability to open clogged arteries was unknown. Doctors were powerless to save heart attack victims, and cancer spelled certain death.

In spite of the death-dealing plagues that have ravaged the world since the turn of the century and before, the life expectancy of man today has increased by about 25 years. Thus, in many parts of the world, a child born today has a life expectancy of about 70 years.

The Price Paid to Save Life

Fortunately, most young people living today have escaped many of the deadly diseases that were responsible for the early demise of many of their ancestors. But they may not take pleasure in the knowledge that many of man’s furry friends​—dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, and others—​were sacrificed in the cause of medical science ‘so that people today might live longer and healthier lives,’ as the scientists tend to express it.

Virtually all the diseases that have been eliminated or brought under control in this century​—polio, diphtheria, mumps, measles, rubella, smallpox, and others—​have been conquered through animal research. Anesthetics and analgesics, intravenous feeding and medications, radiation therapy and chemotherapy for cancer, all were tested and proved effective first on animals. And these are but a few.

“There is virtually no major treatment or surgical procedure in modern medicine that could have been developed without animal research,” said a noted neurologist, Dr. Robert J. White. “Work with dogs and other animals led to the discovery of insulin and the control of diabetes, to open-heart surgery, the cardiac pacemaker and the whole area of organ transplantation. Polio . . . has been almost totally eradicated in the United States by preventive vaccines perfected on monkeys. By working with animals, researchers have raised the cure rate for children afflicted with acute lymphocytic leukemia from four percent in 1965 to 70 percent today,” the same doctor said.

The role of animal research is confirmed by former laboratory assistant Harold Pierson, who worked under Dr. F. C. Robbins at Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. He told Awake! that their program to discover an oral vaccine for polio involved using monkey kidneys. The tissue from one kidney could be used for thousands of tests. He explained: “The monkeys were kept in humane conditions and were always under anesthetic when they were operated on. Certainly there was no deliberate cruelty. However, by reason of their operations, they were involuntary victims of scientific cruelty.”

Heart Surgery and Alzheimer’s Disease

As a direct result of animal research, new surgical skills have been developed to open arteries blocked by cholesterol deposits, thus preventing many heart attacks​—the leading cause of death in the Western world. By experimenting first on animals, doctors learn how to remove successfully massive tumors from the human brain and reattach severed limbs​—arms, legs, hands, and fingers. Dr. Michael DeBakey, who performed the first successful coronary artery bypass, said: “In my own field of clinical investigation, virtually every pioneering development in cardiovascular surgery was based on animal experimentation.”

About Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Zaven Khachaturian of the U.S. National Institute of Aging said: “Eight years ago, we were at ground zero. There has been incredible progress in Alzheimer’s research because of our investment in basic research concerning brain functioning going back to the 1930s.” The bulk of the work involved animals, and the doctor noted that they hold the key to continued progress.

AIDS and Parkinson’s Disease

The most crucial search now, and one causing scientists and immunologists to work overtime, is for a vaccine to combat the dreadful disease AIDS, which some experts estimate will kill by 1991 about 200,000 people in the United States alone. In 1985 scientists at the New England Regional Primate Center succeeded in isolating the STLV-3 virus (SAIDS, simian form of AIDS) in macaque monkeys and in introducing it in others. Said Dr. Norman Letvin, immunologist at the New England Regional Primate Center: “Now that the virus has been isolated, we have an animal model in which to develop vaccines for monkeys and for humans. It is possible to learn a great deal more from a very small number of animals in a controlled study than you would from observing hundreds of human AIDS patients.”

Doctors at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Atlanta’s Emory University were the first to demonstrate, through their studies with rhesus monkeys, the feasibility of implanting dopamine-producing tissue into the brain as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Since 1985 neurosurgeons have been performing the surgery on humans at Emory University Hospital. Doctors feel that this may lead to a breakthrough in finding a cure for the disease.

Man has turned to the animals in his quest for answers to perplexing questions about how to improve and sustain, even temporarily, his own imperfect life. However, the use of animals in medical research raises significant moral and ethical issues that are not easy to resolve.

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Animal Research​—An Ancient Practice

THE widespread use of animals by doctors and scientists to understand the physiology of humans is not unique to this 20th century. Animals have been used in medical research for at least 2,000 years. In the third century B.C.E., in Alexandria, Egypt, records indicate that the philosopher and scientist Erasistratus used animals to study body functions and found them applicable to humans. In the fourth century, the noted Greek scientist Aristotle gathered through his study of animals valuable information regarding the structure and functioning of the human body. Five centuries later the Greek physician Galen used apes and pigs to prove his theory that veins carry blood rather than air.

