
I Was an Animal Experimenter - romefort
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/i-was-an-animal-experimenter/
======
jonchang
I can say with confidence that this sort of thing would never occur in a
modern research laboratory. Note that standards for ethical experimentation on
animals (including humans) hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s. A
couple of points here:

Any type of animal experimentation must be accompanied by an IACUC protocol
that is approved by a committee, typically at least 3 people, and usually
including a veterinarian, research scientists, and layperson. The protocol
justifies why using animals is necessary for the research and exactly how the
animals will be cared for during the experiments.

Performing surgery on live animals - You have to be trained in the procedure
by practicing on dead animals first. Any surgery that happens must be done
under anesthesia using approved chemicals. For example, in fishes and
amphibians, this is an anesthetic dose of MS-222.

Sacrificing animals - Typical standards require that the experimenter
sacrifice the animal quickly & humanely, using at least 2 methods (chemical
and physical) to ensure that the animal is not suffering due to a sublethal
dose of your chemical. Again for fishes, this is a lethal dose of MS-222
followed by either pithing or freezing. For rodents this is usually anesthesia
followed by cervical dislocation.

Experimental endpoints - You will not get your IACUC approved if you don't
have a way of dealing with your live animals after your experiment is over.
Simply killing them because you don't have money to keep them around is
absolutely forbidden. For fishes, they get released back into the ocean or
kept around for aquarium outreach purposes.

The issue of animal rights is an important one. For example I personally think
that the IACUC protocols don't go far enough. Nonvertebrate animals are
typically not covered by IACUC at all so this means that it is legally above
the board to vivisect slugs without anesthesia. Of course you might not think
that slugs deserve rights but this is a debate that needs to happen. In
particular many countries do not cover cephalopods (octopuses, squids, etc)
under their animal use laws..

~~~
marincounty
"Any surgery that happens must be done under anesthesia using approved
chemicals."

I had a girlfriend who was working on a some kind of graduate neuroscience
degree in the late 90's. She used to tell me stories about students, and
researchers killing/maiming animals in order to carry out their experiments.

Her lab job was to kill rats in the lab(adults, and babies). She would slam
their heads into a piece of granite. Some times multiple times. (btw--she had
horrid dexterity)

I asked her why they didn't administer some type of anesthetic--or kill the
animals humanely.

She told me they couldn't because chemicals might affect the brain, or body
chemistry when analyzing the tissues.

She told me endless stories about needless experiments on animals by students
and faculty. They were not doing cutting edge research. She even admitted a
lot of it was validating Current studies--so students could finish their
studies in order to get that advance degree.

I finally told her enough. She wasn't a bad person, just looking for the
respect a advance degree in neurobiology would bring her. She wanted respect,
and felt the degree would provide that.

She dropped out of the program for personal reasons(she couldn't keep up with
the studies mainly) and spent the next 10 years taking party drugs in San
Francisco. She is now a vegetarian.

I don't think anyone is regulating the treatment on campuses in the United
States? My nephew is taking a biology class at a little college in Los
Angeles. I asked them if they are still pithing frogs in order to basically
show the students the heart will beat once severed from the frog. He said they
are still doing this in freshman biology.

So, there are no regulations in the United States on the treatment rodents and
amphibians in schools and labs. I can state that with a fair amount of
confidence! (The school he dropped out of was a private liberal arts school
that accepted any kid who could come up with the tuition)

We need to, at the least, stop killing animals on campuses in order to teach
art student majors--biology and anatomy.

Years ago some Researcher put a plywood cover on his truck. He then filled the
truck with live piglets. He then went four wheel driving. He claimed to be
studying orthopedic injuries.

~~~
Thriptic
> Her lab job was to kill rats in the lab(adults, and babies). She would slam
> their heads into a piece of granite. Some times multiple times. (btw--she
> had horrid dexterity)

NO IACUC at any university or any veterinarian would approve this.

> Years ago some Researcher put a plywood cover on his truck. He then filled
> the truck with live piglets. He then went four wheel driving. He claimed to
> be studying orthopedic injuries.

If not illegal then, this would certainly be illegal now.

> She even admitted a lot of it was validating Current studies--so students
> could finish their studies in order to get that advance degree.

How is validation useless?

> So, there are no regulations in the United States on the treatment rodents
> and amphibians in schools and labs.

