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    Deviating from the moment from its “we’re just a public interest group”
script, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has launched a billboard
campaign against the March of Dimes Walkathon.

    The PCRM paid for billboards in parts of the country reading, “How many
animals will be killed with your March of Dimes donation?” A better question
would be, “How many people would die if PCRM banned animal experiments?”

    As March of Dimes spokeswoman Michelle Kling replied to a question about
the billboards from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “Thousands of children
are alive today and millions of people are living healthier lives because
of advances in treatment and prevention made possible by March of Dimes-funded
research involving animals.”

    Meanwhile activists online were busy distributing sample letters for
people to write to corporate and celebrity sponsors of the March of Dimes.
The sample letter is typical animal rights cant claiming animal experiments
have played no role in better understanding birth defects.

Frankly, we are disturbed that MOD the charity has spent millions
of dollars on disturbing animal experiments that have contributed little
or nothing to the prevention and treatment of birth defects.

. . . MOD has also provided money for experimenters to give
nicotine, cocaine, and alcohol to animals, even though we already know
from human clinical experience that these substances can harm a developing
baby.

    That last line belongs in a college-level logic textbook as an example
of a false dichotomy – of course we now known cocaine and other substances
are potentially harmful to fetal development, but a) we gained a much
better understanding of the scope of such danger from animal experiments,
and b) studying exposure in animals allows for scientist to test a variety
of hypothesis on the total extent of such problems and possible treatments
much faster than could possibly be done in clinical trials. Scientists
might know that alcohol and cocaine can harm a human fetus, but there
is still so much we don’t know about the full effects of such exposure
and the best ways to treat or ameliorate such problems.

References:

“Write to March of Dimes Sponsors” Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine press release, April 2000.

“March of Dimes gets flak for its funding of research with animals.”
Michael Stetz, San Diego Union-Tribune, April 7, 2000.

“PCRM Steps Up Attack On March of Dimes.” Americans for Medical Progress
Newsletter, April 8, 2000.

“Billboard criticizes March of Dimes; group’s ad in Dallas denounces
animal experiments.” Jeff Prince, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 1, 2000.

    The Seattle Post Intelligencer recently ran an excellent series of articles debunking a lot of animal rights myths about medical research. That didn’t stop one eighth grader at a local school from writing in to claim that penicillin kills guinea pigs. This claim is straight off of fact sheets (they should call them false sheets) by PETA and other groups. In a fact sheet titled “Drug Testing: Pain, Not Gain,” PETA claims that:

Penicillin would not be in use today if it had been tested on guinea pigs–common laboratory subjects–because penicillin kills guinea pigs.

    PETA doesn’t bother to cite the source of this claim (surprise), but it is actually based on a rather bizarre misreading of a study that examined the effects of prolonged exposure to very large doses of penicillin which does indeed tend to produce toxicity and death. Similar problems, however, occur with human beings who are exposed to very large doses of penicillin for long periods of time, and for much the same reason — in both the guinea pigs and human beings, the prolonged exposure to penicillin kills micro-organisms in the gut which creates a whole host of other problems.

    Leave it to the animal rights activists to claim that studies showing extremely high doses of penicillin administered for long periods of time can produce toxicity in guinea pigs means “penicillin kills guinea pigs.” They might as well say that if penicillin had been tested in human beings it never would have been approved because “penicillin harms human beings.”

    But the interesting thing, it turns out, is that penicillin was largely ignored for many decades after its initial discovery because it didn’t appear to have any beneficial effect in human beings. Only tests done in the first half of the century with mice finally convinced medical researchers that penicillin might have some broad benefits worth exploring.

    Dr. Robert Speth wrote a letter-to-the-editor outlining of the Seattle Post Intelligencer outlining the strange winding path that penicillin took and the crucial role of animal tests, which he has graciously permitted me to reprint:

Animals: Penicillin’s Success Came From Tests on Rats

By Robert Speth

    The animal rights movement has made schoolchildren primary targets of their
anti-research propaganda. The letter (May 14) from Victoria Wilkins, an
eighth-grader at Eckstein Middle School, is an example of how the animal
rights movement is victimizing children. The letter, which no doubt she took
great pains to write, is founded in the litany of inaccurate information used
by the animal rights movement to disparage animal research.

    While each of the arguments she poses against animal research can be
rebutted, her comment regarding penicillin is so inaccurate as to require
immediate correction.

    When penicillin was discovered in the 1870s, it was tested on humans. Its
effects were so erratic and unpredictable that it was ignored as a drug until
1940 when Sir Howard Florey tested it on eight mice injected with a lethal
dose of bacteria. Only the mice that got penicillin lived. The experiment was
so compelling that it quickly led to the use of penicillin in World War II,
saving thousands of soldiers’ lives.

    Florey used mice because he had so little penicillin he could not test it on
humans. Indeed, attempts to use penicillin in humans after Florey’s discovery
were still inconclusive. But, because the results in mice were so convincing,
Florey and his chemist purified their crude penicillin extract to obtain a
grade that worked reliably in humans.

