Dying to be Saved

The Perils of Animal Experimentation for Animals and People

By Tracey Laszloffy, Best Friends Network Volunteer

I am a type 1 diabetic. I have been striving to manage this disease for the past 14 years and each and every day is a challenge. Diabetes is a chronic disease that affects the body’s ability to produce or use the hormone insulin. Living with diabetes requires constant monitoring and discipline. While I think I do as good a job as is possible, the truth is that I hate being a diabetic, and I would love it if a cure were found. I would love to no longer have to test my blood-sugar levels 6-9 times a day and administer 3-6 shots of insulin to manage the glucose in my system. I would love to not have to count carbohydrates for the fear that if I consume too many, my blood-sugar will spike. And I would love to not have to eat when I am not hungry because my blood-sugar is low and I need glucose to balance it out. I would love to never again get hit by an unexpected low blood-sugar that makes irrational, irritable, and tearful while shaking uncontrollably and sweating profusely. I would love to not have to face the high probability of diabetic complications leading to blindness, loss of limbs and kidney damage. But as much as I want these things, I am against others suffering and dying so that I might be spared or saved.

Recently I had an appointment with my endocrinologist for a regular diabetes checkup. During my visit I brought up the issue of the diabetic research being conducted through the Yale Medical School. Yale is one of 13 Diabetes Endocrinology Research Centers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with a 5-year $6 million grant that provides the infrastructure to carry out research on the causes, improved treatments, complications, and prevention of diabetes. One of the current Yale projects, headed by Charles A. Janeway, Jr., focuses on the immunology of diabetes in mice. When the mouse-testing phase is completed within five years, the next phase will consist of creating a comparable human gene sequence and transplanting it into a larger animal such as a sheep or pig. If the researchers are able to establish that this system works with human genes, eventually transplants will be carried out in human patients with type I diabetes.

According to my doctor, the Yale research has the potential to make important advances in understanding and treating type I diabetes, which if so, would help people like me. Nevertheless, because it relies on animal experimentation I told him that I was skeptical of its scientific and medical utility, and more importantly I was opposed to it ethically.

A Closer Look at the History of Diabetes Research

As a diabetic I routinely hear how vital animal testing has been to advancing diabetes treatment. Yet, despite the millions of animals that have been experimented on in the search to discover the causes of and cures for diabetes, the rate of diabetes has continued to rise steadily and no cure has been found. This leads to two core points.

First, some of the critical discoveries that were made with respect to diabetes didn’t involve animals at all, although these discoveries rarely get much press. For example, in 1788 Thomas Crawley was the first scientist to establish a relationship between pancreatic damage and diabetes which he achieved by performing autopsies on diabetic cadavers. In the mid nineteenth century Dr. M. Barron studied the human pancreas and realized that diabetes stems from damage to the Islets of Langerhans. The person who actually isolated the role of insulin in diabetes was a physiologist named Schafer who in 1915 proposed that the Islets of Langerhans must secrete a substance that governs carbohydrate metabolism. He suggested that this secretion of the pancreas be named insuline.

Second, proponents of vivisection love to cite examples of discoveries that have been made relative to diseases that were based on animal experimentation. However, what is often not considered are the ways that our obsession with using other species to study diseases in humans has invariably impaired medical progress. For example, supporters of animal testing commonly refer to the diabetes research that was conducted on dogs in the 1920s by Banting and Best which is considered the key breakthrough in the treatment of type 1 diabetes. But what is rarely acknowledged is that these experiments failed to yield relevant data for humans suffering from the disease. The results Banting and Best obtained were compromised by the fact that the dogs they experimented on never had diabetes in the first place. Rather, the “dogs were suffering from traumatic stress, obvious to any who have viewed photographs of their unaesthetised, depancreatised victims. Since this condition is said to resemble diabetes symptoms to some extent, vivisectors and their allies capitalised on the convenient similarities.” (Source: ARTL: Diabetes and Insulin)

One has to wonder, whatever insights Banting and Best acquired, how much greater might their contributions have been had they been studying human subjects who actually had diabetes? This question is not limited to diabetes research. With regard to all biomedical research, it is critical to ponder how our understanding of and treatments for all diseases might be significantly more advanced if researchers had developed and utilized non-animal methods starting years ago?