Animal Research​—Violent Reactions

IF THE precise number of four-legged creatures used in laboratory experiments and as models for medical research could be tabulated, the yearly sum total worldwide would be staggering. It is estimated that at least 17 million animals​—dogs, cats, primates, guinea pigs, and rabbits—​are used each year in the United States alone. Rats and mice account for 85 percent of this number. Since there are no accurate records of where these animals are used or how many, these numbers are considered by some experts to be poor estimates at best. Some sources place the total for the United States closer to a hundred million. Do you find these figures shocking?

Although the sacrifice of these furry creatures has not been without purpose, do you recoil at the mere thought of it? Do you consider this slaughter immoral? Millions of people abhor the use of animals in research. Some argue that the abuse of animals is speciesism. A speciesist is one who is “biased toward the interests of his own species and against the interests of another species.” (Point/​Counterpoint Responses to Typical pro-Vivisection Arguments) According to animal liberationists, speciesists “believe that the end justifies the means, and that evil must be done [to animals] to achieve good [for humans].”

On the other hand, the scientific point of view is summed up in the following questions: Do you resent a system that advocates the killing of animals so that doctors may learn new techniques in performing operations on humans or preventing the spread of deadly diseases? Are you prepared to forgo new lifesaving drugs and medicine because you know that they were first tested on animals? Would you be willing, yes prefer, to have your live but brain-dead child or parent used in surgical experimentation rather than an animal? And finally, there is this: If research on an animal could save you or a loved one from an excruciating disease or death, would you refuse it with the view that to sacrifice an animal to save a human is immoral? Some would say that the dilemma is not so easy to resolve.

Animal Liberation Movement

Nevertheless, during the decade of the 1980’s, there was a growing sentiment against the use of animals in research. Today that sentiment has been translated into a worldwide network of active organizations that continue to grow in strength and numbers. They are very vocal in demanding total abolition of the use of all animals for medical or laboratory experimentation.

Animal-rights activists are making their voices heard through street-corner demonstrations, political lobbying, magazines and newspapers, radio and television, and, most notably, militant and violent tactics. Said one prominent Canadian activist regarding the liberation movement: “It’s spreading rapidly through Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The States are becoming stronger. There’s phenomenal growth in Canada. There’s a group of networks spread world-wide and the trend globally is for support of the more aggressive animal rights movements.”

Some of these ‘aggressive networks’ are willing to use violence in support of their cause. During the last few years, at least 25 research laboratories in the United States have been vandalized by animal-rights groups. University laboratories have been bombed. These raids have caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Important records and valuable data have been destroyed. Research animals have been stolen and released. In one such act, valuable research on infant blindness was destroyed. Expensive equipment valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars has been smashed.

In an open letter to university officials and the news media, one militant group boasted that destroying a $10,000 microscope in about 12 seconds with a $5 steel bar was “a pretty good return on our investment.” In other places of research, doctors and scientists found blood poured on files and research materials and liberationist slogans spray-painted on walls. One report speaks of “harassment, including death threats, of scientists and their families.” In the United States, animal liberationists have issued more than a dozen threats of death or violence to individual scientists. In a 1986 London BBC broadcast, one commentator said: “What unites the activists is the conviction that direct action​—the destruction of property, and even life—​is morally justified in a war to free the animals.”

Said one animal-liberation leader: “There hasn’t been anybody hurt but that’s a dangerous threat . . . Sooner or later someone will strike back and there might be injuries to humans.” In 1986, in the same interview, the liberation leader predicted violence in Britain and West Germany. Events in the form of firebombings and violence have confirmed her prediction. In the United States, attempts have already been made on the life of one man whose company experiments with animals. Quick action on the part of the police saved him from being bombed. However, not all animal liberationists agree with these violent, illegal tactics.

Why Their Opposition?

According to The Journal of the American Medical Association, “most individuals concerned with the use of animals in biomedical research can be divided into two general categories: (1) those concerned with animal welfare who are not opposed to biomedical research but want assurance that animals are treated as humanely as possible, that the number of animals used are the absolute minimum required, and that animals are used only when necessary.” This group, according to recent surveys, makes up the less vocal majority.

