Part One: Animal Research’s Changing Equation
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Gavels and courtrooms are replacing placards and bullhorns, says the biomedical research community, as determined legal eagles work to increase animals’ rights and possibly even grant them “personhood.”
One morning in late 2010, a few of the 32,000 registered attendees for the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting gathered in a room of the San Diego Convention Center for a panel whose name exemplified their fears: Conferring Legal Rights to Animals: Research in the Crosshairs.
Outside the building, a cluster of protesters, some wearing lab coats spattered with fake blood, stood alongside Lawrence Hansen, a University of California, San Diego, professor of neuroscience and pathology affiliated with the Experimental Neuropathology Laboratory. In his clean white coat, Hansen joined them in condemning the use of animals in medical research. Clutching a blown-up image of a monkey with a probe in its skull, he extolled the digital imaging techniques he believes soon will provide all the answers without drilling holes into animals’ heads.
“I’m willing to wait a few years until techniques are perfected,” he told signonsandiego.com.
Inside the main hall, neurological researcher John Morrison of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine voiced the Society for Neuroscience’s dominant view that animals are still essential for much research, including that related to brain disorders like Alzheimer’s. “We still have a long way to go,” he said.
Once, unsuspecting human guinea pigs were used for medical experimentation, as in 1932’s notorious Tuskegee untreated syphilis study. Sometimes, new drugs — or new formulations of old ones — weren’t tested at all, as in 1937’s sulfanilamide drug disaster, which led to 100 deaths. Responses to such scandals include the 1938 U.S. Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, and then 1974’s National Research Act and the 1979 Belmont report, which laid out the principles of ethical research on human beings making animal experimentation a research centerpiece.
With animal testing for toxicity a mandatory step preceding human clinical trials on any drug, it would take an update of federal rules to reflect advances in animal alternatives before animals — other than perhaps primates — have a real chance of exiting into a new era.
Thursday, the National Institutes of Health cited better alternatives as it drastically cut back future biomedical research using federally owned chimpanzees.
And while not all research chimps in the United States are federally owned, the government’s decision likely will cast a long shadow. Some 84 percent of scientists polled by Pew in 2009 listed a government entity as their most important funding source. The NIH provides 85 percent of federal funding, spending approximately $30.3 billion annually on medical research grants and supporting some 325,000 research personnel at more than 3,000 institutions here and overseas.
Johns Hopkins bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn, who headed a panel for the Institutes of Medicine report that examined the necessity of using chimps and which informed the NIH’s decision, said “the bar has been set very high” before future federal research would involve chimps. Other animals, however, were not mentioned.
In the mid-2000s, an estimated 10 billion animals were fed, confined, and killed for food annually in the U.S. A tiny fraction of that number is caged in research laboratories. But, what happens to them — particularly primates — captures the imagination and produces niggling moral conflicts, even in researchers themselves.
More than 90 percent of the 980 biomedical scientist respondents in a February 2011 Nature magazine poll consider research on animals essential. Yet, according to Nature, nearly 16 percent of the animal researchers who responded had experienced “misgivings” about what they are doing, and 33 percent “ethical concerns” about animals’ role in the work.
Even small strides toward legal rights for animals could have significant ramifications for science’s use of animal models. So, researchers whose work depends on their availability are watching the animal rights movement’s increasing sophistication with concern.
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