    When animal rights activists tell children that penicillin kills guinea pigs
and, therefore, “If we had relied on animal research we would not have
penicillin” they are lying to our children.

    That is why teachers must be extremely vigilant with regard to the materials
distributed by animal rights groups for their curriculum. Children’s
schooling should not be a means for the animal rights movement to spread its
false propaganda.

    Dr Speth is Professor of Pharmacology and Neuroscience at the College of Veterinary Medicine, Washington State University, Pullman WA. He is also a charter member and Past-President of the Society for Veterinary Medical Ethics, a Board Member of the National Animal Interest Alliance, an emeritus board member of the Washington Association for Biomedical Research, and a recipient of the Lewis J. Kettel award from Incurably Ill For Animal Research.

       On nights when I can’t
quite get my information fix from the Internet, I like to walk down to
a local store that sells hundreds of different magazines and newspapers.
Because I am interested in computer games but not knitting, the proprietor
of the store has been kind enough to arrange the magazines by content,
so I never end up leafing through art magazines when what I really want
are the latest Quake II screenshots. The store also shelves sexually explicit
magazines together in one area and behind a glass partition.

       I always thought this was
an excellent scheme, but according to the hyperbole floating around the
Internet these days, this amounts to censorship.

       The whole brouhaha centers
around web blocking software. Often wrongly justified as an alternative
to government censorship, blocking software simply prevents a user from
accessing certain sites. The idea is to keep children from venturing into
areas that contains inappropriate content.

       Of course there are critics
who think that in itself is wrong. Jon Katz at HotWired argued earlier
in the year that essentially parents had no right to stifle their children’s
creative impulses. If your 15-year-old wants to check out the leather
S&M sites, who the hell are you to stop them? Although I probably
should make a long-winded reasoned argument against Katz’s position,
I’ll merely note that I hope Katz never runs into one of these creatively
free juveniles in a dark alley.

       But for the most part people
don’t disagree that keeping children from “adult” sites
is a bad idea. What they worry about is that the software and techniques
will spill over into the adult world. Unfortunately these arguments end
up being hopelessly confused about censorship.

Barbs for Barr

       Christopher Barr, a CNET columnist
with whom I rarely agree, found this out when he wrote a column proposing
a solution to a common problem with ratings systems for web sites. The
idea behind ratings systems is to have groups propose various rating systems
and then allow people with web sites to rate their content appropriately.

       The problem, of course, is
that ratings are like using nuclear weapons for fishing — rarely do you
get very precise targeting. As many critics have pointed out, if web ratings
are applied consistently, news sites would largely be blocked because
they carry stories involving violence or coverage of controversies over
sex and pornography.

       Even parents who might not
want their child visiting the S&M leather site might not want software
to block CNN’s website simply because it covers a controversy about
such a site. Barr advocates essentially creating a special exemption for
news web sites. As Barr puts it, “we feel that bonafide news sites
should be subject to different criteria.”

       There’s only one real
question — what counts as a “real” news site? In his hilariously
whiney complaint about this approach for The Netly News, Joshua
Quittner notes that the skin magazine “Screw” runs reviews of
adult videos. Doesn’t that make it a news site? (Yeah and next Quittner
will argue Netly News isn’t another boring corporate site
trying to pass itself off as technologically astute).

       The replies to Barr’s
columns are amusing. Declan McCullagh at Netly News complains
that repressive governments could use rating systems and blocking software
to ban controversial speech. Yeah and repressive governments could throw
books in a fire, but that’s not much of an argument against combustion.

       Barr doesn’t help his
case either by trying to take the moral high road. If he were honest he
would just admit the main problem his critics have with the system. Regardless
of what the final implementation of a news rating is, it will be largely
arbitrary.

But that’s fine

       And those busybodies who have
a problem with this should mind their own business. Look, if the Wall
Street Journal and Playboy an CNET and others want to get together and
decide amongst themselves who is and is not a real news site, more power
to them. If they can convince companies to include blocking features in
software which can block non-news sites which contain violence or other
contest, go for it.

       See there’s a simple
fundamental liberty called freedom of association. If a group of companies
want to get together and tell us their opinions — which is essentially
what a ratings system does — and then browsers give us the ability to
base our children’s browsing on those opinions, it’s none of
the American Civil Liberties Union’s business.

       The notion that this is censorship
is ludicrous. One of the comments Barr mentions from a reader is “If
someone else decides who runs a news site, isn’t it still censorship?”
No, of course not. If you believe, as I do, that this whole ratings system
is silly, don’t use it. Don’t install blocking software on your
computer, don’t activate it in your browsers and put up a rude web
site ripping on the Internet Content Coalition.

       But the point is you have
a choice. The Internet Content Coalition isn’t censoring anyone —
if you don’t agree with them simply don’t use programs which
use their criteria. Don’t label or rate your site. Get over it.

