The Ethics of Animal Research: Exploring the Controversy

2 Ethics and Animal Research

2 Ethics and Animal Research Bernard E. Rollin Historically, at least in the United States, animal research was not perceived as an ethical issue by the research community. Indeed, anyone raising questions about animal research tended to be stigmatized as an anti-vivisectionist; a misanthrope preferring animals to people; an ingrate not valuing the contributions of biomedical science to human health and well-being. In fact, I personally received a full barrage of such charges when I was working to draft and promote through Congress what in 1985 became U.S. federal law protecting laboratory animals. In a 1982 New England Journal of Medicine review of my book arguing for elevating the moral status of animals and codifying that status into law for laboratory animals, I was compared to a “Nazi” and a “lab trasher” (Visscher 1982). My own experience with being vilified as “anti-science” when supporting these laws was reflected in societal debate on animal research. (For the record, I am far from anti-science and, in fact, hold academic appointments in two science departments.) While animal research abolitionists were arguing that such research produced “no benefits” for humans, the research community adopted an equally extreme posture. The Foundation for Biomedical Research, for example, produced a film entitled Will I Be All Right, Doctor? The query in the title, uttered by a frightened child before undergoing surgery, is answered, in essence, by the physician as “Yes, you will be all right if these anti-vivisectionist extremists leave us alone to do what we need to do with our animals.” So outrageously extreme was this film that at its premiere before a putatively friendly audience of laboratory animal veterinarians (which I attended), the only comment came from a veterinarian who affirmed that “I am ashamed to be associated with something pitched lower than the worst anti-vivisectionist propaganda.” Such responses by researchers, in fact, go back to the writings of famed physiologist Walter Cannon, in the early twentieth century. In a background note to a collection of Cannon’s writings, the editor points out 20 Chapter 2 that “the most vocal defenders of vivisection often argued against all forms of outside interference in medical education and research. They opposed not only the abolition of the use of animals, but even its regulation, maintaining that any concession on their part would lead to dire consequences for medical science” (American Philosophical Society 2003). In all fairness, the antivivisectionists were not very much more conceptually or morally sophisticated. One day after I received the New England Journal of Medicine review of my book, the same book was reviewed by abolitionists, where I was castigated for “accepting the reality of science” and scolded for proposing regulations that would result in short-term improvements for animals, thereby retarding the extinction of animal research! The failure of the research community to engage animal research as a rational ethical issue prior to the passage of our laws in 1985 was manifest . Between 1975 and 1985, I fruitlessly searched scientific journals for reasoned discussions defending invasive research on animals and found none. What I did find were variations on the theme orchestrated in the film described earlier. To what can we attribute this blind spot in what is an otherwise sophisticated and informed community? In a number of publications, I have described what I call “scientific ideology,” the set of basic, uncriticized assumptions presuppositional to twentieth-century science (Rollin 2006). Ideologies operate in many different areas—religious, political, sociological, economic, ethnic. Thus it is not surprising that an ideology would emerge with regard to science, which is, after all, the dominant way of knowing about the world in Western societies since the Renaissance. The ideology underlying modern (i.e., post-medieval) science has grown and evolved along with science itself And a major—perhaps the major— component of that ideology is a strong positivistic tendency, still regnant today, of believing that real science must be based in—and only in— experience, since the tribunal of experience is the objective, universal judge of what is really happening in the world. If one asks most working scientists what separates science from religion , speculative metaphysics, or shamanistic world views, they would unhesitatingly reply that it is an emphasis on validating all claims through sense experience, observation, or experimental manipulation. This component of scientific ideology can be traced directly back to Newton who proclaimed that he did not “feign hypotheses” (hypotheses non fingo) but operated directly from experience. (The fact that...