CHAPTER THREE
The Vivisection Industry
Big Business
Most people are unaware of what an enormous business vivisection is. Vivisectors receive over 7 billion dollars in U.S. government grants every year. This grant money comes out of the pockets of U.S. taxpayers. To make matters worse, the vivisectors themselves decide which grant proposals will receive funding. Through the system of peer review, vivisectors submit grant proposals and sit on the same committees that approve such grants. In any other area this conflict of interest would not be allowed. In the self-monitored world of vivisection, it is simply business as usual. In addition to taxpayer-sponsored government grants, vivisectors also receive money from private charities. This money is donated by well-meaning people in the good faith that if will be spent on valid research. These people hope that their donations will help to find a cure for the disease in question. They are unaware that their donations finance fraudulent, unscientific, experimental research on animals - research that can never cure anything. Year after year the public is told that the cures to these diseases could be "just around the corner" if only the public would donate more money for "research". And yet vivisectors never round this "corner". Of course, to do so, if they could, would put an end to their funding.
In addition to the vivisectors themselves, there are companies that profit from this system. Vivisection consumes approximately 100 million animals a year in the United States alone! The majority of these animals are purchased from animal breeders. Obviously, the profits to be made by breeding 100 million animals a year are enormous. There are also the makers of cages, restraining devices, surgical equipment, food and bedding material for the animals.
The industry which profits from vivisection will do anything to hide its fraudulence from the public. Ironically, it is the very fact that people do not think of vivisection as an industry that keeps them from questioning its scientific validity. As long as the general public is unaware of the enormous profits to be made from vivisection, it does not question the motivations of the people who defend it.
Alibi Tests
In 1957, the West German chemical company, Chemie Grunenthal, released the drug Thalidomide (known in Germany as Contergan and in England as Distaval), a tranquilizer for pregnant women and nursing mothers. It had first been tested on animals for three years, and no adverse effects had been detected. [Time, 1960] On the basis of these animal tests, Chemie Grunenthal was permitted to claim that Thalidomide was harmless for pregnant women and nursing mothers. In Octo6er 1961, after further animal tests, Thalidomide was released in the United Kingdom with the assurance that it could be "given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without adverse effects on mother or child." In reality, Thalidomide was anything but "completely safe". Thalidomide caused more than 10,000 birth defects in the children of women who had taken it - some born with fin-like hands growing directly from their shoulders, some born with missing or stunted arms or legs, others born with ingrown genitals, deformed eyes or ears. [Ruesch,1983, pp.360-361]
What happened later provides insight into the real purpose animal testing serves. This real purpose is a world apart from the story we are told, that animal tests are done to protect the consumers. As we shall see, it is the pharmaceutical companies and not the consumers that animal tests protect.
After the human damage caused by Thalidomide could no longer be concealed, Thalidomide's manufacturer, the West German company Chemie Grunenthal, was put on trial. It resulted in a two and one-half year criminal trial, the longest in German history. Chemie Grunenthal brought in medical experts from around the world to testify on their behalf. The basis of their sworn testimonies was that generally accepted animal tests could never accurately predict human reactions to drugs. [Ruesch, 1983, pp.361-362] Incredibly, Chemie Grunenthal was found not guilty and was not held liable for any damages.
One of the experts who testified at the trial was the Nobel Prize winner, co-discoverer of penicillin, Ernst Boris Chain. On February 2, 1970, he stated under oath: "No animal experiment with a medicament, even if it is carried out on several species, including primates, under all conceivable conditions, can give any guarantee that the medicament tested in this way will behave the same in humans, because in many respects the human is not the same as the animal." [Hartinger, 1991, p.3]
Reliance on animal tests had allowed the sale of Thalidomide and the birth of 10,000 deformed children. The same animal tests provided the alibi that allowed its manufacturer to get itself off scot-free. The Thalidomide story makes it clear that drug companies knowingly perform fraudulent animal tests simply to provide themselves with an alibi for selling dangerous drugs to the public.
Animal testing continues to provide alibis for drug companies. It allows them to sell dangerous drugs by using animal tests to fraudulently "prove" their safety. After the human damage caused by these drugs can no longer be concealed, drug companies are allowed too defend themselves by saying they "performed all the required tests".
According to Dr. Herbert Gundersheimer, M.D.: "Results from animal tests are not transferable between species, and therefore cannot guarantee product safety for humans... In reality these tests do not provide protection for consumers from unsafe products, but rather they are used to protect corporations from legal liability." [Gundersheimer, 1988]
Obviously, the chemical/pharmaceutical companies have a great motivation to continue the myth that animal testing is scientifically valid. And these huge multinational companies have the money, power and influence to keep this myth going.
The Status Quo
The public would like to believe that the medical research community would be open-minded, logical and willing to re-examine the theories on which their research is based. On close examination, it becomes apparent that just the opposite is true. Indeed, vivisection continues, to a large degree, simply because "that's the way it's always been done". Researchers and doctors are taught from day one of their training through vivisection, by teachers who were in turn taught the same way. The medical research community seems to have an unshakable tendency to continue an error once it has been accepted. Those doctors and researchers who do question privately are often unwilling to risk their careers, reputations and licenses by publicly opposing the status quo.
