Many animal rights activists have an extremely simplified view of animal research which seems derived largely from pop culture depictions of research. Do a few experiments, find a cure, move on. If experiments don’t lead immediately to cures or treatments, many animal rights activists conclude, they must be unnecessary and cruel. The recent surge in cancer drug testing, however, illustrates how progress really occurs in treating diseases.
Over the last few decades, billions of dollars has been poured into Cancer research — much of it for expensive animal tests of one treatment or another. As animal rights activists are happy to point out, all that money and all of those dead animals have yet to produce a cure. A typical example of this view is a fact sheet published by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Cancer: Why We’re Losing the “War”.
But the bottom line is that medical research into something like cancer is going to take a lot of time to see results. The last 30 years have seen an amazing growth in the understanding of cancer, much of it due to animal tests. As the Boston Globe recently reported, all that research is finally starting to come to some fruition. Today there are more than 400 different drug compounds in various stages human clinical trials to test their efficacy at treating cancer.
One of the interesting new technologies mentioned by the Boston Globe are monoclonal antibodies, which it notes are antibodies produced in the lab designed to seek out and destroy cancer cells. Animal rights activists are very much in favor of monoclonal antibodies because there is a distinct possibility that any ultimate cancer treatment based on them could be made without using animals. But the bottom line is that, contrary to PETA’s propaganda, animal experiments and research played a fundamental role in the development of monoclonal antibodies. It’s a technology that wouldn’t exist without animal research.
None of this, of course, means that a cure for cancer is going to be announced next week. But progress is being made thanks to animal research, and it is outrageous for groups like PETA to continue claiming otherwise.
Source:
Cancer drugs surge in pipeline. Naomi Aoki, Boston Globe, April 11, 2001.