Transcriber: Sophie Brigant-Derrien Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
Earlier this year, there was an accident on a Pennsylvania highway.
A truck crashed, spilling its cargo all over the road
on a wintry day in freezing temperatures.
The contents were 100 monkeys.
They were bound for a laboratory in Florida.
The boxes they were in were strewn across the road,
and four monkeys escaped.
The escapees were eventually killed, ending their terrifying journey.
Those monkeys started their lives as free living macaques in Mauritius.
They were captured, flown to New York,
packed in a truck and headed for a laboratory.
Presumably, the survivors made it to the lab,
but it’s safe to say that the four who escaped and died in Pennsylvania
were the lucky ones.
How did we get here?
Why are we capturing monkeys,
separating them from their families and their social groups,
shipping them around the world like freight
so they can die in a laboratory?
Experimentation with non-human animals has a pretty long history.
Ancient Greek physicians going back to at least six BCE
were dissecting and vivisecting animals.
They wanted to know how the human body works,
but they were forbidden by taboo from cutting open humans,
even dead humans.
So there’s been recognition for thousands of years
that there is biological similarity between animals and humans,
and also that humans are just another species of animal.
In the 16th century,
the Flemish physician Vesalius realized
that some anatomical structures that existed in animals
were not found in humans.
And he made this discovery by dissecting human cadavers,
which was illegal and considered sacrilegious.
But his work led to more accurate descriptions of human anatomy
and laid the groundwork for modern comparative anatomy.
In the Renaissance, the scientist Francis Bacon
acknowledged in 1605 in his book The Advancement of Learning
that there were ethical concerns with human vivisection.
But, he said, we don’t have to give up on vivisection altogether,
because the dissection of beasts alive,
notwithstanding the differences of their parts,
may sufficiently satisfy our inquiry.
So 400 years ago, Bacon recognized that experimentation could be inhumane.
He recognized that there were differences between humans and other animals.
But, he said, animals are close enough.
Of course, experimentation with humans never went away.
Those who were considered less than human were always used in experiments.
Enslaved women in the U.S. were subjected to gynecological experiments
by the father of modern gynecology,
James Sims,
who operated on them without anesthesia.
Incarcerated persons were subjected to ghastly experiments
that burned their skin and poisoned their bodies
and infected them with diseases.
Institutionalized people, including the elderly and children,
were infected with viruses and injected with cancer cells.
Impoverished, uneducated black sharecroppers in Alabama
were subjected to a decades-long experiment
to see what untreated syphilis would do to them and to their families.
This was centuries after we already knew what syphilis did to human bodies,
and the experiment persisted for decades
after we already had effective treatments for syphilis.
During World War II, the Nazis experimented on internees,
infecting them with typhus, killing them with hypothermia, and much worse.
This was human supremacy in science:
the idea that some people were not fully and really human
and they didn’t matter morally;
they could be treated like animals.
You’ll often hear people say: I don’t want to be a guinea pig.
They don’t want to be treated
like a less than human experimental subject
who has no choice.
They don't want to be treated like an animal,
but guinea pigs don't like it either.
After World War II,
after revelations of atrocious injustice and exploitation of humans in research,
the world responded by enacting guidelines
that protected the vulnerable from the abuses of research.
These were manifestos,
documents like the Nuremberg Report and the Declaration of Helsinki.
Those very same documents, however,
gave rise to other documents,
including the Belmont Report, in the United States,
which laid the ethical foundations for the Common Rule,
which is the U.S. law that governs research with human subjects.
And those laws were enacted to provide stringent protections
for children, for infants and for prisoners.
So the 20th century brought revolutionary change
in the protection of human research subjects
against the worst abuses and exploitation of research.
But the burdens of protecting those humans
have largely been borne by non-human animals.
Some of those early research codes, those manifestos,
actually mandated research on animals
prior to ethical research with human subjects.
But today, unlike 400 years ago,
it’s well recognized that using animals as substitutes for humans
is really not close enough.
There’s a saying in biomedical research:
Mice lie and monkeys exaggerate.
In stroke research, they say:
Everything works in animals, but nothing works in people.
And both of those express a well-known problem
in biomedical research with using animals,
and that is that using animals fails more often than it works:
about 95% of the time.
More than 90% of the investigational new drugs that are tested in animals
and appear to be safe and effective in animals
turn out not to be safe or effective when they’re tested in humans.
95%, 90%, that is worse than chance.
That’s an astonishing rate of failure.
And it results in millions of animal lives
being thrown away every year.
