As a child I was always interested in animals and wildlife.
I joined this biology club, and with this biology club I had the opportunity to observe a lot of
animals and their wild habitat. But there's also opportunities for us to work in the lab.
The curiosity of a young mind wanting to see what's inside of an animal,
that's what kind of drew me in. To be able to see the inside you have to dissect them, and then I
happened to have the skill set to dissect. And as a young kid, when you're being praised, "Oh,
you're so good at dissecting animals," and the surgical skills and all that, you sort of think
that, okay, this is something that's my calling. Like that is something that I should be doing for
my career, so that's how I went into the field of biology. And then after I graduated from college,
I decided to pursue my PhD degree and I flew all the way across the globe
to the United States. It was exciting at the time because it was like, oh I got into this program,
I'm gonna be studying these things, the dream of my life, then the heavy school work kind of took
my mind away from missing my friends and family. It was quite intense the first couple years.
I was studying cardiovascular diseases and the relationship between high-fat diet and heart
failure, so what we did is we fed rats a saturated high fat diet and then we surgically induced
heart failure in them by ligating an artery in their heart, inducing heart attack. Basically
my findings are only true in rats but not in humans, and this opens up a big question: why
are we doing this? Why are we using rats? And so I went to my thesis advisor, and then they were not
fazed by it. I went digging even more to find out that actually this is not an insulated incidence,
most of the animal studies do not reflect human biology, human physiology.
So much so that 95 percent of the time when a drug is test safe and effective in animals, it
turns out not to be true in humans. So 95 percent of the time the drugs fail in clinical trials,
and all these animal testing that we've been doing is just, I don't know for what.
And that's when I got like, really uncomfortable with my study, and then I brought out this, this
problem to so many people and they're just like, this is just how how we do science. I was like no,
you know, I flew all the way here to study science. This is not what I was expecting.
It was amazing to get the letter to say I was accepted into the Neuroscience PhD Program. I
mean it was not something I ever thought could happen. I was the first person in my family
to go to college, to graduate from college, and the thought that I would be one day Dr.
Emily and studying neuroscience, which just sounds so fancy, you know, going in every day to the lab,
I just felt really important. I felt like, you know, science was this kind of academia, kind of
this ivory tower, and so and I thought, you know, this was kind of something okay. There's these are
important experiments and we'll use a few animals here and there, but it's for the good of science.
When we were we were doing all this I thought well, this is important, It's regulated,
you know? You hear that from people who defend animal experimentation a lot, how highly regulated
it is, and all the hoops that you have to jump through and the rules that you have to follow.
I mean really when I got a chance to look at the big picture, the rules mean practically nothing.
You can do anything you want to an animal as long as you write even the most speciesist
justification for it. It started to be really apparent to me that I wasn't doing this for
a greater good. Really I wasn't doing it to cure any diseases. It's okay, it's just me.
The point of me designing this experiment which would use animals was to get me my degree
and nothing else. To finish out so that I could be "Dr. Emily." I didn't think that that was worth
it. I didn't even think you know me being able to get my PhD was worth what I had taken. I mean
all an animal has is their life and I took that from around 200 animals. So I was like,
I can't keep doing this, it doesn't seem right to me. Something's wrong with the system.
So one professor said your job as a PhD student is to graduate.
It's not your job to think about this. I wasn't getting any real answers as to
how we can solve this problem with animal data not translating to humans, and I quickly realized that
all of them all of the senior scientists, they don't know the answer either. They've
just been trained in using animals so long that either they kid themselves into believing it,
or they just sort of hold on to this hope like it will help humans somehow, someday.
I was in the middle of my PhD degree and I had a dilemma. Should I keep on going? Should I leave?
I took several months to decide on this, and I still don't know if my decision was right,
but I decided to finish my degree because I thought with a PhD degree I will have a
louder voice and I will be able to help more animals. It was kind of a selfish decision,
and it required me to continue to kill. I think that's probably why I'm so emotional whenever
I talk about this, because I haven't forgiven myself and I don't know how I can get over this.
