Charlatans
Matthew Hartfield | 19.10.2008 07:53 | SHAC | Animal Liberation
13 October 2008
Last week, five leading members of the activist group, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac) faced trial on suspicion of threatening scientists working at the besieged laboratory. The accused were alleged to have launched a campaign of terror which included leaving hoax bombs at one scientist’s house, posting soiled sanitary towels through his letterbox (which were claimed to be “infected with the Aids virus”) and spreading rumours that he was a paedophile.
This is not the first time that such action has made the news; three years ago Darley Oaks farm in Staffordshire, which bred guinea pigs for use in experiments, was forced to close following a similar intimidation campaign. In this particular case the owner capitulated following the theft of the remains of his dead mother-in-law.
Although most people would condemn these actions, they might seem to gather some legitimacy from the general confusion and emotional hysteria surrounding animal testing in general. It seems that every other week there are stalls on Princes Street pasted with photos of bloodied dogs and sensationalist captions such as “Puppy Killers!”
Taking time to talk to one of these generally compassionate activists (as opposed to the militants mentioned above), you will generally hear a series of “facts” that expose animal testing as a sham. The main arguments are that animal biochemical systems differ so much from a human's that it renders any experiments invalid, and that any tests for medicines need to be repeated on humans anyway before they can be cleared.
A brief inspection into the history of medicine and science shows that this is untrue. The efficacy of penicillin, blood transfusions, vaccines or insulin, to name a few, was demonstrated via animal experiments. In the case of penicillin, mice were injected with a lethal dose of streptococci bacteria; half of them were further injected with penicillin. These were the only mice that survived. Penicillin has subsequently saved millions of lives worldwide.
After that, you may be asked “What about false positives?” Unfortunately these have occurred. The most famous case involved the drug thalidomide, which was given to pregnant women during the sixties as a treatment for morning sickness. It was initially tested on animals and was shown to be non-lethal. Tragically, the drug was later linked to birth deformities in children whose mothers took it. This side-effect was not detected, as the effect on unborn babies was not tested before its sale. Science does not get everything right first time, and in the cases when it is wrong the consequences can be awful. Yet that is just one case; as mentioned before, there have been countless true positives discovered through animal tests, which save many more lives then false positives cost.
After mentioning this to your considerate campaigner, they may admit that’s true, but then state that animal tests are obsolete anyway, since necessary experiments can be performed on cells in vitro, or via theoretical simulations. This is a relatively new argument against animal tests – but again it quickly falls flat. Penicillin was tested in mice as the human dose required is 3,000 times the amount needed in rodents, so it was essential to test for toxicity in animals first. Vaccines cannot be tested on isolated tissue cultures as the effects of disease on the entire host need to be monitored.
It is not the case that researchers will automatically experiment on animals if a drug or chemical needs to be tested. UK law forbids the use of animals in tests unless there are no alternatives. If animal tests need to be performed, then the Scientific Procedures Act 1986 requires that the institution, head researcher and each individual researcher own a licence before experiments commence. And research councils are always looking for methods that will reduce the need for animal tests. All these restrictions have come about due to legitimate concerns about the use of animals in experiments and how to ensure they are well treated.
Therein lies the crux. Scientists engage in legitimate, mature discussion all the time about the ethics of animal experimentation, with courses on this forming an integral part of any university science degree. Some are completely against it; but most agree that it is a necessary evil, which can enhance the wellbeing of society if performed correctly. Such debate is what is needed, rather then the hysterical appeals to emotional authority put across by animal welfare activists. To bypass them, and ensure that this subject is treated openly and rationally, will show up the brutal activists for the charlatans they really are.
Matthew Hartfield is a PhD candidate in Biology at the University of Edinburgh
Matthew Hartfield
Comments
Hide the following 15 comments
http://www.journal-online.co.uk/articles/show/3318
19.10.2008 08:31
horsesmouth
Opinion Of Professor Sir George Pickering
19.10.2008 10:59
Professor Sir George Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine,University of Oxford, from his lecture " Physician and Scientist" delivered as Harveian Oration at the Royal College Of Physicians of London on October 19th 1964. Published in the British Medical Journal, 26th December 1964, pp. 1615-19 and quoted in the debate on the animals (Scientific Procedures) Bill on 17th February 1986 as reprinted in Parliamentary Debates ( Hansard) Volume 92 17th February-28th February 1986, column 117.
A Sentimental Emotional Hysteric
you and your sick science are dangerous.
19.10.2008 11:58
someone who wants safe medicine
Facts Inc Blood Transfusions & Animal Experiments
19.10.2008 13:36
Reference Plan 2000, 'How much longer'.
