As I mentioned in an earlier item, Ray Greek has been busy sending letters to the editor of news outlets that give positive coverage of animal research. Here’s another example of Greek’s missives, in this case to The Daily Mirror,
Dr. Mark Matfield of the Research Defence Society — a pharmaceutical industry-funded organization which defends animal experimentation — says that more animal experiments will save lives (Mirror, Aug 5). In fact, the opposite is true. Think how many lives could have been saved if beagles had not “proved” cigarette smoke was safe! Now women on HRT are at twice the risk of breast cancer and heart disease, thanks to a drug tested on monkeys.
Until animal experiments are abandoned in favor of state-of-the-art medical research, we will continue to suffer the consequences.
Ray Greek MD
Europeans for Medical Advancement, London
Lets take up the issue of beagles and smoking.
Dr. Oscar Auerbach is credited with being the first person to demonstrate a causal connection between smoking and lung cancer. Auerbach examined the lung tissue of hundreds of people who died from lung cancer and published his conclusion that tobacco smoke contributed to the lung cancer.
In the early 1970s, Auerbach conducted an experiment in which he exposed beagles to tobacco smoke. Auerbach’s research in beagles further strengthened the causal connection. Don’t take my word for it, one of the most embarrassing documents to emerge from tobacco companies was a memo by British tobacco company Gallaher that, among other things, argued that Auerbach’s beagle research definitively demonstrated the causal link that tobacco companied had for so long denied,
(2) One of the striking features of the Auerbach experiment was that practically every dog which smoked suffered significantly from the effects of the smoke, either in terms of severe irritation and bronchitis, pre-cancerous changes or cancer. This, of course, is a much more extreme situation than in human being where only one in ten heavy smokers get lung cancer and one in five suffer from some form of respiratory infection, often describe as mild bronchitis. We can, therefore, question whether the beagle is in some way untypical of human behavior and the only reasonable argument against this is that the dogs were given a much more massive dose compared with the human dose and in the case of Auerbach’s work, since the smoke bypassed the mouth, which sets as a good trap for certain constituents of the smoke, the dog lung was subjected to a much greater effect from the smoke.
(3) However, in spite of the qualifications in one and two, we believe that the Auerbach work proves beyond reasonable doubt that fresh whole cigarette smoke is carcinogenic to dog lungs and therefore it is highly likely that it is carcinogenic to human lungs. It is obviously impossible to be certain of the extrapolation from an animal lung to a human lung, but we have to bear in mind that the anatomy of the dog is relatively close to human anatomy and the type of tumor found in the dog was the same type as found in heavy smokers.
And yet, tobacco companies continued to publicly deny this obvious fact. In fact when this memo was finally made public in the late 1990s, Gallaher officials denied that they ever found Auerbach’s research credible and maintained that this analysis had to be put into its proper context.
Beginning in the 1950s, tobacco companies adopted largely the same approach to animal research that the animal rights movement denies now — it actively sought to prevent such experiments from taking place, distorted the results of those that did, and when both of those failed simply outright lied about the implications of animal research to the issue of whether tobacco smoke contributed to lung cancer.
On the one hand, tobacco companies were telling the public that the animal research was mixed or inconclusive at best. But internally, they were issuing memos underlining the strength of the work that Auerbach and others were doing and desperately coming up with strategies to conceal and obfuscate the truth.
In fact tobacco companies were so afraid of the implications of animal research, that according to a Phillip Morris memo they reached an informal agreement to minimize biological research in order to protect against future liability.
Dr. Greek would have fit in nicely with such intellectual dishonesty.
Sources:
Ernst L. Wynder, M.D.. CDC, Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, November 5, 1999.
Where there’s smoke. R. R. Baker, January 2001.