Letters to the Editor

Animal Experimentation Is Ineffective and Unnecessary

In the Jan. 22 Commentary section of The Daily Campus, an editorial was published lauding UConn for its decision to discontinue David Waitzman's nonhuman primate research at the Farmington Health Center. While the piece acknowledged the most immediate methodological concerns that ultimately ended the project, the authors fail to recognize the decidedly problematic nature of research on non-human primates, and all non-human animals, in general. 

An abundance of evidence shows animal models to be poor predictors of human maladies and drug treatment. Further, accepting animal testing entails failing to recognize the moral and ethical implications that years of intensive research on non-human animals now presents - ones that threaten to trump the potency of frequently uncontested appeals to the scientific efficacy of animal research.

The scientific community includes many researchers who not only question the ethical nature of animal experiments, but their validity altogether. For example, a literature review of over 2,000 scholarly articles that was recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (296:14, 2006) found that of the 76 animal studies identified, only eight were successfully replicated in humans and led to a therapy being subsequently approved for human use.  Similarly, a December 2006 literature review article published in the British Medical Journal (Dec 2006) reported that "many studies in animal models are of poor methodological quality" and that "lack of concordance between animal experiments and clinical trials may be due to … the failure of animal models to adequately represent human disease."  These results, of course, do not account for the plethora of studies that fail and remain unpublished in perpetuity.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) estimate that for every 1,000 drugs that are tested on animals, only one reaches human clinical trials. Two salient examples of dangerous drugs that made it to human clinical trials were recently hot topics of discussion in mainstream media: TGN1412 and, more currently, Pfizer's torcetrapid.  Both were shown to be safe in animal models but ultimately led to deaths in human subjects. Of the drugs that make it to these human trials, only one in five are eventually approved by the FDA. That's a staggering failure rate of roughly 99.99 percent! And, adding insult to injury, the drugs that reach the shelves cause over 700,000 hospital visits (i.e. Vioxx, Paxil)  (AP, 10/17/06) and 100,000 deaths every year (JAMA, 279: 1200-5, 1216-7, 1998) making them the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S.  These data must not be taken lightly.

Echoing the above concerns, in January 2006, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt expressed the need to encourage earlier use of human drug trials  stating that, "Currently, nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies." Fundamental biochemical and genetic differences between species render animal models of human disorders futile.  In the specific case of non-human primates, witness the continued failure of researchers to find effective treatments or effectively identify the pathologies of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and stroke using monkeys as models.  In the case of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis, despite pouring billions into animal research, effective treatments for these have arisen from non-animal in vitro and in silico methods.  There is a battery of such non-animal and human-based tests that provides us with reliable information that can be reliably and safely extrapolated to the clinic.

So, when researchers claim, as they invariably will, that they have happened upon, via animal experimentation, some isolated scientific breakthrough that is of direct relevance to human health, it is important to remember that the overwhelmingly majority of such studies fail and they will most certainly not tell you about all of those.

Animal research is not essential as many scientists commonly espouse.  In fact, the use of animal models represents a conscious decision to engage in an enterprise that is both ethically and scientifically at odds with what empirical data and common sense would have us believe.

In a 2005 Nature piece titled "Natural Symmetry," Gay Bradshaw and Barbara Finlay raised the issue of what they called unidirectional inference.

That is, given the wealth of rich, empirical data that scientists have accrued about the interspecies continuity of behavior, psychology, physiology and emotion, serious consideration must now be given to deconstructing the arbitrary wall that science has continually erected between animals, human and non. What scientists have found is that amongst all of these similarities there exist no morally relevant differences between species that would justify the subjugation of nonhuman animals in biomedical research any more than it would, say, justify the forcible use of orphaned babies in biomedical research. If, as we continually discover, human and many non-animals suffer and experience the psychological and physical effects of pain in similar ways, it is therefore morally unacceptable to inflict physical violence, whether in a lab or factory farm, upon either.

Finally, while scientists who advocate for the use of non-animal models are marginalized and animal rights activists are villified, who will protect us and our non-human brothers and sisters against, as Sarah Wolfensohn put it in a recent Nature piece, the "over-zealous scientists who are single-mindedly pursuing their scientific goal" with little regard for the advancement of ethical, useful medicine?

-Justin Goodman