I think it's important to show people what animal testing does on your psychological well-being.
Human nature we're not supposed to kill, you know, it's just it's not natural. It's not right.
You know having done animal testing, it's something that you just know is wrong when
you're doing it. I mean you're holding an animal who you know didn't ask to be bred,
didn't ask to be put in a box and shipped to a lab, to be held in a cage, you know, injected
and killed, and then when you add on top of that the fact that it's something that we really could
be doing better, we could be devoting our resources instead to developing more human
relevant models if we weren't just so stuck in the past and in the habit. If we could overcome
that inertia, you know we could fast forward to more discoveries and better protect humans.
What I thought when I first started was that there would be a potential to have a really
big impact on human health so curing diseases, making people's lives better and healthier,
and I think what the general scientific community is coming to
to agree upon is that we're talking about human health in most cases so we want cells that come
from humans. We don't want to know what happens in a rat, we know we can cure cancer in rats.
Well it doesn't translate to humans. We can use non-animal methods that are actually better than
the animal testa that we've used in the past. They can be based on human cells,
human mechanisms of disease. We've advanced so much. The science has advanced so much.
We've learned so much over the past decades. We can do better and we should do better.
I feel kind of embarrassed to talk about what I did.
I have this feeling like somehow I should have known better,
even though at the time I really had no way of knowing better. You know everybody in charge was
doing all this too. The message that you get is if you even start to question
whether or not the experiment is right in the bigger sense,
like that's very taboo. You can't question if any science is good science. We're going to
learn something from an experiment even if it's poorly designed. We'll learn something from it,
and to me the fact that when someone's suffering because of that, you need to take a step back.
This is my dissertation. It's the culmination of all of those experiments
that I did in graduate school, and I just wrote a short dedication. I dedicate this
body of work to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice: over 200 animals, mice and rats were
euthanized in the direct collection of primary research presented in the following chapters.
My major professor actually refused to walk me at my graduation ceremony. He
said that he felt betrayed, and it would be awkward for him to walk me across the stage,
and so I ended up just not going. I just didn't want to make anybody uncomfortable.
Alright, thanks for the introduction. Thank you all for coming. At the end of the the thesis you
do your dissertation. That's like a written report, and then you do a public presentation
describing what you've done. I did my presentation, in the older version I had a line
that says, "To all the animals that I killed. I'm sorry. I was wrong."
But my thesis advisor at the time told me to scratch that line because he said
knowing my committee it will affect my chances of graduation if I put that line in.
I was like, it's really hurtful because
it's my dedication, and I want to say sorry for the animals. I didn't get to do that.
I don't see the animals in the cages just
some tools for gathering my data. I see them as individuals. They have emotions. They feel pain.
They suffer just the same way we do.
I knew I would never do animal testing again, so that was when I had to really rethink
what am I going to do with my life. I just spent, you know, a decade investing in this
science education where I thought I'm going to go out and change the world, and make a difference.
Here I am with with this degree and all this experience and now what am I gonna do with it?
The lab was on the 11th floor.
It's interesting to be back here now, 10 years later, and think about how much
has happened since then, and what I've learned and the experiences I've had.
It's a great feeling to to be able to reduce animal testing, replace animal testing, and also
protect human health and the environment. I mean, this is exactly why I got into science.
It's a win-win because I can save animals and do good science. It doesn't get better than that.
I've gotten many companies food and beverage companies to switch over and then they have a
policy in place now to say that they will not conduct, fund, or commission animal testing.
Just in the last year or so, the animals that I've saved has surpassed the animals
that I've killed, and that was rewarding for me. I kept a tally in an excel file my computer.
Every time I get a victory, I calculate how many animals that saved and I compare that against
my the animals I've killed for my thesis. I'm now in the net positive now, so it's getting better.
Now I am so proud of the work that I do.
I really get a chance to not only still do science, but I get to work at a policy level
with legislators and big decision makers and I'm really so proud of that.
I love my job so much, and I feel good. I feel like I'm going to be on the right side of history.