The Ethics of Animal Research: Exploring the Controversy

1 The Ethics of Animal Research: An Overview of the Debate

1 The Ethics of Animal Research: An Overview of the Debate Jeremy R. Garrett The practice of animal research is at once familiar and strange. On the one hand, almost everyone knows that it is a regular and widespread part of modern scientific and medical research. Indeed, the idea of being a “lab rat” or “guinea pig” is frequently invoked and readily understood in contemporary discourse. On the other hand, the vast majority of animal research is conducted outside public view. Aside from oversight committees , government regulatory agencies, and research personnel, very few people will ever have first-hand exposure to what occurs in animal research laboratories. For most people, “access” is limited to two very different kinds of post facto news stories: (1) those about new drugs or medical devices that have shown promising results with animal subjects or (2) those exposing the (sometimes lurid) details of certain experiments or the abuse or neglect of animal subjects, or both, that come to light because of whistleblowers or undercover investigators or activists. The curious result of all this is that animal research is either hardly noticed at all or, when it is noticed, a source of considerable controversy. This book sets out to explore the issue as it manifests in this latter way. The chapters that follow offer many perspectives for analyzing and evaluating the ethical issues at stake in animal research. They aim to elevate the quality and tone of the debate while elucidating where progress can be made. In this introduction, I will (1) briefly describe the history and contemporary practice of animal research, (2) identify five important factors driving the scientific and ethical controversy, (3) pinpoint the moral crux of the debate, and (4) briefly introduce the individual chapters in this volume and explain how they contribute to the overall aims of the book. The Practice of Animal Research in History and Contemporary Society While it is possible that the rudiments of “animal research” extend much further back in human history, the practice can be traced to at least the 2 Chapter 1 fourth century BCE. Aristotle, arguably the world’s first biologist, studied the bodies of both live and dead animals in developing his accounts of anatomy, embryology, and physiology. Five centuries later, the great Roman physician Galen derived his influential model of human biology from studying the cadavers of pigs and monkeys, among other animals. (Both Aristotle and Galen worked within wider cultural parameters that strongly forbid human dissection.) In this early period, and for roughly the next 1,700 years, animal research was a limited and isolated practice, confined primarily to a small handful of curious scientists and physicians (aside from Avenzoar and other Muslim physicians, the most notable examples come from the last 300 years of that span, including William Harvey, Stephen Hales, Antoine Lavoisier, Claude Bernard, Louis Pasteur, and Ivan Pavlov).1 It was not until the early to middle portion of the twentieth century that animal research became a regular, widespread, and even (legally) required component of the multistage methodology of modern biomedical and toxicological research. In addition to the general increase in scientific activity fueled by the needs and ambitions of burgeoning nation–states, two specific factors contributed significantly to the rapid expansion of animal research during this period. First, the United States and other nations enacted federal product safety legislation in the late 1930s in response to various tragedies resulting from ineffective product safety testing (most notably, the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide incident). One part of these legislative decrees was the requirement that products such as food, drugs, and medical devices be shown to perform safely with animal subjects prior to being tested on or sold to human subjects and consumers . A second important factor was the Nuremberg Code, a seminal ethics declaration developed in response to the Nazi program of involuntary human experimentation in the 1930s and 1940s. This code identified ten points of guidance for ethical research with human subjects that significantly influenced subsequent research ethics legislation worldwide. In addition to establishing the need for research to satisfy now-familiar requirements of informed consent and general beneficence and utility, the Nuremberg Code also enshrined a requirement for animal research in its third directive, which states that experiments “should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment” (NIH 2010). These...