Research on Other Illnesses

As with diabetes, research on other diseases has relied heavily on animal testing. Yet even though countless animals have suffered and died, today millions of people continue to suffer from a whole assortment of heavily studies diseases. Consider two examples: AIDS and cancer.

Why AIDS Research is in Need of Aid

For years researchers have tried to infect chimpanzees with HIV, however, chimps do not acquire HIV the way humans do, nor do they develop AIDS from normal exposure to the virus. Hence experimenters have gone to extreme lengths to induce HIV in monkeys as a basis for testing vaccines on them. Not surprisingly, every HIV vaccine that passed animal testing has failed in human clinical trials. A research scientist working on AIDS therapies wrote in New Scientist that “Animal research merely gives false hope to people who need real cures and detracts financially and intellectually from more appropriate research.” (Source: Claude Reiss, “Mouse Model Fails,” New Scientist, 11, May 2002).

The progress that has been made in the study of AIDS has come from human clinical investigation and in vitro (cell and tissue culture) research. Animal models continue to be used even though they do not develop the human AIDS virus. AIDS researcher Dani Bolognesi stated, “No animal models faithfully reproduce human HIV-1 infection and disease, and the studies of experimental vaccines in animal models...have yielded disparate results” (Source: Dan Bolognesis, 1992, Journal of NIH Research, 6(6), 59-62).

Losing the War on Cancer

Since1971 we have been fighting the “war against cancer” and still we have no cure. We have spent nearly $200 billion on research and yet there has been a 73% increase in the cancer death rate since 1971. Not only has animal experimentation inhibited our discovery of the answers we seek regarding the etiology and cure of illnesses, in many instances it also has produced misleading results that have had detrimental effects on human welfare. For example, for years researchers attempted to study the link between cigarettes and lung cancer by forcing animals to inhale cigarette smoke. Because these studies failed to demonstrate a correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer the pubic was mislead for years about the dangers of smoking.

According to Dr. Richard Klausner, former director of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), “The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades, and it simply didn't work in humans.” The NCI also believes we have lost cures for cancer because they were ineffective in mice and hence never applied to humans.

Bad Science

Animal experimentation makes for bad science because the anatomy and physiology of other species renders whatever results are obtained from animal testing irrelevant to humans. This point is underscored by the numerous examples of testing that proved to be safe for non-human species yet turned out to be quite harmful to humans, and vice versa. Consider the following examples.

Thalidomide was offered to pregnant women as a sedative during the 1960s and 1970s. Having been safely tested on thousands of animals it was assumed to be safe for humans. Unfortunately, Thalidomide causes severe birth defects in unborn children, and as result, at least 10,000 children whose mothers took this drug during their pregnancies were born with severe deformities.

Clioquinol is another drug that was safely tested in animals yet had a severely negative impact on humans. Manufactured in Japan in the 1970s, Clioquinol was marketed as providing safe relief from diarrhea. To the contrary however, this drug actually caused diarrhea, as well as blindness, paralysis and/or death in over 30,000 people who took it because it was tested safely on animals.

Even though pharmaceuticals are routinely tested on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 100,000 people every year are killed and more than 2 million are hospitalized with serious complications from prescription drugs. The British Medical Journal recently reported that four out of every ten patients who take a prescribed drug can expect to suffer severe or noticeable side effects, while numerous clinical observers agree that the incidence of iatrogenesis (medically induced disease) is now so great that approximately one in every ten hospital beds is occupied by a patient who has been made ill by their doctor.

Bad Ethics

The only one way that humans and all other species are exactly the same is with regard to our common capacity to experience pain and distress. Our shared capacity to feel pain and to suffer makes us all morally equivalent, therefore, no species should ever be subjected to experimentation where they have not consented to participate. The fact that we forcibly experiment on other sentient beings is made even worse by the fact that laboratory animals have virtually no legal protection. Hence they routinely endure horrific suffering from confinement and isolation, painful and distressing experiments, lack of relief from pain or medical attention related to illness or injuries, and all with minimal, if any consequence to their violators.

