Can Medical Research on Animals be Justified?

Animal rights/liberationists mount two primary arguments against the use of animals in medical and scientific research. The first is entirely an ethical assertion: Regardless of the admitted benefits humans receive from animal experimentation, the research must be stopped because it is immoral. The most notable proponents of this approach are professors Gary Francione and Tom Regan. This position is terribly wrong, in my view, but it permits an ethical debate based upon an empirically accurate understanding that, at least to some degree, animal research benefits humankind and that applying the animal rights abolitionist view to the matter would deprive us of these results. 

The other, and I must say predominate, animal rights approach to opposing animal research—let’s call it the “anti science meme”— is intellectually dishonest and factually unsupportable.   Not only is animal research ethically wrong, this argument goes, but it actually provides no benefits to humans, and indeed, causes us significant harm.

Animal rights activists use the public's ignorance of the scientific method to mislead about the place of animals in research. For example, in early research, scientists often proceed using the kinds of techniques animal rightists claim should be the be all and end all prior to human testing, e.g. computer programs, tissue lines, etc. But eventually, testing in a living organism is required to test hypotheses, verify findings, and test for safety. 

One need only look at recent efforts to create a vital regenerative medical sector. One approach toward this end has been embryonic stem cells. But they can't be tested yet in humans because animal studies show that they cause tumors. As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2000, for example, researchers at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA, injected mouse embryonic stem cells into rats in an attempt to alleviate Parkinson’s-like symptoms. Of the 25 rats receiving the injections, 14 showed modest improvement, 6 showed no benefit, while 5 died of brain tumors caused by the embryonic stem cells. In other words, the hoped-for treatment actually killed one-fifth of the animal subjects. [i]

Had these animal studies not been done, the cells might have been injected into humans and the deaths would have been of people rather than rats. Animal rightists may believe that "a rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy," as Ingrid Newkirk has put it.  But most people don't. It would have been unethical to go from non organism theory into human testing.