The second group, according to the same source, are “those concerned with animal rights who take a more radical position and totally oppose the use of animals in biomedical research.” “Animals have fundamental inalienable rights,” said the codirector of one such group. “If an animal is capable of perceiving pain or feeling fear, then it has a right not to have those things inflicted upon it.” “There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights,” said another spokesperson. “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all mammals.”

Many deeply convinced animal liberationists are opposed to the use of animals for food, clothing, sports, and even pets. Fishermen have been pushed into the water by those opposed to catching and eating fish. People wearing fur coats and animal-skin apparel have been verbally abused on the streets. Stores have been broken into and expensive fur coats destroyed by those with a more radical view of animal use and abuse. “I will not eat eggs for breakfast or wear leather goods,” voiced one. “Behind virtually every slice of bacon and every innocuous looking egg,” warned a newsletter of the Humane Society of the United States, “lurks a long, hidden history of unbearable suffering.” Complete with photos of sows and chickens confined in small pens and cages, the newsletter charged that these conditions, widespread in the pork and poultry industry, make a “plate of bacon and eggs nothing less than ‘the breakfast of cruelty.’” Obviously, there are strong and sincere feelings involved in the defense of animal rights.

Horror Stories

Many people believe that opposition to animal research is fully justified. One of the more infamous cases involved the Head Injury Laboratory of a prestigious American university. Stolen videotapes taken during an animal-liberation raid revealed “monkeys getting their heads slammed in a smacking machine, with researchers laughing at the spasmodic behavior of the brain-damaged creatures,” reported the Kiwanis magazine of September 1988. This led to the withdrawal of government funding for the laboratory.

There is also the infamous Draize test, all too familiar to the cosmetic, shampoo, detergent, and lye industries. This test is used to measure the irritancy of products that might get into a person’s eyes. Typically, from six to nine albino rabbits are placed in stocks that allow only their heads and necks to protrude. This prevents them from clawing at their eyes after the chemical substance has been poured into them. It is reported that the rabbits scream in pain. Even many researchers bitterly oppose this form of testing and are trying to stop its use. Animal-rights movements have documented many horror stories born in animal research laboratories.

Animal liberationists do not have a high opinion of the previously quoted Dr. Robert White. The American Anti-Vivisection Society wrote that he “is the infamous vivisector from Cleveland who has transplanted the heads of monkeys and has kept monkey brains alive in fluid, outside the body.”

As in many controversies, there are two extremes, and then there is a middle way that tries to take the best and eliminate the worst of the effects. For example, are there any practical alternatives to experimentation with animals? Is total rejection of animal research the only viable, balanced answer? Our next article will consider these questions.

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Differing Viewpoints

“I BELIEVE that animals have rights which, although different from our own, are just as inalienable. I believe animals have the right not to have pain, fear or physical deprivation inflicted upon them by us. . . . They have the right not to be brutalized in any way as food resources, for entertainment or any other purpose.”​—Naturalist Roger Caras, ABC-TV News, U.S.A. (Newsweek, December 26, 1988).

“Looking at the broad picture, I cannot ignore the vast amount of good that has resulted from research. Vaccines, treatments, surgical techniques, and procedures developed in laboratories have increased life expectancies dramatically in the past century . . . In this light, not using animals for research could be seen as the inhumane choice: We had the way to learn how to alleviate disease but didn’t use it.”​—Marcia Kelly, Health Sciences, Fall 1989, University of Minnesota.

“I say ‘No’ to animal experimentation. Not only for ethical, but mainly for scientific reasons. It has been demonstrated that results from animal experiments are in no way applicable to human beings. There is a natural law connected with metabolism . . . according to which a biochemical reaction, that has been established for one species, is valid only for that particular species and for no other. . . . Animal experimentation is fallacious, useless, expensive and furthermore cruel.”​—Gianni Tamino, researcher at the University of Padua, Italy’s principal medical school.

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Rabbits in stocks used for Draize tests on the eyes

[Credit Line]

PETA

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UPI/​Bettmann Newsphotos

Animal Research​—A Balanced View

THOUGH the price paid may be controversial, most people believe that animal research has resulted in tremendous good for humankind. Even those who advocate violence against the use of animal testing have been the beneficiaries of new medical knowledge and operational procedures as well as disease-fighting drugs.

