Animal Research—Blessing or Curse?
IF YOU are among the many millions of persons who first breathed the breath of life toward the beginning of this century, you may well know that your longevity has far exceeded the expectations of your parents and the doctor or midwife who delivered you. If you were born in the United States, Canada, or Europe, your life expectancy in the year 1900 was about 47 years. In other countries life potential was even less. Today, in many countries life expectancy is over 70 years.
Whatever your age, you are living in a paradoxical time. Your grandparents or great-grandparents witnessed the uncontrollable effects of the numerous maladies that decimated their generation. Smallpox, for example, took the lives of countless thousands yearly and scarred millions of others for life. Influenzas took their toll—one epidemic alone spelled death for 20 million people in one year (1918-19). Following World War I, epidemic typhus killed three million people in Russia. Typhus epidemics occurred in many other countries during World War II. It is estimated that 25 of every 100 people infected during typhus epidemics died.
The dreadful disease infantile paralysis, known later as poliomyelitis, reduced the world population by some 30,000 persons yearly and crippled thousands of others, especially children. There were those of tender years who did not survive their first bout with typhoid fever or diphtheria, scarlet fever or measles, whooping cough or pneumonia. The list seems endless. Of every 100,000 babies born in 1915, approximately 10,000 died before their first birthday. Brain tumors were inoperable. The ability to open clogged arteries was unknown. Doctors were powerless to save heart attack victims, and cancer spelled certain death.
In spite of the death-dealing plagues that have ravaged the world since the turn of the century and before, the life expectancy of man today has increased by about 25 years. Thus, in many parts of the world, a child born today has a life expectancy of about 70 years.
The Price Paid to Save Life
Fortunately, most young people living today have escaped many of the deadly diseases that were responsible for the early demise of many of their ancestors. But they may not take pleasure in the knowledge that many of man’s furry friends—dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, and others—were sacrificed in the cause of medical science ‘so that people today might live longer and healthier lives,’ as the scientists tend to express it.
Virtually all the diseases that have been eliminated or brought under control in this century—polio, diphtheria, mumps, measles, rubella, smallpox, and others—have been conquered through animal research. Anesthetics and analgesics, intravenous feeding and medications, radiation therapy and chemotherapy for cancer, all were tested and proved effective first on animals. And these are but a few.
“There is virtually no major treatment or surgical procedure in modern medicine that could have been developed without animal research,” said a noted neurologist, Dr. Robert J. White. “Work with dogs and other animals led to the discovery of insulin and the control of diabetes, to open-heart surgery, the cardiac pacemaker and the whole area of organ transplantation. Polio . . . has been almost totally eradicated in the United States by preventive vaccines perfected on monkeys. By working with animals, researchers have raised the cure rate for children afflicted with acute lymphocytic leukemia from four percent in 1965 to 70 percent today,” the same doctor said.
The role of animal research is confirmed by former laboratory assistant Harold Pierson, who worked under Dr. F. C. Robbins at Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. He told Awake! that their program to discover an oral vaccine for polio involved using monkey kidneys. The tissue from one kidney could be used for thousands of tests. He explained: “The monkeys were kept in humane conditions and were always under anesthetic when they were operated on. Certainly there was no deliberate cruelty. However, by reason of their operations, they were involuntary victims of scientific cruelty.”
Heart Surgery and Alzheimer’s Disease
As a direct result of animal research, new surgical skills have been developed to open arteries blocked by cholesterol deposits, thus preventing many heart attacks—the leading cause of death in the Western world. By experimenting first on animals, doctors learn how to remove successfully massive tumors from the human brain and reattach severed limbs—arms, legs, hands, and fingers. Dr. Michael DeBakey, who performed the first successful coronary artery bypass, said: “In my own field of clinical investigation, virtually every pioneering development in cardiovascular surgery was based on animal experimentation.”
About Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Zaven Khachaturian of the U.S. National Institute of Aging said: “Eight years ago, we were at ground zero. There has been incredible progress in Alzheimer’s research because of our investment in basic research concerning brain functioning going back to the 1930s.” The bulk of the work involved animals, and the doctor noted that they hold the key to continued progress.
AIDS and Parkinson’s Disease
The most crucial search now, and one causing scientists and immunologists to work overtime, is for a vaccine to combat the dreadful disease AIDS, which some experts estimate will kill by 1991 about 200,000 people in the United States alone. In 1985 scientists at the New England Regional Primate Center succeeded in isolating the STLV-3 virus (SAIDS, simian form of AIDS) in macaque monkeys and in introducing it in others. Said Dr. Norman Letvin, immunologist at the New England Regional Primate Center: “Now that the virus has been isolated, we have an animal model in which to develop vaccines for monkeys and for humans. It is possible to learn a great deal more from a very small number of animals in a controlled study than you would from observing hundreds of human AIDS patients.”
Doctors at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Atlanta’s Emory University were the first to demonstrate, through their studies with rhesus monkeys, the feasibility of implanting dopamine-producing tissue into the brain as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Since 1985 neurosurgeons have been performing the surgery on humans at Emory University Hospital. Doctors feel that this may lead to a breakthrough in finding a cure for the disease.
Man has turned to the animals in his quest for answers to perplexing questions about how to improve and sustain, even temporarily, his own imperfect life. However, the use of animals in medical research raises significant moral and ethical issues that are not easy to resolve.
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Animal Research—An Ancient Practice
THE widespread use of animals by doctors and scientists to understand the physiology of humans is not unique to this 20th century. Animals have been used in medical research for at least 2,000 years. In the third century B.C.E., in Alexandria, Egypt, records indicate that the philosopher and scientist Erasistratus used animals to study body functions and found them applicable to humans. In the fourth century, the noted Greek scientist Aristotle gathered through his study of animals valuable information regarding the structure and functioning of the human body. Five centuries later the Greek physician Galen used apes and pigs to prove his theory that veins carry blood rather than air.