The only legal protection laboratory animals have is the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) which does not cover the animals used most commonly in lab experiments: mice, rats, and birds. These species have absolutely no protection. Of those species who are covered, they receive only the most minimal “protection” in terms of requirements to provide basic things like food and water. The AWA does not cover how animals are treated during experiments, no matter how long they may persist; nor does it mandate relief from pain or suffering. Animals typically exist in squalid conditions where they endure the distress of confinement, isolation, repeated handling, and untreated physical pain. Moreover, enforcement of the AWA is carried out by the USDA who has only about 100 inspectors to cover over 8,000 facilities. Consequently, most labs are free to do whatever they want without challenge hence abuse is widespread.

Every year the USFA publishes the Annual Report of Enforcement (ARE) which provides statistics on the total number of animals used in experimentation while the Violation Summary reports the frequency of cited violations of the Animal Welfare Act. A 2006 report showed that labs had violated the law over 2017 times which is a 90% increase from the 2002 total for 1106.

The Self-Serving Agenda Underlying Animal Research

The reality of experimental research is that it is driven much more by the self-serving, greedy and fame-seeking agendas of researchers, universities and corporations than by the interests of humankind. Within academia for example, there is a heavy “publish or perish” culture that drives faculty to madly pursue large grants and publish research articles that will bolster their professional credibility, status and power. The less than noble agenda underpinning much of the research that is conducted leads to experimentation that is redundant, costly, unnecessary and often, blatantly cruel. For example, at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Cincinnati researchers were funded to conduct barbaric head trauma experiments on hundreds of monkeys and cats who received massive head injuries, even though we already have a wealth of information about head trauma from human patients. At Cornell University a researcher was granted taxpayer supported federal funding to addict cats to barbiturates and then force them to undergo withdrawal, which has no relevance to human experience. And at the University of Colorado Denver Dr. Moshe Solomonow was studying back pain in humans by performing painful experiments on cats. As stated by Dr. Marius Maxwell, “As a neurosurgeon focused on human spinal injuries, I can say that it makes no sense to use cats in studies designed to learn about human back issues. Dr. Solomonow's experiments are redundant and the applicability to humans is non-existent. This work is already being done in human subjects and should not be conducted in animals.”

Alternatives

Non-animal research methods, including epidemiological studies, in-vitro (test tube) studies, clinical observations of human patients, micro-dosing, mathematical and computer modeling, scanning technologies (e.g., transcranial magnetic stimulation), micro-arrays and other DNA technologies have all proven to be more accurate and applicable we well as less time-consuming and less costly. Unfortunately, vested financial interests and adherence to tradition are stumbling blocks on the road to change.

What You Can Do

Just as humans continue to suffer and die from dreadful illnesses and injuries, there are millions of animals who continue to suffer and die in laboratories around the world. As fellow sentient beings, our animal brothers and sisters deserve far better than the torment we inflict on them. In short they are dying to be saved, and hence, they need us to act…now!

• Contact the National Institutes of Health, which is the main source of funding for animal-based research in the U.S., and tell them you don’t want your tax dollars used to underwrite animal experiments, whatever their purpose. Explain that all animal testing is violent and unethical, and you prefer to have your tax dollars used to fund research based on epidemiological, clinical, in vitro, and computer modeling studies, instead of laboratory experiments on animals.

Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Director
National Institutes of Health
Shannon Bldg., Rm. 126
1 Center Dr. (Mail Stop 0148)
Bethesda, MD 20892
Fax: 301-496-8276 or Email: Ez26y@nih.gov

• Visit the New England Anti-Vivisection Society (NEAVS)

• Visit Help Animals in Laboratories

• Various way to lend your support can be found at StopAnimalTests.

Photo courtesy of Brian Gunn /IAAPEA ©