" We do trials in people because animal models do not predict what will happen in humans."
Dr Sally Burtles, Cancer Research UK
Before they started " Trading" as Cancer Research UK. There was the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and The Cancer Research Campaign. Between them they had around 170 years, yes, 170 years of fundraising into cancer. When they started, cancer was quite rare. Now, it is out of control, 40% and rising of the UK population will develope cancer a rate expecting to rise to 50% by 2020. About 1 in 3 to 1 in 2!
Cancer Research UK have made little or no progress into the eradication of this dreadful disease. Though rest assured, they have made loadz a money!
For over 100 years animal experimenters, masquerading a vain pretence as scientists, have conducted cancer research. By inducing cancers into helpless, harmless, innocent beings, torturing them slowly and mercessly to death.
Cancer Research and all the filth vivisection busness is a black hole with huge amounts of public monies being poured down it. With the people getting nothing in return.
Vivisection is scientific fraud. These people and the companies that employ them are a disgrace to the human race and all involved should receive prison sentences.
Consider- Rodents are the animals almost always used in cancer research. They never get carcinomas, the human form of cancer, which affects membranes (e.g lung cancer). Their sarcomas affect bone and connecting tissue: the two cannot be compared. Rodents are cheap to breed/ buy and house this is why they are used.
In the end though, as all our animal loving friends out there will agree. It is so very sad, that the animals themselves in the end have to pay the ultimate price. Their lives.
Jo Jo
Surgeon Lawson Tait And Animal Animal Experimentation
19.10.2008 20:14
Tait undoubtedly made a major contribution to the advance of abdominal surgery, but stated without hesitation that he had been led astray again and again by the published results of experiments on animals, so that eventually he had to discard them entirely.
Tait believed that vivisection is an error, not only because it can produce misleading results, but also because there is the constant danger that attention will be diverted from more reliable sources of information, such as clinical studies. Indeed in Science, History and Medicine, Cawadias (1953) argues that, whenever medicine has strayed from clinical observation, the result has been chaos, stagnation and disaster.
The view needs to be taken seriously because the assumption that people and animals are alike in the way their bodies work diverted attention from the study of humans, which ultimately held back medical progress for hundreds of years.
Over to you Dr Frankenstien.
Me
Any current research
20.10.2008 08:47
Lawson Tait - 1882
Cawadias - 1953
Anything since the invention of the microprocessor?
Rationalist with a calendar
recent research
20.10.2008 09:57
P. Perel, I. Roberts, E. Sena, P. Wheble, C. Briscoe, P. Sandercock, M. Macleod, L.E. Mignini, P. Jayaram, K.S. Khan, "Comparison of treatment effects between animal experiments and clinical trials: systematic review", British Medical Journal Online First (15 December 2006).
Pandora Pound, Shah Ebrahim, Peter Sandercock, Michael B. Bracken, and Ian Roberts, "Where is the evidence that animal research benefits humans?", British Medical Journal 328 (2004): 514 – 517.
Michael Morris
e-mail:
michael.morris@actrix.co.nz
Please John Gray's Straw Dogs
20.10.2008 10:39
There simply isn't any excuse for it you know.
pink monkey number 6.8 billion
This is a moral issue not a medical one
20.10.2008 11:56
Despite great advances in science and technology, animals still cannot be replaced completely by non-animal methods. And despite great advances in medicine, there are still all too many serious conditions that we cannot cure or treat adequately.
Without animal research it is very difficult to see how we could develop new treatments for conditions that affect the nervous system and other complex, serious conditions such as cancer, AIDS and heart disease. This research is indispensable, but it is important to realise that it provides just part of the picture. The other parts of the picture are provided by non-animal methods - computer modeling, cell culture, studies of patients and populations, for instance.
We must make this argument based on the moral issue of eating animals. If we try to use science we will lose.
Tom
Practical recent example - Jellyfish, worms and research revolutions
20.10.2008 12:04
This revolution began in the early 1960's when Osamu Shimomura and Frank Johnson at the University of Princeton, intrigued by the ability of Aequorea victoria to glow green when disturbed, set out to isolate the proteins responsible. They succeeded in isolation two proteins, a blue luminescent protein they named aequorin and another green protein that glowed when exposed to UV light. In the 1970's Osamu Shimomura studied the green protein, later known as GFP, and found that unlike aequorin GFP did not need a supply of energy to glow, a useful property for a molecule being used to label proteins in a cell.
