Children's Stories and Adult Attitudes toward the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research and Testing

CHILDREN'S STORIES AND ADULT ATTITUDES TOWARD THE USE OF ANIMALS IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH AND TESTING H. N. CHRISTENSEN* Preserving the motivation for the writing of the best literature for children undoubtedly deserves a higher priority from society and at the same time probably earns more optimism than that for adult literature. Anyone who has watched the intense activity in the children's section of a public library, say in June after schools close, can hardly escape being inspired. Represented here is surely a population that is balancing the more passive appeal of television with a lively development of affection for literature and of learning from it. The assistance available to children and to the parents and teachers who guide their selections surely appears much better than that for adult readers. For their own choices of reading, American adults appear to depend unduly on statistics about what others are reading, on review publications beset by trendism, and on excessively conservative decisions by publishers. Children as an ever new audience enjoy the splendid stories of past decades in unembarrassed competition with the latest stories. The sponsorship and assignment of awards for children's literature and the illustration of children's books surely serve better the literary and cognitive education of that audience than do the sum of the parallel arrangements that usually serve for adults. I want to present here a concern that these advantages I attribute to children's literature be preserved and extended, particularly in one ofits traditional areas, namely, that of animal stories for children. I approach the subject without having spent anything like a career on it; hence I have been particularly obligated to librarians of the Ann Arbor Public Library, especially Marcia Shafer, for help in examining pertinent litera- *Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109.© 1986 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/86/2904-0495$0 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 29, 4 ¦ Summer 1986 \ 573 ture—also to my children and grandchildren for the responses I have been privileged to see from them. I need also to acknowledge stimulation from participation in discussions initiated by Doctors Richard Landau and Clifford Gurney. These discussions under auspices of the Midwest Section of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences concern the possible development of a college curriculum that would orient other parts of the educational program with reference to biology. In the proposed program, appropriately devised courses would relate the gain of understanding of life in all its aspects to study programs centered in areas other than science. This program seeks to deal with one aspect of the two-culture problem, namely, the frequent deficiency in the appreciation , quantitative as well as qualitative, of the human enterprise of gaining systematic knowledge through biological science. The discussion begins by listing questions as to the nature and beginning of life, the place of mankind in the world, the biological consequences of technological excesses, the biological basis of our behavior, and the relevance of a current knowledge of brain function for an understanding of human values. If society were to confirm that such influences of biology should begin even earlier in life, what the child reads and observes about animals should also contribute to progress toward these goals. I want to contrast animal stories that fully deserve the admiration I have expressed above with an apparently increasing literature that presents a biology so sentimental and unreal, sometimes even political, that the reading or listening child is in danger of developing an antirational bias that could handicap him or her throughout school and life, even to the point of allowing recruitment for antiscience crusades. Let me offer for consideration by my reader four premises about the human condition as a basis for my discussion of problems whose public management appears to me to depend on perceptions of animals acquired in childhood—to a considerable degree, I believe, from stories: 1. That we all have large personal stakes in the improvement of biomedical knowledge by ongoing tests and experiments that necessarily use animals.— Happily, these tests use fewer dogs and fewer cats than they did a decade ago. A...