If anything there is TOO MUCH regulation. There are so many hoops you have to
jump through before you're allowed to do animal experiments that it's almost
ridiculous at this point in several institutions. I was on a team which
proposed an experiment in which we wanted to monitor the uptake of trace
quantities of known compounds and their derivatives in hair. The doses would
have been far below anything toxic and the only procedures were injection of
the compound and shaving the rodents while they were under anesthetic. This
experiment took WELL OVER A YEAR to make it through multiple animal welfare
committees and for investigators to get the required training; so long that we
ended up dropping the proposal all together.

Please also keep in mind that most experiments are being done on mice, animals
which people have no problem killing and attacking in their homes using brutal
techniques (sticky traps, terrible poisons, spring loaded traps) or feeding to
their caged pets while still alive with no moral qualms whatsoever.

~~~
logfromblammo
I recently attended a parents' meeting for the elementary school science fair.
If the 5th-grade students were doing an experiment that involved animals, they
had to fill out a stack of forms and collect the signature of a vet. If the
experiment involved humans-- _even if that involvement was as simple as
answering a question_ \-- _each_ human participant had to sign a form.

My kid, who also attended, said, "I'm doing my experiment on plants."

Elementary school science fair! If you want to condition your own dog to
salivate at the sound of a bell, you need to fill out additional paperwork and
get your vet to approve. I can only imagine what load of crap university
scientists have to wade through to get any research done.

~~~
tomjen3
Annoying? Likely, but once you have seen the abuses that have taken place over
the last 50 years you will see why that is necessary.

~~~
logfromblammo
You don't need a D.V.M. to know what animal cruelty is, and you don't need a
Ph.D. to determine whether the human participation in your experiment is
unethical.

We don't need more gatekeepers dictating morality to us.

The abuses demand oversight, it is true. But that oversight does not require
professional qualifications. Something that shocks the conscience of a Nobel
laureate will likely also shock the conscience of high-school dropouts. The
very same peer jury system that is capable of condemning a criminal human to
state execution or awarding millions of dollars in civil restitution can
certainly determine whether a method of sacrificing research animals to
science is acceptable or not.

The same public concerns that led to the retrofit of commercial
slaughterhouses with more humane Grandin animal handling systems can be
applied to research animals. My suggestion is this: for any given experiment
that involves potential harm or injury to animals, assemble a randomized,
unbiased, volunteer jury of at least 12 people. Explain to them the goals of
the experiment and the protocols, and the proposed animal involvement. If no
more than 25% of the jury objects, the experiment may begin immediately.
Otherwise, rewrite the protocols and try again. Ethics approval could take
days instead of months.

------
jobvandervoort
I used to do animal experiments and my partner still does them daily. We both
had to kill (or as they say in science -sacrifice) the animals ourselves when
necessary.

There is a very large body of research that couldn't and can't be done without
animal experiments. Both in fundamental and clinical sciences.

However, what I do see is a movement away from usage of macaques towards a
higher usage of experiments using flies. Rodents are fundamental in
neuroscience and will stay that for a while, as they are both easy to
genetically modify and have reasonably sized brain and organs that is
comparable to ours.

I've seen several people, PhD students, but also top-level scientists, moving
away from using animals or mammals for their experiments because of the same
realization that the author had. It's important that we realize what we are
doing to the animals, but the end of animal experimentation is not yet in
sight.

------
Luc
Reading 'Animals Like Us' by Mark Rowlands made me realize that it is utterly
reasonable to abstain from harming animals. There is a string of logic,
starting from very basic principles of ethics, that makes it the rational
thing to do (if you accept the basic principles).

It's a sort of ethical math. Most people don't do the math because it's not
obvious that some thought is needed, instead going with their gut feeling.

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/1859843867/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1859843867/)

~~~
MrDosu
You are not going to get a vaccination against HIV for example without animal
experimentation at the current state of science.

My parents work in the field and I have worked at a few labs where they do
animal experimentation. It's not as bad as the press makes it out to be.
People don't work around animals their entire lives without caring about them.

~~~
Luc
Rowlands does a good job of dealing with these two arguments in his book. Like
I said, I think it takes careful thinking, and a book is a good conduit for
that.

------
nosefrog
100 years from now, we will look back on the experiments performed on nonhuman
animals with the same disgust that we have for the experiments performed on
humans by the Nazis.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." \-
Martin Luther King Jr.

~~~
BringTheTanks
You have a somewhat naive view about how our moral compass moves as a straight
lines from bad to good.

Before the Nazis performed experiments on humans, it _was_ considered horrible
to perform experiments on humans.

What Nazis had that allowed them to perform experiments on humans was a carte
blanche to do whatever they want by contemporary law, and the ideology that
those human beings were in fact "inferior" human beings.

