The Effectiveness of Animal Experimentation in Scientific Exploration

 Annually, 115 million animals are used worldwide in experiments. These include a wide variety of field testing, such as biomedical, behavioral, and cognitive research, along with so many others. However, it is becoming more and more questionable how reliable and effective this mode of scientific research is. In this mini-lecture, I will specifically focus on the effectiveness of animal experimentation regarding scientific exploration.

Science should be evidence-based, but animal experimentation as a means of informing human well-being isn’t held to this standard.

For example, humans with diseases aren’t living in cages and exposed to experimental drugs and procedures with no conceptual understanding of their situation. Human diseases are usually artificially induced into animals, but the immense difficulty in producing anything approaching the intricacy of human diseases in animal models limits their usefulness. And with that, it is just as difficult to produce reliable outcomes and these outcomes can cause human harm.

Take, for example, Nonhuman primates, or NHPs. They are used instead of mice and other traditional experimental animals because it is proposed that they will wbetter simulate human results. So, in 2006 mice, rabbits, rats, and NHPs were given TGN 1412, an immunomodulatory drug, which is a type of drug that strengthens your immune cells to help attack cancer cells, which produced no undesirable effects. And additionally, NHPs were given 500 times the human dose for four consecutive weeks and none of these NHPs produced any ill effects. However, when it was given to 6 human volunteers, it has the opposite effect. Minutes after injection, all of the volunteers had a severe adverse reaction which essentially led to systemic organ failure.* This is not an isolated event. Events such as these demonstrate why it logically makes sense that NHPs and other species are used, but are in actuality poor models for supplying clinical evidence that would be useful to human well-being.

However, it is also worth noting that by the means of science, biologically, there is only a degree of difference between us and them, and it is also recognized that most animals are conscious, feel pain, and undergo the experience of suffering, which are the most profound similarities between humans and non-human animals.

Because the truth is, animal experimentation suffers from a dilemma of internal logic. It attempts to unify two contradictory ideas:

Either animals are not like us, as we don’t use humans instead for these animal-based experiments, and thus there is no basis for carrying out these experiments to conclude any reliable findings that would lead us to the conclusive evidence regarding the human condition; or else they are like us, our fellow beings, as they are used to mimic the human form, in which case we should not carry on with these experiments as we would find them abhorrent to carry out on humans.

But science doesn’t have to stop because animal experimentation is no longer a suitable option for scientific research. There are so many examples of human-based technologies that are increasingly becoming better alternatives for live animal testing, such as human organs grown in the lab, human organs on a chip, and cognitive computing technologies, all of which can be our future.

The goal of science is admirable; it can’t be denied the incontestable virtues and advantages of improving the health and longevity of human beings, yet it tainted by the persistent devaluation of animals that are commonly non-representative of human disease.

Science has the potential to move in a direction that is efficient, effective, and ethical.

Akhtar, Aysha. “The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation.” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics : CQ : the International Journal of Healthcare Ethics Committees, Cambridge University Press, Oct. 2015, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594046/. 

Ricard, Matthieu, and Chödzin Sherab. A Plea for the Animals: the Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion. Shambhala, 2017. 

Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. The Bodley Head, 2015. 

J;, Bailey. “An Assessment of the Role of Chimpanzees in AIDS Vaccine Research.” Alternatives to Laboratory Animals : ATLA, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Sept. 2008, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18826331/. 

RJ;, Hogan. “Are Nonhuman Primates Good Models for SARS?” PLoS Medicine, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Sept. 2006, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17002511/.