Martin Stephens of the Humane Society of the United States said: “We have to be honest and recognize that there have been some benefits from animal research. But our ultimate goal is the complete replacement of animals.” (Parade Magazine, October 9, 1988) “I do admit,” said Vicki Miller, president of the Toronto Humane Society, “that some good use was made of animals around the turn of the century. The control of diabetes legitimately derived from animal research. But there is no necessity for it now that we have all sorts of alternative technologies.”​—The Sunday Star, Toronto, Canada.

This same critic was asked how she would answer those who put forth the argument: If a rat has to die to save a baby’s life, it’s worth it. If animals are kept out of research, babies die to save rats. Her reply to the Toronto Globe and Mail was: “It’s such an emotional issue, and from that point of view it’s been nearly impossible to overcome . . . There’s the rat-or-the-baby thing and you lose every time.”

The question was asked in the preceding article: “If research on an animal could save you or a loved one from an excruciating disease or death, would you refuse it?” John Kaplan, law professor at Stanford University, California, wrote an answer in the November 1988 issue of Science magazine: “Those opposed to research with animals have seldom stood on principle and instructed their physicians not to use the results of biomedical research on animals when it would benefit their loved ones or themselves. Nor have they been willing to forswear for themselves the advantages of any future advances from animal research. We can admire the principles that impel Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse blood transfusions . . . and those who object to the hunting of fur-bearing animals not to wear furs. But we must vigorously combat the ideology that leads those who oppose animal research to pursue their cause not by example but rather by fighting through dishonest arguments to deprive everyone of the benefits.”

“The public should be informed,” wrote the editor of Science magazine of March 10, 1989, “that research on animals also benefits other animals. In fact, a vaccine for rinderpest, a virus that kills millions of cattle slowly and painfully, was developed by animal experiments; the vaccine is now applied by the World Health Organization to millions of cattle in Africa.”

Biblical Viewpoint

Following the global Flood in Noah’s day, Jehovah God issued this edict to Noah and to his offspring, which includes our generation: “Every moving animal that is alive may serve as food for you. As in the case of green vegetation, I do give it all to you. Only flesh with its soul​—its blood—​you must not eat.” (Genesis 9:1, 3, 4) Animal skins could also be used for clothing. This would not violate man’s God-given dominion over the animal kingdom.​—Genesis 3:21.

“If animals may be used as food to sustain people’s lives,” wrote the Awake! magazine of June 22, 1980, “it seems reasonable to use them in medical experiments to save lives. However, this is no license for unrestricted and often valueless, repetitious experiments involving intense suffering.” Certainly, from the Biblical viewpoint, heartless cruelty to animals cannot be justified.​—Exodus 23:4, 5, 12; Deuteronomy 25:4; Proverbs 12:10.

Many doctors and scientists admit that some good has come from the radical movement of those opposed to animal research. “An awful lot of the points made by the animal welfare movement are extreme but right,” admitted one scientist. “The lives and suffering of animals must surely count for something,” declared American scientist Jeremy J. Stone. “Some knowledge can be obtained at too high a price,” agreed British physiologist Dr. D. H. Smith. “We agree with the desire to make research less painful, to take good care of and to reduce the number of animals in experiments,” said Dr. J. B. Wyngaarden of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. And one animal activist admitted: “It used to be almost macho to use animals and not think anything about it. Today, thinking about alternatives is considered the thing to do.”

“Alternatives” is the key word. Scientists admit that they may never get to the point of total elimination of animals in research, but where possible they are constantly looking for alternatives. For example, rabbits are no longer used to confirm human pregnancy, since a chemical procedure is now available. Guinea pigs are no longer used to isolate the tubercle bacillus. Culture methods are now saving the lives of these animals who would otherwise die. Other tissue-culture procedures have replaced the testing on some mice. And many rabbits slated for the painful Draize test may be spared because of the alternative use of hen-egg membrane as a testing surface. Certainly, people sensitive to animal suffering hope that there will be many more alternatives found, and soon.

The greatest alternative to animal testing, however, will be that long-awaited earthly Paradise for which true Christians have prayed. Jehovah God, the loving Creator, has promised that all diseases and death itself will be abolished forever. In God’s promised new world, man and animals will be forever at peace with one another, and nothing will make them afraid. And there will be no more diseases and thus no more need for animal experimentation. Cruelty will be a thing of the past.​—Isaiah 25:8; 33:24; 65:25; Matthew 6:9, 10.