I don't know if you eat fish, chicken and so on, but probably you don't think
of yourself as a Nazi if you would. Because you don't consider a chicken at
the same level as a human. And this gives you carte blanche to have chicken
for dinner and feel absolutely no remorse.

Is it right or wrong? I don't pass judgment. I know all beings have a sense of
self and we shouldn't cause pain and take a life for no reason, yet, killing
each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life.

I know that if we consider life sacrosanct and we eat chicken fingers at
Chipotle, we need ideology to justify our actions, and so we'll consider
animals inferior. If we consider them inferior, they'll be target for
experiments, because medical science will continue to evolve.

Depending on how our culture evolves, the moral compass may move in an
entirely different direction, where we stop regarding life of any kind as so
precious, even human. We'll acknowledge how replaceable we are, and our
mortality. This would enable full legalization of humane practices like
assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the
doors _again_ for experimenting _on humans_ to move medicine forward.

You never know.

~~~
randomsearch
"yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life"

I'm not sure what "the cycle of life" is, but just because something may be
present elsewhere in the animal kingdom does not mean we should replicate it
or justify our actions through it.

~~~
afarrell
But does it mean we should be willing to lock someone else in a cage or ruin
their livelihood for doing so?

------
nailer
> That powerful talk made me realize that animals, like us, are sentient
> beings who have intelligence and experience fear and pain.

Well yes, we're animals. I don't understand why adults still think of humans
as somehow being not animals.

~~~
Netcob
Especially the most basic and primitive emotions/sensations that influence our
behavior very directly, like pain or panic.

I get how fish might not experience "culture shock", "weltschmerz" or "ennui",
but most of the things we feel every day aren't special at all.

~~~
pvaldes
I cant see a fish bored perfectly, or experiencing culture shock. Why not?. A
lot of people fall in this trap with fishes. "Well, goldfishes are dumb, and
goldfishes are fishes, therefore fishes are dumb".

To reduce the more diverse type of vertebrates, with more than 30.000 extant
species, to the behaviour of a goldfish put in a matchbox of water is extreme
oversimplification. Some fishes are very intelligent in fact. Not like an
human but much more than a mice or a chicken for sure. Sadly the 90% of
philosophers in history just didn't understand what type of creature is a fish
and the derived reasoning about those had lead to funny dead ends.

But the real problem is that "to be able to feel pain or not" or "to live in
water or not" are just subjective lines (Saving lion, moral act. Saving tuna,
maybe tomorrow, tunas are dumb). We could also create different laws for vegan
species (cow: moral, dog: amoral), or for species that can feel love and care
for his descendants (butterfly: amoral, spider: a wonderfully moral creature),
or that can feel electromagnetic fields, or that have four extremities with 5
fingers at the end (human good, spider and horses amoral) or that can live
longer and pacific lives (humans so-so, sequoia great). The rules of this game
are totally artificial from the start.

------
kingkawn
I did animal research for a few months before I couldn't take it anymore. The
standards are for PR, are hardly enforced, and nobody cares beyond not looking
bad. I don't care what they say they do, if they are taking the initial step
of choosing to use animals theyre a poor choice for self-enforcement of animal
welfare.

------
pvaldes
Puppet activists playing god and destroying the lives of the young researchers
whereas everybody treat them as the great hero of the week. Is a problem, yes.
To be young an naive and doing silly things trying to impress your crush is
understandable and even likeable. But, when your love plan involves to
'morally torture' or destroy lives of other young girls and guys, and millions
of dollars in stuff, papers should adopt a more responsible point of view.

The type of activism that repeat again and again old dated facts as if were
current, is mostly a way to climb up socially at any cost, and to find comfort
in the group. No intelligent people can argue that to give a expensive dinner
of mouses to the wild cats equals to love or improve the life of those mouses.
The peaceful and intelligent lab rats set free ceremoniously, with be soon
bitten, chased away and most of them will be ripped in pieces for the wild
rats before 24 h. The survivors will last a couple of more miserable days
terrified, hungry, bleeding and isolated of their families. This is cruel for
a social animal, and not much different to stealing a lap dog from this friend
owners and house and releasing it alone in the territory of a wolf pack to be
teared apart and eated.

Experimentation is mostly a tool to achieve something that a lot of good
people disperately need as soon as possible. To make a taboo of this tool will
not solve much of our real problems and probably will create a huge amount of
human pain.

