In The Name of Science: Issues in Responsible Animal Experimentation (review)

In the Name of Science provides a useful discussion of the contemporary animal experimentation controversy, encompassing moral and practical issues that arise in using animals in the laboratory. Unlike many engaged in the debate, Orlans stakes a claim to the middle ground, positioning herself between the extremists who argue that animal experimentation is either wholly beneficial or wholly evil. As a medical researcher in the 1950s, she was disturbed by the disregard for animal welfare and animal life that she witnessed in student science projects. By her own account, she was equally dismayed by the harsh reaction she received from fellow scientists when she advocated limits on the use of animals in school science projects. Her experiences in both research and reform inform the book.

Orlans begins with an introductory chapter on the early days of institutionalized animal experimentation. Relying extensively on secondary sources, she recounts some of the popular responses to physiological experiments conducted by François Magendie and Claude Bernard, and, briefly, the events leading to the passage in 1876 of the Cruelty to Animals Act in Great Britain. Although she offers little that is new in this account, historians of science and medicine may find interesting her characterizations of the historical explanations for the nineteenth-century treatment of experimental animals offered by such notable physiologist-historians as J. M. D. Olmsted (a biographer of Magendie) and A. Clifford Barger (a biographer of Walter Bradford Cannon). Orlans cites, for example, the “unconvincing defense” that Barger delivered at an Upjohn conference in Michigan in 1985, where he insisted that the authors of the 1873 Handbook for the Physiologists, edited by John Burdon Sanderson, “forgot” to mention that anesthetics should be used in animal experiments (p. 16). She does not discuss the reasons why Barger would offer such a defense, nor does she specify precisely how his assessment was unpersuasive. The incident and its discussion in the book serve, however, to illustrate the extent to which the history of animal experimentation remains highly contested.

After her account of the 1876 Act, Orlans jumps to much more recent arguments about the morality of using animals for experimentation. In addition to outlining the views of many of the major participants in the philosophical discussion over animal rights and speciesism, she analyzes in an even-handed way some of the legislative battles over animal experimentation and the strategies developed by both the proresearch community and the animal welfare movement. She devotes several chapters to the regulatory mechanisms established to monitor animal welfare and minimize animal suffering. In particular, she focuses on the working of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUC) mandated by the 1985 amendments to the Animal Welfare Act. Modeled on institutional review boards created to review experimental protocols involving human subjects, these committees, as she emphasizes, presented new challenges for the research community. Although the conditions of animal procurement and maintenance had been regulated by federal law since 1966, the evaluation of experimental procedures had not been subject to review. Orlans explores some features of the novel terrain encountered by these newly mandated committees, including the long-troubling issue of pain assessment in animals and the political implications of the requirement that a community member (unaffiliated with the institution) be appointed to serve. The analysis of these institutional animal use committees is a constructive contribution to understanding how federal policy influences the conduct of medical research. In the end, Orlans succeeds in finding some middle ground where the issues raised by animal experimentation can be thoughtfully examined.