I had to laugh out loud after reading the first couple paragraphs of a fluff piece on Dr. Jarrod Bailey that reporter Paul James wrote for The Newcastle Journal. Here’s James’ take on Bailey,
A Newcastle scientist is spearheading a campaign to end medical research on animals.
But Dr. Jarrod Bailey is no animal rights activists and his argument is founded entirely on the belief that it simply does not work.
As scientific director of Europeans for Medical Progress, Dr. Bailey, 34, said “archaic” animal methods have either harmed humans or set research back by decades.
Of course, Bailey is an animal rights activist.
Bailey is a regular consultant with U.S. animal rights group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and Europeans for Medical Progress is simply a British clone of PCRM.
According to PCRM, Bailey is the project development coordinator in the School of Population and Health Sciences at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England.
The Europeans for Medical Progress web site demonstrates that PCRM’s British counterparts are well-school in PCRM-style deception. For example, as proponents of animal research regularly note, most Nobel Prizes award in biological sciences were the result of animal research. EMP just dismisses this argument,
Yes, most did. But it doesn’t follow that the discoveries would not have occurred without animals. It only means that the market for lab animals was thriving and accessible.
From the second half of the 19th century onward, experimenting on animals became part of all medical curricula. Therefore researchers were obliged to perform animal experiments to earn their degrees.
In the instances wherein animals were used for the Nobel Prize-winning results, they were not necessary. Though animal tissue research was the convention, human tissue was available and more viable – as many Nobel Prize winners have since remarked.
I would love Bailey or EMP to explain how, for example, Walter Hess could have demonstrated how the brain functionally organizes the workings of the internal organs, for which he shared a Nobel Prize in 1949, by restricting himself to just tissue samples (Hess used cats).
Source:
Scientist: Animal tests don’t work. Paul James, The Journal (Newcastle), February 24, 2005.