Labs should have sticks with " _Is the Thalidomide, stupid_ " printed in
uppercases, and those type of articles should probably be answered also with
the same slogan.

~~~
Luc
> Labs should have sticks with "Is the Talidomide, stupid" printed in
> uppercases, and those type of articles should probably be answered also with
> the same slogan.

This made me smirk, because Thalidomide could be the poster child for the
ineffectiveness of animal testing.

~~~
dhmholley
And unfortunately it often is used that way, by people who don't understand
that animal testing would have caught the birth defects had it been tested on
pregnant animals (advocating, if anything, for more thorough animal testing,
not for animal testing's ineffectiveness). Of course people aren't interested
in this, they're just after the conclusion that supports their preconceived
ideas.

~~~
Luc
It was tested extensively on animals before release, and even after it was
suspected of causing deformities, tests on pregnant dogs, cats, monkeys,
hamsters and chickens were done and failed to produce deformities.

Eventually they showed up in a particular strain of rabbits.

But hey, that was long ago.

~~~
dhmholley
If you have some citations for that I'd be interested in reading them, because
I've never heard that before.

~~~
Luc
I have only scanned it, but probably in here:
[http://jpsl.org/archives/history-and-implications-testing-
th...](http://jpsl.org/archives/history-and-implications-testing-thalidomide-
animals/)

"Lasagna [157] commented that once a chemical is known to cause birth defects
in humans, an animal species or strain can usually be found that will
replicate the response, but that this is not the same as prospectively
predicting this response."

~~~
pvaldes
> tests were done and failed to produce deformities.

Lucey and Behrman. 1963. Thalidomide: effect upon pregnancy in the rhesus
monkey. Science 139:1295-1296.

Hendrickx, Axelrod and Clayborn. 1966. 'Thalidomide' syndrome in baboons.
Nature 210 (5039):958-959.

 _" Delahunt and Lassen induced typically malformed foetuses in four of seven
pregnant Cynomolgus monkeys which were treated after implantation had already
occurred"_

Hendrickx, A. G., and L. Newman. 1973. Appendicular skeletal and visceral
malformations induced by thalidomide in bonnet monkeys. Teratology 7
(2):151-159. doi:10.1002/tera.1420070206.

Please note the year of the articles. The studies with monkeys were made
_after_ the drug was distributed in many countries and thousands of babies
without legs and arms started to born, not before.

~~~
Luc
Yes, people kept on doing animal test after the deformities were confirmed on
rabbits. That just makes it more fucked up, not less.

~~~
pvaldes
You are not understanding the situation.

Let suposse that a mass murder kills 5000 babies, and mutilates other 5000.
There will be a trial, right?, this is serious stuff. A complex trial with
thousands of victims waiting for justice.

Will the lawyer of the victims, jump in this legal battlefield like going for
a picnic, and show triumphant their one and only proof?("rabbits, didn't feel
the need to investigate further because science is evil").

Will someone tell the police, "stop doing interviews, replicating the crime
scene, looking for witness, asking the experts, we have one hint!. Dismiss the
other proofs"?

Do you understand know, why a lot of work and experiments have to be done?
Because there was dozens of trials in 46 countries and you need to know the
truth without the slightest shadow of a doubt.

~~~
pvaldes
s/know/now/

------
return0
I think modern lab standards are not nearly as horrible. The larger problem is
not the harsh treatment, but the huge number of animals that are killed in
labs nowadays. There is the prevalent push to publish more and more often,
which requires more and more animals in order to report minute results. Rarely
do researchers analyze their experiment data to exhaustion; they'd rather run
a new experiment than try to figure it out from existing data. If we want to
use animals less, we need 1) public availability of all experimental data and
2) more and better computational models that take the bottom-up approach to
studying organisms and the brain. Until then we 'll keep piling up dead
animals with reckless abandon.

------
howling
I always wonder why people feel so upset over millions of animals being
experimented every year when we kill and eat billions of animals every day.

~~~
TheCondor
There is a giant difference between feeding some and some of the "behavioral"
experiments mentioned in the article.

Why do cats play with mice? Are cats evil?

~~~
saint_fiasco
To be fair, factory farming is pretty awful.

------
sam____
If that is Paul's belief system, he sold it out awfully quickly because he was
"fascinated by one class lab". He is now "astonished that the daily grind of
depriving, shocking and killing these animals did not move me to leave my
job." He quit because he lost interest and wanted to be a programmer, stealing
a lab coat in the process...

I don't mean to be too harsh, but the thing that comes through loudest to me
is that, by his own measure, Paul may be a bad person.

------
Lorento
Animals suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale.
If you're really against animal suffering and dying then a far bigger problem
is the existence of wild animals with peak populations, unreliable food
supplies, predators, fights and disease. Stopping animal research is like
trying to stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a
difference but you're not .

