Vivisection is for Losers: Why Animal Research Hurts Humans Too

Those of you who are old enough can probably recall President Nixon signing the National Cancer Act and declaring a War on Cancer in 1971. So how's the war going? Well, we're losing it. Today, cancer is the second leading cause of death after heart disease in the United States. Over 1.2 million Americans can expect to get cancer every year. And there's no end in sight to this war, or the wars on AIDS, hepatitis, heart disease, birth defects, and many other killer diseases. Why? The biggest obstacle is that even in the 21^st century, many research labs and well-meaning medical charities, such as the March of Dimes and the Muscular Dystrophy Association, still stubbornly adhere to vivisection, despite its disappointing track record and obvious cruelty, to solve medical mysteries and develop cures.

What is vivisection? Literally, it means cutting into, or surgery on, a live animal. In a larger context, it has also come to mean invading the body of an animal by administering test drugs or diseases, breaking limbs, slathering toxic substances on, shocking, asphyxiating, forcing to swallow or inhale toxins-in short, any experiment performed on animals. Millions of animals are vivisected and then killed in labs around the world every year in the name of medical research. They include rats, mice and birds (who are not even classified legally as animals and enjoy absolutely no protection under the already weak Animal Welfare Act that regulates the use of lab animals) as well as dogs, cats, birds, horses, cows, pigs, goats, rabbits, monkeys, great apes, and reptiles. Vivisection, or biomedical research, as its proponents like to call it, is a huge, profitable industry. If only it worked.

In "Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals", C. Ray Greek, MD and Jean Swingle Greek, DVM take a different approach to the discussion of vivisection. They acknowledge but set aside the animal cruelty argument used by animal rights advocates and instead focus on the harm it has done to humans. Their premise is that animal experimentation, despite its oft-stated noble purpose of being "for the greater good of humankind" and "a necessary evil", has actually hurt the humans it was intended to help and slowed down the progress of medical research. They maintain that the major advances in medical care we enjoy today have been made possible by techniques such as simple clinical observation, clinical research, in vitro research with human tissue, autopsies, computer modeling, technology, human drug surveillance, epidemiology, pathology, preventive medicine, and through sheer accident, among other animal-free modalities.

Vivisection has been around since the second century AD, when Roman physician Galen dissected live animals and reached the conclusion that veins carry blood. The authors point out that he could have just as easily figured that out through examination of his human subjects, and thus begins the long story of the futility of vivisection, which continues into the present century.

The Greeks explain that human and nonhuman animals are physiologically distinct, and therefore will often not react to drugs and diseases the way humans do. For example, the fact that humans share 97% to 99% of our DNA with great apes does not mean that our bodies function in the same way as theirs. One complicating factor is that it's not just about the DNA, it's also about the millions of base pairs that make up the DNA. Any small change in base pair sequences can mean a big difference between, and even within, animal species.

Doesn't it seem that every six months or so, there's another news story about some popular, heavily advertised drug that's been making people sick or even killing them? This is not your imagination. It happens frequently despite federal laws requiring animal testing of each new drug before it goes to human trials. What does that suggest about the merits of vivisection, or the wisdom of conducting human trials on drugs previously tested on animals? The authors cite the amazing statistic that 15% of all hospital admissions are due to adverse drug reactions. Thalidomide is a notorious example of an animal-tested drug leading to major problems in humans. It caused terrible birth defects in the babies of pregnant women who took the drug for morning sickness in the 1950s and 1960s. Some 45 other drugs are discussed in the book, which, although tested on animal models first, ended up harming or killing humans. And these drugs, the Greeks assert, are just a small sampling of FDA-approved, animal-tested drugs that proved dangerous to humans. They also bring up the flip side of the issue, that there have been a number of drugs tested on animal models that made the animals sick, which, it was later discovered, were helpful to humans and could have been used to treat diseases.

The authors also discuss the enormous amounts of money involved, as well as the thousands of personnel dependent on the vivisection industry. These include the purveyors of animals and equipment; drug companies; medical associations; government agencies; PR companies; lobbyists; and the researchers themselves, who are under constant pressure to compete to receive funding for experiments that are often repetitive and unnecessary, and then to write papers about them that make the research seem relevant. The vicious cycle of vivisection keeps a lot of people employed and makes others quite wealthy.

The book concludes by talking about the danger of spreading new diseases by obtaining organs and tissues for humans from animals, called xenotransplantation. The bacteria, parasites, viruses, fungi, and prions of animals can be deadly to humans and the diseases they engender are often contagious.

Finally, the authors point out what we all should realize by now: that unhealthy living accounts for most diseases and simple lifestyle changes would do more for people than anything that comes out of a laboratory.

Can you understand now why the War on Cancer has turned into a medical quagmire? If animal vivisection doesn't sound like a solid, scientific way of obtaining accurate information about humans, then please encourage charities not to fund vivisection by donating only to those that carry the Humane Charity Seal of Approval. When you send in your donation, thank them for practicing good science as well as compassion by not using animals. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is an advocacy group for doctors that promotes preventive medicine and the use of higher standards in medical research. It currently lists 249 charities that do not fund animal research. Among them are Easter Seals, American Breast Cancer Foundation, Lymphoma Foundation of America, Multiple Sclerosis Foundation, National Association for the Visually Handicapped, National Children's Cancer Society, Spina Bifida Association of America, and UNICEF. They and others richly deserve your support. Your life may depend on it.