One doctor who stood against the accepted medical beliefs of his time was Dr. Walter R. Hadwen, born in 1854. He placed emphasis on diet, lifestyle and hygiene rather than drugs, chemicals and vaccines. He delivered his city, Gloucester, from a smallpox epidemic by ruling out vaccination and introducing strict measures of hygiene and sanitation. [Ruesch,1989, p.276] A devout opponent of all animal experimentation, he accepted the Presidency of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1910. Dr.Hadwen best explained the tendency of medical men to accept and perpetuate error in the preface to his book, The Difficulties of Dr.Deguerre: "No medical man during his student days is taught to think. He is expected to assimilate the thoughts of others and to bow to authority. Throughout the whole of his medical career he must accept the current medical fashions of the day or suffer the loss of prestige and place. No ublic appointments, no coveted preferments are open to to the medical man who declines to parrot the popular shibboleths of his profession. His qualification may be beyond reproach; he may himself possess the qualities that command respect; but unless prepared to think and act within the narrow circle of accepted dogma, he must be prepared for a more or less isolated path."
Confusing the Issue
Vivisection is a human health issue. It is not an "animal-rights" issue. Vivisection must be abolished because of the harm it does to people. By constantly debating the issue with "animal- rights" activists who do not comprehend the scientific issue, vivisectors make the publicbelieve that there are no scientific challenges to vivisection. This is blatantly untrue. In addition to the eminent doctors and scientists whose opposition to vivisection you have already read, there have been countless others. Prof.Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., taught and practiced medicine for over 30 years. During that time he had been the National Director of Project Head Start's Medical Consultation Service, Chairman of the Medical Licensing Board for the State of Illinois, Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Illinois, and recipient of numerous awards for excellence in medicine and medical instruction. He was also the author of The People's Doctor newsletter and several best-selling medical books. In a 1986 interview, Dr.Mendelsohn stated: "The reason why I am against animal research is because it doesn't work. It has no scientific value. One cannot extrapolate the results of animal research to human beings, and every good scientist knows that... As far as I am concerned, I have to be opposed to quackery; since animal experiments have no validity and since they lead to quackery in medicine, I have to be opposed to animal experiments as a scientist." [Mendelsohn, 1986]
G.H. Walker, M.D., doctor at the Royal Hospital and the Children's Hospital in Sunderland, England, wrote in 1933: "My own conviction is that the study of human physiology by the way of experiments on animals is the most grotesque and fantastic error ever committed in the whole of range of human intellectual activity." [Walker, 1933, p.335]
Sir George Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, wrote in 1964: "The idea, as I understand it, is that fundamental truths are revealed in laboratory experimentation on lower animals and applied to the problems of the sick patient. Having been myself trained as a physiologist, I feel in a way competent to assess such a claim. It is plain nonsense." [Pickering, 1964, pp.1615-1619]
Recently more and more doctors have formed organizations that oppose vivisection on scientific grounds. These honest doctors wish to rid their profession of the unscientific practice which keeps us from obtaining our health care goals. These groups include: International League of Doctors for the Abolition of Vivisection (ILDAV) , Doctors in Britain Against Animal Experimentation (DBAE) and League of German Doctors Against Vivisection. The vivisection industry has managed, with the help of the media, to ignore these scientific challenges. The reason for this is obvious: they know that they cannot defend vivisection scientifically.
The Ivory Tower
The continuation of vivisection would be impossible if not for the way it is handled by the media. Reporters receive "news handouts" from laboratories and report them without question. Vivisectors do not receive the type of "third degree" that journalists give to other newsmakers.
We are always presented with newspaper articles about the latest "big medical advance" When we get past the attention-grabbing headlines to the middle of the article, we find that this "big advance" is "in the preliminary stages and will need more years of testing before it is ready for trial in humans." In five years no one asks what became of this "big advance", and people have heard of so many new "big advances" that they have long since forgotten this one. It is interesting to note that when these articles mention the "needed five years of research", they do not mention the additional taxpayer-sponsored grant money that goes with it. This pattern has gone on for many years, and yet most people continue to accept these reports. The reason for this must lie in the fear the general public has of questioning "scientists". Unfortunately, the general public is led to believe that vivisection is beyond its comprehension and can only be understood by "scientists". Vivisectors hide behind scientific jargon and technical double-talk to make people feel that they could not possibly comprehend anything so complicated.
As we have already demonstrated, vivisection is in no way beyond our ability to comprehend and question. Not only do we have the ability to question vivisectors and pharmaceutical companies, but as medical consumers and taxpayers we have an absolute right. It is time to stop devising plans for paying these people to mismanage our health, and question why they are not advancing our health situation.
The vivisection industry has placed itself in an ivory tower, above questioning. With our money it has created a systen which is completely self-monitored and self-regulated. It is imperative that we take the vivisectors down from their ivory tower, expose their research as fraudulent, and replace it with valid research that will enable us to create a healthy society.