The Traditional Media

       The main problem the “censorship”
crowd has with this arrangement is they seem to think nothing akin to
it exists for other media. One of the people Barr quotes claims, “Since
the Supreme Court said the online world should be as free as print, and
no self-labeling system exists for magazines or newspapers, why should
the Net be any different?”

       While newspapers and magazines
don’t label themselves for the most part, third parties do come in
all the time and rate them. When I go to the magazine store, for example,
the proprietor often has the New York Times and Washington
Post on a table with newspapers. The Village Voice, however,
is stuck back in a corner closer to magazines of political opinion. Similarly
glossy and questionable publications dealing with the Wild West are shelved
with fan magazines rather than with reputable history periodicals. New
Age and alternative medicine periodicals are kept separate from serious
medical and scientific journals.

       Each of these decisions involves
a third party coming along and essentially deciding what sort of magazine
or newspaper each periodical is and then arbitrarily placing it in its
area. If I objected to this — say I wanted all magazines shelved alphabetically
or perhaps I want to be able to find “Hustler” and “Sports
Illustrated! Kids” next to one another, I am always free to simply
purchase my magazines elsewhere.

       As Barr notes, “the success
of any self-rating and filtering system depends on how well it works and
how it’s accepted and used.” While parents might want their
kids not to see the adult sites, very few people I know run blocking software
to prevent themselves from having full access to the web. But if large
numbers of adults want to let a small coalition decide what they see and
here that’s fine — it’s their choice.

       A few months ago I learned
I might have inherited a genetic disorder. Dealing with that was nothing
compared to the nightmare all Americans will face if Bill Clinton gets
his way on genetic testing.

       In my case, a relative developed
a genetic condition that is believed to be inheritable. The odds I have
the gene are very low, but the only way to know for sure is to get tested.

       This where President Clinton
comes in. During the next 10 to 20 years, numerous tests for genetic diseases
and disorders are going to be developed. Such tests will enable people
to determine with great precision their odds of developing everything
from cancer to heart disease to diabetes.

       Clinton and other politicians
fear this development will increase the cost of insurance and even make
insurance unavailable for some people. If an insurance company knows,
thanks to genetic testing, that a person is likely to die by age 40 or
suffer a serious illness in his 30s, it would be crazy not to charge that
person higher premiums for life and health insurance. Insurance companies
are, after all, not charities but businesses that help consumers distribute
the cost of risk.

       Clinton’s solution is to support
a bill currently before Congress that would make it illegal for insurance
companies to discriminate against people on the basis of genetic tests.
Insurance companies would have to offer the same premiums and policies
to those who carry the gene for Huntington’s disease as for those who
test negative for every genetic condition. This solution, unfortunately,
would likely destroy the insurance industry.

       If I learn I’m going to die
from a genetic disease, and the insurance companies are required to offer
me the same premiums and policies as they offer others, my choice is simple
– I’m going to buy as much health and life insurance as I can afford and
leave a hefty inheritance to my family.

       As the people most likely
to develop illness or die prematurely buy more insurance while those at
lower risk purchase less, insurance company costs will rise. Premiums
will also rise and the insurance industry in general might become unprofitable.

       Fortunately there are other
options.

       Alexander Tabarrok, an assistant
professor of economics at Ball State University, outlined an ingenious
alternative in the July/August issue of Contingencies, a magazine for
actuaries.

       Tabarrok’s solution is simple:
Since taking genetic tests imposes a risk that a person will learn he
has a genetic condition, people should take out insurance to protect themselves
against that risk.

       Tabarrok envisions a system
of mandatory genetic insurance like the system of mandatory car insurance
used throughout the nation. Just as states require automobile owners to
purchase insurance, so people taking genetic tests would be required to
purchase insurance. The insurance would cover the additional costs of
higher premiums and/or health care costs should the buyer be found to
carry a disease-causing gene.

       Unlike the proposal favored
by Clinton, Tabarrok’s genetic insurance would keep health insurance costs
at current levels and might even lower them. Since the risk of genetic
disease is already included in insurance costs, Tabarrok’s proposal essentially
just splits what is now one insurance policy into two.

       But since genetic insurance
removes any reason for people to avoid genetic tests, it would encourage
people to get genetic tests early in life. This would tend to reduce health
care costs, and hence insurance costs, as people received early treatment
for such diseases and increase their possibility of living long, healthy
lives.

       Someone with a gene increasing
the risk of heart disease, for example, could be advised to start a low
fat diet and regular exercise early in life, thereby increasing the probability
of avoiding heart disease altogether.

       Although Tabarrok’s proposal
would be great for consumers and insurance companies, it would be lousy
for politicians such as Clinton. Sure it would largely solve the genetic
testing dilemma, but it doesn’t let the president cast the insurance companies
as uncaring, profit-hungry Scrooges. It doesn’t create any huge new bureaucracy
or get the nation a step closer to nationalizing health care.

       Instead it simply uses market
forces to deliver the best goods at the best prices to consumers. If Clinton
would get behind that kind of policy, he could genuinely help people who
must make a difficult decision over genetic testing.

       This op-ed column originally
appeared in the Detroit News.