GFP was clearly a very interesting protein but there was a problem, it could only be obtained from jellyfish, so obtaining useful quantities of it was next to impossible. A scientist named Douglas Prasher working for the National Cancer institute had the answer, if the gene for GFP could be identified and cloned it could be inserted next to a gene that scientists wished to study so that the protein produced by that gene would be labeled by a GFP molecule. This label would then allow the scientists to follow what that protein was doing in a cell or organism. With this in mind Douglas Prasher identified and sequenced the gene encoding GFP, publishing his results in 1992. Unfortunately at this point his funding ran out, but he did send copies of the gene to several researchers, including Martin Chalfie at Colombia University.
Martin Chalfie's research concerned the development of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, and he was excited by the possibility that bioluminescent proteins could be used to follow twhat proteins and cells were doing and where they were doing it. C.elegans is an organism favoured by many scientists who study animal development and genetics, and has played a decisive role in research leading to two other recent Nobel Prizes, that awarded to Sidney Brenner, John Sulston and Robert Horvitz in 2002 for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death, and that awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello in 2006 for their discovery of RNA interference. Martin Chalfie himself worked with Sidney Brenner and John Sulston while at the Laboratory of molecular Biology in Cambridge a few years earlier. What Martin Chalfie and his colleagues did was to prove that GFP could be expressed in the bacteria E. coli and in C.elegans, and then to place the GFP gene under the control of a gene that is active in only six nerve cells in the worm. The resulting worm with six cells that glowed green under UV light caused a sensation when it was published in the journal Science in 1994, if GFP could be function in organisms as diverse as bacteria, jellyfish and nematode worms why shouldn't it work for other species?
While scientists around the world started to employ GFP in their research its versatility was greatly increased by the work of Roger Tsien who used the techniques of molecular biology to increase the numbers of colours available to scientists from just one colour, green, to a palette that covers the visible spectrum. A dramatic demonstration of the potential of the expanded palette of GFP proteins cane in 2007 with the publication of a paper that used different colour GFP labels to enable scientists to follow the fates of thousands of cells simultaneously in a portion of the mouse brain, a technique quickly dubbed the brainbow. Just this week another paper in Science described how scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory used GFT labeling to track all the cells in the zebrafish embryo during the first 24 hours and use this information to construct a digital 3D model, allowing early embryonic development in vertebrates to be studied in unprecedented detail.
Scientists now use GFP widely in the laboratory, and its uses are as diverse as determining when and how proteins bind to each other in cells in vitro to following the fate of individual nerve cells in the developing brain of living organisms. The importance of GFP to biological and medical research today cannot be overstated.
We salute the winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on their magnificent achievements.
Regards
Paul Browne
1)Chalfie M., Tu Y., Euskirchen G., Ward W.W., and Prasher D.C. “Green
fluorescent protein as a marker for gene expression.” Science Volume 263,
pages 802-805 (1994).
2)Livet J., Weissman T.A., Kang H., Draft R.W., Lu J, Bennis R.A., Sanes
J.R., Lichtman J.W. "Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of
fluorescent proteins in the nervous system." Nature Volume 450(7166) pages
56-62 (2007).
3) Keller P.J., Schmidt A.D., Wittbrodt J., Stelzer E.H.K. "Reconstruction of Zebrafish Early Embryonic Development by Scanned Light Sheet Microscopy " Science, Published Online October 9 2008, DOI: 10.1126/science.1162493
Information provided as requested - Paul Browne
This article is full of half truths, inaccuracies and lies!
20.10.2008 12:48
I really don't have time to destroy all the drivel and deception posted above....except to say that whilst penicillin was originally tested in mice, and it is true that they didn't die, it was also found to be ineffective and was only used as a means of last resort for an ill, (and VERY rich), patient when all else had failed [the rest, as they say, is history].
Let's now consider a few examples of primate research, our closest relatives and therefore the most "relevant" test subjects.
Six people were diagnosed as having multiple organ failure. This as a direct result
of having received but one five hundredth the dose, the primates (rhesus macaques)
had received of TN1413 -- Northwick Park Hospital, London [February 2006].
