Science teaches us to always ask questions.
An answer should never be accepted unless there is abundant evidence to prove its veracity.
This very principle has guided the scientific process through generations of research. It was this principle that caused me to rethink and ultimately repudiate my nearly two decades in animal research.
I started doing animal research, like so many of my colleagues, with the presumption that my research was somehow going to save lives.
I was uncomfortable with using animals to simulate human conditions, but I believed the benefits outweighed the harm that I was causing to the animals. I believed that as a veterinarian, I would be best able to understand the animal condition and provide the best care possible.
There were many proud moments in those years. I had a tremendous sense of accomplishment after successfully defending my dissertation.
Whenever I worked with the many engineers and surgeons, as they developed artificial organs, I felt as if I were on the very edge of medical advancement.
The first time I saw someone who was alive thanks to an artificial heart that I had helped test still remains one of best moments in my career.
In the beginning, there was a scientific question: How could the animal model be improved to better simulate the human condition?
Again, I believed that as a veterinarian, I would best be able to understand how to create a disease in the animal that would sufficiently mimic the human disease, without unduly harming the animal.
I carefully monitored and treated the animals to minimize any pain. I did what I could to improve their conditions.
In retrospect, I was fooling myself. The similarities between a human disease and an artificially manufactured animal disease are akin to a plastic lawn flamingo and the real bird; they are both pink, but any closer examination reveals how truly different they are.
Then came the realization that no amount of improvement and no amount of transformation could ever make an animal disease model be anything but the palest reflection of the human condition.
It was at that moment that I was able to step back and understand how animal research has misinformed medicine. By focusing on disease models that look similar, but are very different, science has forgotten to ask the questions.
Those questions necessarily make us uncomfortable. Any time we are forced to consider that our assumptions are wrong, it is difficult.
Animal research is built on a pyramid of assumptions. It is assumed that if humans and animals have the same gene, it has the same triggers and same actions.
It is assumed that artificially created heart failure in a dog will inform our ability to manage heart failure in people.
It is assumed that when a rat becomes diabetic after being fed a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet, it can be used to improve our ability to treat the condition in people.
At first glance, all of those seem reasonable.
Each describes an animal model that is being used to test new human therapies.
Each of those models, and every other artificially constructed animal model of human disease, are built upon so many assumptions that the end results only serve to mislead medical therapy.
If heart disease in humans develops over decades, why is it assumed that we will learn how to treat the condition based upon results of a dog that was normal one day and in heart failure the next?
If the therapies we use for Alzheimer’s disease are based upon the results of animal research, where drugs are injected into the animals to produce similar symptoms to the human condition, what exactly are we learning how to treat?
Does it make sense that our approach to diabetes is based upon animals that are inbred, have had multiple gene manipulations and are fed toxic levels of cholesterol and fat?
The answers to those questions and any others, related to the current use of animals in research, lead to the same conclusion.
Animal research is based upon so many flawed premises that it has only served to mislead and misinform medical progress.
The pyramid of assumptions in animal research does not have a solid base in scientific fact; rather it has been built on a Ponzi scheme of ever-increasing conjecture and chance.
Human beings have near-infinite creativity in solving problems. We should not be wasting it on the stifling approach to medical breakthroughs that animal research presents us.
Kenneth Litwak is a former laboratory animal veterinarian. He is currently on the staff of the US nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, based in Washington.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS