"Atrocities are no less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research."
- G. Bernard Shaw
The January 24 Associated Press (AP) story was unashamedly entitled, "Lab rats out of a job." (It made me think if AP writer Michael Hill had covered the liberation of Auschwitz, he'd have declared Europe's Jews to suddenly be "homeless.") In the piece, Hill talks of possible "high-tech alternatives" to animal experimentation. Before you view this as a major scientific and moral step forward, allow me to present Hill's closing salvo:
"Taylor Bennett, senior science adviser to the National Association for Biomedical Researchers, said animal testing maintains an essential role in making sure new pharmaceutical products are safe and effective for humans."
Safe and effective? Not so, says Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. "The reason why I am against animal research is because it doesn't work," he explains. "It has no scientific value and every good scientist knows that."
Aysha Z Akhtar, M.D., M.P.H., a senior medical advisor and
Jarrod Bailey, Ph.D., a senior research consultant for the Physicians
Committee for Responsible Medicine, concur. "The more we study the
relevance of animal tests, the more apparent their shortcomings
become," Akhtar and Bailey state in a Feb. 9, 2007 letter published in
the British Medical Journal. "Even subtle physiological
differences between humans and animals can manifest as profound
differences in disease physiology and treatment effectiveness and
safety. For example, numerous differences in spinal cord physiology and
reaction to injury exist between species and even strains within a
species. These differences likely contribute to the repeated failure of
spinal cord treatments that have tested safe and effective in animals
to translate into human benefit."
In addition, say Akhtar and
Bailey, "tests in rodents for predicting human carcinogenicity with a
false negative rate approaching two-thirds, potentially caus(ed)
widespread human exposure to carcinogens." They also point at wonder
drugs like Vioxx, which failed to show adverse reactions in animal
tests but ended up to be potentially deadly for humans.
"Results
from animal tests are not transferable between species, and therefore
cannot guarantee product safety for humans," agrees Herbert
Gundersheimer, M.D.
"A major shift in our research paradigm is
long overdue," declare Akhtar and Bailey. "The move away from animal
experiments toward more accurate methods of studying disease and
intervention is scientifically superior and more ethical for humanity,
as well as for animals."
"Ask the experimenters why they
experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like
us,'" says Professor Charles R. Magel. "Ask the experimenters why it is
morally OK to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the
animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical
contradiction."
If animal experimentation is both ethically
indefensible cruelty and speciously spurious science, why are we still
subjected to ill-informed media articles like Michael Hill's "Lab rats
out of a job"? Dr. Gundersheimer has a possible answer: "In reality
(animal) tests do not provide protection for consumers from unsafe
products, but rather they are used to protect corporations from legal
liability."
(Did I just hear someone shout out "Bingo"?)
As
James Baldwin once reminded us: "People who shut their eyes to reality
simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on
remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead
turns himself into a monster."
Mickey Z. is the author of the forthcoming novel, CPR for Dummies (Raw Dog Screaming Press). He can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
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