As practicing neuro surgeon and neuroscientist with three decades of research behind
me, I know only to well that non-human primate research as contributed little, if
anything, to the treatment of patients with neurological disorders. The great
strides in our understanding and ability to treat such disorders have resulted from
humans studies. If we want medical progress, we must focus on human, not monkeys,
using today’s sophisticated scanners and other state of the art techniques. -- Dr Marius MAXWELL
Europeans for Medical Progress Sumer 2007 Newsletter
HIV has been given to primates in attempts to study the illness. It has shown us one
very valuable fact: that is it’s not worth wasting any more time, money or resources
on this (flawed) method. -- Chriss ILES (former) Laboratory Animal Technician,
Vivisection Information Network. 16/07/03
I could go on all day exposing vivisection as a scientific sham, however I have campaigns to run so I will leave you with this parting shot:
The British Medical Journal, (arguably THE most respected industry journal), reported in 2004 that at least 10,000 people die in the UK every year as a result of Adverse Drug Reactions, (ADRs), caused by prescribed medicines.....which, cue the drum roll, were all tested on animals and none of the ADRs they caused were detected in the animal model!
To reply to Tom's point about not arguing the scientific points, (because it REALLY must be addressed), the "ethical argument" has failed, and it will continue to do so because of the basic psychology of human beings! Gary Francione and his drones claim that we have campaigned against vivisection for 120 years and that the methods we have used during that time have failed, (which is true), but the arguments we have used during that time, (the ethical argument), is the one they still promote as the ONLY solution!
By using the "ethical argument" we allow the vivisectors to use their classic "It's the mouse or your child" propaganda, whereas the public should be aware that animal experimentation is unreliable and dangerous. Ethics can be debated forever, scientific facts are irrefutable....and the scientific facts are that vivisection is the ONLY "science" which has NEVER been scientifically validated, and every attempt to introduce scientific validation is blocked by the vivisection lobby!
Facts are facts, and if you want to know what vivisection really does to humans....look at this:
I now have to get back to the campaign work,
Gateway to Hell Admin
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Part 2 Opinion Of Professor Sir George Pickering
20.10.2008 13:52
" To apply data gained from experiments on an anaesthetized carnivore or rodent to an unanaesthetized primate is, in the first place, unwarrantable. In the second place, assumptions are made about the nature of the disease process that are quite without foundation."
As August Krogh once remarked " The problems of physiology are so complicated that, to put it tersely, one cannot not expect to be able to reason correctly from the facts for more than five minutes at a stretch."
Over to you Frankie :)
A Sentimental Emotional Hysteric
Wrong re the defendants
20.10.2008 15:21
The fact that persons unknown have broken the law is what they are being tried for. This also happened with John, Jonny, Kerry and Jo who were sent to prison for 12 years (apart from Jo who got 4 years) for running a campaign outside of which others did stuff including perhaps grave robbery, they pleaded guilty (after getting very bad advice) to blackmail ie running a campaign which said "stop murdering animals or we will protest and expose your cruelty". This is very dangerous to all activists it means in effect that anyone who can be seen as a leader/organiser of any campaign for example a residents group opposing a mobile phone mast on top of a school might say "leave our kids alone or we will leaflet outside the carphone warehouse" and find themselves at risk of 14 years inside especially if someone smashes the shop window late one night! A carphone warehouse employee might get mugged in an unrelated incident but what is to stop the police and employer using that incident against the protestors if they really wanted to, or even engineering ever more heinous crimes in order to frame the activists? After all they do not need to catch the mugger they just have to intimate that it was linked with the campaign, eg employee behind screen fearful of losing job saying that the mugger said something about giving children brain tumours. And thus 14 years a piece for parents just trying to protect their children.
Wherever anyone stands on this matter it can not be just to send anyone to prison for such long periods because of what others have done.
Lynn Sawyer
There is no scientific case for vivisection
20.10.2008 22:32
not only do they not support such an inquiry though they actively try to thwart it happening...
clearly they are seriously afraid of their claims being scrutinised and the facts being in the public domain...
it is to their utter disgrace that they care so little about human suffering that they persist in attempting to deceive the public and delaying medical progress.
Shame on them.
CatC
Debunking the pro-vivisection lobby myth re thalidomide
21.10.2008 00:13
Thalidomide has a toxic effect on the human nervous system. The original animal tests did NOTshow any indications of this very serious effect and the licensees of thalidomide in several European countries carried out their own independent animal tests but still the results didn't show any such effect.
So, thalidomide shows why testing on other species is extremely dangerous for humans - IF the animal tests had demonstrated nerve damage thalidomide wouldn't have been allowed on the market in the first place, and the major tragedies of birth deformities (AND peripheral neuritis) would have been avoided.
Further, although peripheral neuritis doesn't of itself point to reproductive damage scientists would/should have taken damage to the nervous system as grounds for great concern as to that aspect.
The thalidomide tragedies show why we need scientific, human-relevant research and testing....not the utter pseudoscience of experimenting on other species which are all different at the cellular and molecular level.
CatC