And it also results in harms to humans
in the form of harms to human research subjects
and in delays and in lost opportunities
to make discoveries that advance and promote human health.
The use of animals as substitutes for humans
is not scientifically justified.
And we haven’t really progressed from Bacon’s claim 400 years ago
that animals are close enough.
Here’s an example.
In stroke research,
and stroke is the third leading cause of death
in industrialized nations,
there’s only been developed a single neuroprotective drug,
TPA, or the Clot Buster,
to treat strokes.
And this is despite thousands of experiments with animals
and hundreds of clinical trials in humans to discover better treatments.
And all of those failed.
And that failure is well-recognized;
it has been much studied and much discussed
by the stroke research community.
They know that the problem is the animals that they’re using.
And yet, animal research remains the norm in stroke research,
just as it is the norm across biomedical research.
And that norm is cemented in place by educational pathways
that reward and encourage animal research
and by a lucrative worldwide trade in genetically modified animals,
in animals bred for research, and animals that are captured,
like those monkeys who died in Pennsylvania.
A lot of people have an interest
in that animal research remaining the norm.
So we are stuck in this centuries-old model
when all the evidence is telling us it’s not really working.
Why is that?
Well, another norm: human supremacy.
And this is the idea that animal lives
are worth so little and have so little moral value
that we can use them as if they are mere disposable things,
like test tubes.
The latest figures for the numbers of animals that are used in the US
per year
is 797,000 animals,
and that number excludes rats, mice and fish,
who are not considered animals under federal regulations.
So the total is easily over a million animals per year
because mice and rats actually make up
the majority of the animals that are used in research.
So the lives of those million-plus animals are worth so little
that we can literally throw them away
and use them in research that is almost certain to fail.
Of course, failure is a part of science,
and we can expect that failures will happen along the way,
but failures that systematically and intentionally
cause suffering and death
when we know that the problem is the methods that we use,
that's both a scientific problem and a moral problem.
In 1979, Belmont made the radical claim
that justice should be at the forefront of research ethics,
and they framed justice
as the fair selection of research subjects.
It is unjust to exploit those who are already burdened and disadvantaged
by poverty, by captivity, by institutionalization,
by disability and sickness
simply because they are easily accessible and unable to defend their own rights.
It is unjust to select human-research subjects
based on convenience rather than on compelling scientific need.
And the really radical claim that it made
was that it’s unjust to use vulnerable humans,
even if it’s possible
that there will be benefits to other humans.
If we enacted this in the case of non-human animals,
if we extended this principle of justice
as the fair selection and the scientific selection of subjects,
then we would have to recognize
that animals are incredibly vulnerable to many of the same kinds of harms
that protected classes of humans can experience:
they’re captive, they’re powerless,
and they’re unable to assert their own rights against harm.
They’re subjected to things in the name of science
that it is illegal to do to humans,
like the intentional infliction of pain and permanent injury and death.
And we do this to millions of animals every year,
to mice and monkeys,
because, one, we can’t do it to humans
and, two, because animals are the easily available substitute.
These are reasons of convenience rather than reasons of scientific need.
So how do we move forward?
How do we recognize that animals are not disposable test tubes
and advance human health?
Well, first, we have to realize
that human health has not been advanced by animal research,
not nearly as much as could possibly justify
the millions of lives that we take every year.
In fact, as the stroke research case shows,
it's probably holding back scientific progress.
Yet funding heavily favors animal research
over the development of alternatives to animal research.
A fraction of 1% of National Institutes of Health funding
actually goes towards discovering and developing
human biology-based alternatives to using animals.
And despite that lack of money,
scientists have been developing human biology-based alternatives,
technologies like organs-on-a-chip and organoids,
that don’t harm humans and don’t harm animals
and have the potential to benefit human health
over methods that we know are not working
that we’ve been using for hundreds of years.
Imagine what we could do if we actually got serious
about ending the use of animals in biomedical research.
If we flipped that funding picture
and put most of our money into developing alternatives to science that doesn’t work,
and a small fraction of our money into methods
that we already know that are going to fail about 90% of the time.
So is human supremacy,
this idea that human lives matter so much more than animals,
that we can treat them as things and dispose of them at will,
even if there’s just the tiniest chance that it might benefit humans,
is that a justification for animal research?
It turns out that it isn’t.
It fails to justify animal research
because if we really valued human lives
and human health,
we would demand better and more effective research,
research that doesn't harm humans,
research that doesn’t treat human or animal lives as disposable,
rather than research that protects the status quo.
Thank you.