THE MYTHS OF VIVISECTION
Bernhard Rambeck, MD (Germany)Myth 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / Intro
Introduction
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends!
I thank you most sincerely for the opportunity to present, here in London, my ideas concerning the necessity to abolish all animal experiments. I am a biochemist and for the last fifteen years have been in charge of the clinical pharmacology department of an epilepsy centre in Germany. I am on the board of the Vereinigung Ärtzte gegen Tierversuche, an Association of Doctors Opposed to Animal Experiments. I myself have never been engaged in animal experiments, but through my work I have come into constant contact with the problems and consequences of animal experimentation.
Experimenting with animals is nowadays increasingly rejected, mainly for moral or ethical but also for scientific reasons. My field of work - epilepsy research - is a typical example of tendencies and developments in modern medical research towards dispensing with traditional animal testing. Even a decade ago, it was claimed that epilepsy research could only be carried out using the intact brains of living animals. Today, experimental epilepsy research means largely neither human nor animal experiments but in-vitro studies - that is, research with nerve-cell or brain-tissue preparations.
Countless mice, rats, cats, monkeys and other animals have been sacrificed in the last sixty years for experimental epilepsy research, in the last analysis without success. Medicine based on animal experimentation is not, even today, in a position to heal epilepsy but only, to a greater or lesser extent, to suppress seizures. At the same time, the considerable side-effects of the drugs must be reckoned with.
The first drugs used in the treatment of this disease, such as bromides and phenobarbital (which latter is very important even today), were not found as a result of animal experiments but of self-trials and clinical observation. The few other substances against epilepsy which are in current use were the result of chance rather than the products of systematic animal testing.
We have sought for decades to find further seizure-inhibiting substances by using a whole series of excruciatingly painful animal experiments. Artificial seizures have been produced in mice, rats and cats with specific poisons, electrical shocks or by surgical operations. Using these models, drugs were sought which should favourably influence seizures. But these artificial seizures are always mono-causative imitations of epileptic seizures and are hardly comparable with human epilepsy. This is because seizures occur spontaneously in man, unpredictably and mostly independently of external influences, being the results of a multi-causative pathogenic development. Genetic factors and various environmental influences can also play a part.
Hundreds of chemical substances have been found which affect these artificially produced seizures in animals. But this does not mean that one can predict which of these substances may be successfully used for man. Only the human experiment can show if a substance can be used clinically as an anti-epileptic drug.
Using animal experiments, researchers have tried to predict if an anti-convulsant substance results in side-effects or damage in man. Even here, an answer can only be obtained from the human experiment. Almost all clinical problems and side-effects of anti-epileptic drugs have been first encountered in man himself and have not been predicted by animal experiments. Many drugs have had to be withdrawn because, contrary to the results of animal experiments, they produced seizures in man or else had serious and unacceptable side-effects on human beings.
Countless neuro-physiological details have been discovered by using animal testing, but in the final analysis we do not know which of these results are relevant for man. The ultimate causes of epilepsy are largely unknown, despite decades of animal experiments.
As I have already mentioned, in-vitro methods are today increasingly used in the field of epilepsy research. About a decade ago, scientists began to study the seizure-inhibiting or -precipitating effects of substances by using samples of mouse and rat brains or cultures of their neurons. Today, human tissue is increasingly used, obtained, for example, during operations to remove tumours or during other brain surgery. This procedure has the advantage that the results, unlike those from animal experiments, are really relevant and can be much better applied to man.
I could report extensively on the lack of success of animal experimentation in epilepsy research, about the problems of carrying over results from animal experiments to human epilepsies and about completely new diagnostic possibilities which were not developed by animal experimentation, but I shall next consider the problem of animal research in general terms. I shall try to make it clear that the common concept of the necessity for animal research is based on a series of myths, fairy tales and legends, which are, in the end, either totally false or at least have no valid basis.
Modern society must, in its own interests, begin to question these myths. It is not a question of having to live with a necessary evil. I believe that man has a chance of survival in this world ONLY if he succeeds in making peace with nature. Man has increasingly exploited, misused and raped nature. The consequences: our woods are to a considerable extent irreversibly damaged; oceans and seas are becoming ever more polluted; our natural environment is largely destroyed; climatic catastrophes of an unimaginable magnitude threaten our world; and poisons produced by man are eating holes in the protective ozone layer of our planet. If man does not learn to live peaceably with nature, he will cease to exist. Animal experiments do not contribute to living in peace with nature - they are a brutal declaration of war on nature. We exploit the weak, in this case animals, with brute force, supposedly for our advantage. The animal world cannot be a push-button service for our so-called human sciences.
First of all, let it be made clear that we, the groups of doctors against animal experimentation, do not wish to abolish either science or medicine (as is sometimes maintained). Man needs them in this present time more urgently than ever before. But the medical sciences have landed up in a dead-end street. Medicine today has become an organiser of the symptoms of illness; it has forgotten that originally its most important aims were the prevention and healing of disease. The cause of the tragedy of medical science is a mechanistic view of the world, in which concepts of soul, spirit and mind have no further place, and man is nothing more than a sort of bio-machine or a somewhat highly evolved mammal. But as long as medical science studies man and his illnesses by always using an entirely inadequate animal model, medicine cannot recognise or study man's peculiarities and special features, especially that free interplay between body, mind and spirit, the disturbance of which presents itself as illness.
A further clarification: we do not seek to replace animal experiments by experiments with humans, as we are often accused of doing. Groups such as DBAE reject animal experimentation only because of its damaging effects on man; one of the most important demands of these groups is the protection of man from the risks of new and old chemicals or drugs, which can certainly not be judged by animal research.
I want, together with you, to analyse these myths of the pretended necessity of animal experimentation.
Myth 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10/ Intro