Compassion for Animals
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Is there any circumstance when animal experimentation or the use of animals in medical education would be warranted?
“No.”
That brief, to the point, and definitive answer came from John J. Pippin, MD, a cardiologist and senior medical and research advisor for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). I was doing a phone interview with him after attending “The Art of Compassion,” an event celebrating PCRM’s 25th anniversary. 
They gave an award to Marilu Henner, a vegan who’s been working to reform the Child Nutrition Act so kids at school can eat something other than chicken fingers. Good cause. But it was another issue – the use of animals in experimentation and education – that really got my attention. I figured that if a surgeon was going to cut me open, he or she better practice on a pig first, right? Actually, wrong. I thought if an experimental medication was to be proven safe and effective on people, it had better first be tested on animals, right? Also wrong.
Only three accredited medical schools in the whole country use animals to teach surgery. According to PCRM, the schools are Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Chattanooga campus. Dr. Pippin told me there’s a good reason all the other 150-plus medical schools in the country don’t use animals in surgical education: There are better ways to teach surgery. Surgical simulators and supervised operating room experience work just fine. Harvard and Yale don’t see the need to use (or kill) animals, so why do those three schools still do it?
“They don’t want to use the new methods because they’re comfortable with the old methods. But we all have to change our beliefs when the science changes,” Dr. Pippin told me. A paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine backs him up, asserting that simulators are effective training devices for medical residents.
What about animals who give their lives to test new medication? Bad for the animals, but good thing for people, right? Actually, no.
“The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades – and it simply didn’t work in humans.”
Dr. Richard Klausner, a former director of the National Cancer Institute
Dr. Pippin said that using animals to study human diseases is “an abject failure.” Look at the track record for pharmaceuticals. The former vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline has said, “The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people.”
If pharmaceuticals only work for half the population why do we still need to test them on animals? Bottom line: Money. “If funding is available to do research on animals, they do research on animals,” Dr. Pippin pointed out. The money is there. According to a Freedom of Information Act request initiated by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Institutes of Health reported that 42 percent of its research grants involved animals. The NIH budget is $30 billion – 42% of that, some $12 billion, is a lot of animal research funded by taxpayers like you and me. Can you get your tax check to the IRS out of the mailbox? Hmm, too late.
I’d like to know why those three medical schools still use animals for surgical training – so I’m going to ask them and tell you what they say.
Photo credit: Lee Schneider
I too had lived under the same assumptions that you did, prior to this blog. Thank you for enlightening me, Lee. I look forward to reading what those 3 schools tell you.
Great article, Lee. You cover more interesting ground in 500 words than most people do on a cross continental plane ride.
Lee — I think Dr. Pippin has ignored some major parts of medical history: germ theory, insulin, antibiotics, the foundations of genetics and many vaccines were all developed using animal research. These are major success stories of medicine. I do agree that animals need not be used for medical training, but research is a very different story.
http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/insulin/discovery-insulin.html
Thanks for commenting. The doctor I spoke with for the article was a great interview and I’m looking forward to the response I get from the three med schools.
Thanks so much for reading and commenting. I’ll keep you posted on what I find out.
Fascinating. I was always under the impression that all those mice being used for cancer research were dying for a good cause. Interesting to hear that the experience may not be that relevant for humans. Great article.
Joel, thanks for commenting. You make a very important point -and it merits more research on my part. Certainly in the past, as we developed vaccines and antibiotics, animals played a role. But the track record for present-day medications – say, those that might cure HIV/AIDS or cancer – doesn’t seem to be very good. In those critical areas we have a lot of “quality of life” meds, but no cures yet. So is the animal research doing any good in those areas? Also, since the days of germ theory being cutting edge, haven’t we developed useful computer models, etc that allow a VR testing approach?
Thanks for the challenging comment, Joel. Respectfully, there is more than you suggest to the stories of insulin, antibiotics, genetics, and the reliability of animal research.
The role of the pancreas in diabetes was discovered in late 18th century human autopsy studies by Cawley. The pancreatic insulin-producing cells were identified in humans in the mid to late 19th century (Hansemann and others). Progress was delayed because of disparities between human and canine research, and insulin itself was not entirely safe until recombinant human insulin was developed. So animal research was involved, but was it contributory or mostly misleading?
Alexander Fleming himself commented that penicillin would not have been approved if animal testing was required, as it is ineffective or lethal in the usual lab animals. He stated that the entire field of antibiotics might have been derailed on the basis of wrong animal results. We’ll never know, but it’s scary that useful medicines have likely been discarded because they were not safe or effective in animal tests.
Another example? Simple aspirin causes birth defects in all seven species I’ve found results for: mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, dogs, cats, and monkeys. Yet it does not cause birth defects in women. If animal tests had been around in the 19th century, we wouldn’t even have aspirin.
And genetics research has taught us what we did not foresee–that genes are not the key to disease susceptibility or treatment responses, but gene EXPRESSION is. Gene expression differs for many reasons, even between close species (mice v. rats, chimps v. humans), even within a single species, and even between identical human twins.
How then can we believe it is scientifically sound to study human diseases and treatments using nonhuman animals? It isn’t that animal research never works, it’s just that this is rare, unpredictable, and not based on good science.
So if animal research can’t reliably or predictably inform human medicine–and I truly believe it can’t–then we should break our addiction to animal research and turn to the burgeoning fields of human-based research methods that provide results specific for our species.
That would be a great topic for another post!
I can sure think of a lot better use for that $12 billion!
Great article Lee – as an advocate for animal rights, I applaud your research and your attention to a very disturbing topic.
Great Lee -
I’m so glad you are asking those questions and
provoking interesting answers. A very upsetting topic, indeed.