~~~
janxgeist
I think this is a weak argument, because you could just as well use it to
argue for conducting these experiments on humans:

Humans suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale.
If you're really against human suffering and dying then a far bigger problem
is the existence of humans with peak populations, unreliable food supplies,
murderers, fights and disease. Stopping research on humans is like trying to
stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a difference
but you're not.

~~~
XorNot
This is not the slamdunk you think it is. If you could ensure the human
population lived to exactly 70 years old and didn't suffer during that time,
there is a very fair argument it would be a moral imperative to implement this
social order since it would be a massive improvement over the current state of
world affairs.

Scale down that number to find where you think the line is.

~~~
janxgeist
I'm not sure I understand you correctly: are you saying that animal
experiments would be ethical if they removed all suffering for humans?

------
canvia
The train of thought that has me leaning towards becoming vegetarian is along
the lines of:

If an advanced alien species came to Earth, how would I want them to treat
humans? How about in the case that they are advanced to a level that comparing
their abilities and technology to humans would be the same as comparing human
technology and abilities to that of birds or dogs or cows?

Would I want them to dismiss our primitive (from their perspective) nests as
the work of an unintelligent beast? Would I want them to corral us into pens
and feed us fattening foods before harvesting our bodies? Would I want them to
feed us hormones and genetically modify our bodies to produce more milk or
grow larger muscles for consumption? Would I want them to breed the outliers
of our species to create extremely large and extremely small "pure-breeds" of
humans as a novelty? Would I want them to dismiss our primitive verbal
communication as nothing more than cheerful song and make no attempt at all to
understand what we are trying to express?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Hey! Then they would be just like humans! We do all of that.

------
reasonattlm
Animal experimentation is horrible and terrible. Even in the most ethical of
studies suffering is inflicted upon animals that otherwise would not have
happened; entire genotypes of animals doomed to additional suffering have been
bred in some cases. But the alternative is far worse: to not perform these
animal studies, or rather for some privileged group to use force to prevent
others from performing such studies, and so bring progress in medicine to a
grinding halt. Without animal studies there would be no new meaningful
advances in medical science. It is a harsh and unpleasant aspect of the human
condition that forcing suffering upon animals in the course of scientific
studies is necessary to advance both human and veterinary medicine. A few
suffer for the benefit of many - an equation that should make any sane and
compassionate person uncomfortable.

Animal studies are even required to refine the science needed to move beyond
animal studies. Ethics and morality aside, studies employing animals are
expensive and time-consuming. Given the choice, scientists would much rather
experiment on cells in a dish, or on slabs of unfeeling cultured tissue, or
upon simulations of animals, if these methods would generate results of the
same quality.

In comparison to what might be and what is possible, we live in a barbaric age
of suffering, war, death, and sundry other horrors that we like to keep behind
the curtains and out of the mind's eye. But barbaric as it is, this age is far
better than the past by all such measures. We no longer absolutely, definitely
need to slaughter animals for food to sustain the populace, for example, and
rates of violence between humans are far lower than in the pre-modern era of
tribes and universal poverty. The option stands open today for a society of
vegetarians: it is practical from a technological and economic standpoint.
That we have not moved rapidly in that direction is our shame, and our
descendants will look back on us as savages for this and many other reasons.

Those people who criticize and take action against the use of animals in
medical research should first look to their diets, and then to the practice of
farming animals. Vast and expansive animal suffering is caused in the name of
putting meat into the marketplace - greater many times over each month than in
all the animal experiments in modern history. Persuade the omnivores of the
human race to relinquish their participation in the meat market before
savaging the medical science that will benefit both man and beast.

In short, the human condition is a rotted, cloying swamp, but we're closer to
the edge than we were - no longer up to our necks in it, we now have the
luxury of finding more of our surroundings to be disgusting and primitive. The
way out to solid ground is forward, through more of the same, until our
biotechnology becomes good enough to do away with the suffering we must
inflict upon animals in order to build better medicine. Perhaps along the way,
societies will arise whose members also reject the needless suffering we
presently choose to inflict upon animals in order to eat the same diet as our
ancestors.

------
afarrell
If we are to devote resources to preventing humans from assaulting non-humans,
should we also devote resources to preventing non-humans from assaulting each
other?

------
SunShiranui
It is paywalled.

~~~
danieldk
With any such article: Google it, and you can read it without paying.

