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Wasted Lives: Misconceptions About Animal Research by Brenda Shoss If Average Joe, The Wife and The Kids knew that their hard-earned tax dollars went to the study of rat sperm or to prove that older monkeys are less energetic than younger monkeys, they'd be understandably perturbed. Sadly, that last "breakthrough," co-authored by the National Institutes of Health's Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center, is common practice in the government-subsidized vivisection industry. Vivisectors erect a smokescreen of misleading explanations to appease tax-paying Joe and his family. While Americans are convinced that doctors in ivory towers are about to cure cancer, the fact is: Most animal tests merely satisfy scientific curiosity. Furthermore, a researcher's livelihood depends upon churning out papers in the "Publish or Perish" world of medical academia. The National Institutes of Health & Mental Health annually dole out over $8 billion in animal research grants. Every year millions of laboratory animals are cut, scraped, burned and poisoned. Yet animal research has done little to save human lives or support tenable data. Human population studies and non-animal alternatives have led to most medical revelations, including cholesterol's link to heart disease; the smoking/nutrition link to cancer; hypertension's link to stroke; causes for trauma; isolation of the AIDS virus; discovery of penicillin, X-rays, anti-depressants and AZT for AIDS patients. Still, vivisection is big business. Research institutions prosper, as do companies who sell laboratory animals and restraining devices. But who are the real "guinea pigs"-humans or the animals who attempt to mimic them? Science allows for predictability. We don't know which animal is like us, until we know what a drug, chemical or surgical procedure does to us first. Animals are too anatomically, physiologically and pathologically different from humans to react similarly. They merely depict the unnatural way a disease was induced and the stressful environment of the laboratory. Between 1976 and 1985, 198 out of 209 new drugs had to be relabeled with warnings or withdrawn from the market. Fifty-two percent of these animal-tested drugs led to human hospitalization, disability and death. Conversely, how many potentially helpful drugs have been kept off the market because they were toxic in animals, but not in humans? Testing drugs on another species doesn't make sense. Small animals purge toxins far more rapidly than humans. The half-life of caffeine is around 40 minutes in a mouse; it's over 4 hours in a human. Mice excrete phenobarbital after 3 hours while the human system takes 50 to 150 hours. According to Science Journal, August 1999, drug testing on animals produces results that are unreliable in humans. Fortunately, many non-animal alternatives exist: Clinical trials, population studies, autopsy/biopsy studies, anatomically correct manikins, simulators and 3-D models, CAT, PET and MRI scans, human cell/tissue cultures, interactive computer models, videos and computerized post-market surveillance of drugs. Microsurgical Developments in the Netherlands has created a PVC "rat" equipped with latex veins, organs, skin and muscle. American and Canadian scientists have produced lab-generated human corneas to replace the crude Draize eye irritancy tests in which corrosive chemicals are poured into the eyes of restrained rabbits. Parmagene Laboratories of Royston, England developed human tissues and computer technologies to test drugs and MatTek Corporation refined a three-dimensional epidermal model that simulates human skin. Physiome Sciences of Princeton, New Jersey crafted computer models into "virtual organs" that can replace animals in pharmaceutical research.
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