As this site noted the other day, Great Britain recently announced plans to build a national center devoted to finding ways to reduce the number of animals uses in medical research. The plan was attacked by animal rights groups as a sham that didn’t go far enough, but University of Pittsburgh assistant professor Stuart Derbyshire attacked some of the justifications for the center as conceding far too much to animal rights activists.
Derbyshire notes that in announcing plans to build the Center, Lord Sainsbury and others defended the continued use of animals for medical research as necessary for improving human health. But, Derbyshire argues, this sort of defense will ultimately backfire since much animal research is basic research that has no immediate clinical outcomes,
Unfortunately, scientists seem unable to state the aim of any study is just to develop knowledge. In the public sphere, and increasingly in the academic sphere, there is a demand that the outcome of any research project involving animals be self-consciously directed towards a wonder drug, rather than a process of scientific enquiry. The effect is to denigrate investigation, ignoring the fact that trying to understand the natural world is part of the scientific project independent of any clinical benefit to humanity. Scientific research will be impoverished if we insist on directing our research only towards clinical ends.
That impoverishment is upon us. Lord Sainsbury has said that he knows of no scientist who wanted to use animals unless ‘absolutely necessary’ — by which he means to develop insights into the action of drugs and to further clinical therapies. The demand for absolute necessity should send a chill through the spine of any researcher. Is it ‘absolutely necessary’ to know that the representation of whiskers in the brains of rats differs if the rats are raised in cages without toys compared with cages that include running wheels, tunnels and mazes? Will knowing the exact cellular structure of various divisions of the rhesus monkey brain lead to a clinical advance? Does know that fish rock and rub their lips on gravel following an injection of bee acid improve the treatment of pain?
That a clinical benefit may derive from any or all of these experiments is not the point. The fact is that these experiments were primarily performed to see what would happen when something is done, or to develop the understanding of an animal system, rather than to develop clinical insight.
A further problem with demanding clinical relevance is that it opens a gap between scientists’ rhetoric and the reality of scientific research. Presumably, all British scientists who want to do research on animals must now include an aim to develop medicine, regardless of how far-fetched and convoluted the justification may be. This highly defensive position is dangerous. As the gap between real and presented aims widens, there is an increasing risks of being called to account by a public who believed that their money was being used to fund vital medical research rather than for hi-tech photography of dead rats.
Source:
Vivisection: Put human welfare first. Stuart Derbyshire, Spiked-Online, June 1, 2004.