Commentary

Questioning Animal Experimentation

by Marjorie Cramer M. D.,

  In many people’s minds, the question of whether or not animal experimentation should be permitted in a civilized society is a very simple one: if it benefits human health it is permissible because human beings are more valuable than animals of other species. Period.

  In my years of training, I certainly believed this to be true. I believed it, in fact, until my two young daughters started asking me difficult questions about how I could justify animal experiments in view of the suffering involved. At first I took the dogmatic approach. After all, I had done animal experiments myself and thus had a lot invested in believing they were necessary. But I realized that my children deserved the most honest answers that I could give, and so I started to read and study critically.

  I discovered that if one examines the question carefully, it is not simple at all. It has at least two parts:

             Does animal experimentation benefit human health,
                   and is it morally right?

  The claim that virtually every major advance in the past 100 years has come from animal studies has been made so many times that many people believe it without questioning.

  A very common claim is that our life expectancy has been increased because of the discovery of vaccines and antibiotics. But a substantial body of Public Health literature makes it clear that at most, 3.5 percent of the total decline in mortality since 1900 can be ascribed to medical measures. Rather, it is due to public health measures such as improved sanitation and better living conditions. The impact of vaccines and antibiotics was in fact quite small.

  The physicians who make up the Medical Research Modernization Committee have undertaken studies to determine how often the data gained from animal ex­periments are actually used by doctors in understand­ing or treating illnesses.

  What they have found is quite startling: Animal experiments have been of very little, if any, help in understanding or treating humans, and the historical record has been distorted and often falsified to give credit to animal experiments that, in most cases, simply dramatized findings from clinical studies.

  Our experience with AIDS illustrates all of these points. All of the information we have to date about AIDS has been gained from studies of people. The causative agent, mode of transmission, ability of the virus to mutate, and clinical picture have all been learned by studying people with AIDS. As soon as scientists identified the virus which causes AIDS, we knew that there was, at least theoretically~ the possibility of making a vaccine.

  Yet years later, after chimpanzees had been experimentally infected with a virus which was only partly related to the AIDS virus, experimenters at Tulane Uni­versity announced in the press that a vaccine to prevent AIDS was theoretically possible. It might look to the public as though animal experiments had played a very important role in our understanding of the diseases, but in reality, the animal experiments had been used to dramatize what we already knew.

  The Tulane chimpanzees illustrate another fact that is essential to any discussion of animal experimentation. They were infected with a virus which was related to the AIDS virus hut which was in many ways quite different. No animal species except the human becomes sick from infection with the AIDS virus. Thus any conclusions drawn from the chimpanzee studies would have to be made by inference and analogy and would not really be scientific at all. We would need human clinical data in order to understand the similarities and differences between the infection in chimpanzees and AIDS infection in humans.

  Powerful groups have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. These include the experimenters themselves, who would be out of a job should animal experimentation cease; the people who make cages, restraining devices, laboratory equipment and food for experimental animals; and the universities which sponsor animal experiments and rely on a portion of the substantial grants to cover their overhead.

  While expensive animal studies continue, funding is diverted from research that would truly serve human needs. And it is important to be aware that we are talking about burning, starving, mutilating and addicting animals. “Biomedical research” is a term that was coined in the early part of this century by experimenters to replace their original term vivisection” from the Latin words meaning cutting up a living animal. Perhaps the latter reflected the truth too well.

Marjorie Cramer is a surgeon working in New York City. She is a member of the Medical Research Modernization Committee for Responsible Medicine.