Animal Testing Morally Justified

To the Editor:

I am writing in response to Natalie M. Stamm’s letter in last week’s Review, “Oberlin College Must Stop Experimenting on Animals,” which questioned the use of animals for education in the sciences here at Oberlin College and also criticized the larger, national practice of animal testing.
Indeed, it seems that every year we have a few attacks on the OC science department and especially on the folks at neuroscience. The Neuroscience 211 lab is, I believe, the only lab here that involves the “vivisection” of live animals, and when I took it I found it to be an interesting exercise. The faculty and staff seemed to go to every measure to minimize any pain or discomfort the rats might feel. While the outcome of the experiment was fairly predictable, I still found it to be a good introduction into one of the realities of neuroscience as a field of study. That is, animal research is an important part of this field and some familiarity with it is useful (and arguably necessary) in order to excel.
Stamm claimed that animal research is “antiquated, expensive and irrelevant,” and that it “serves no scientific purpose beyond lining the pockets and padding the credentials of a medical community that relies on animal tests to get work published.” She also implied that it lacks any scientific method. I don’t know how expensive animal research is relative to other forms of research, but the rest of her assertions are, I believe, uninformed. (On a side note, I was tempted to use more colorful adjectives to describe Stamm’s letter, but personally I’m sick of all the narrow-minded, one-sided and gratuitously offensive letters I’ve seen in the Review recently).
It is true that historically, before animal rights activist groups became established, some very gruesome testing went on. It may be that some tests go on even today which are unnecessarily painful to animals and could be replaced by other forms of experimentation. I’m not arguing against this. For one thing, l think that putting chemicals on rabbits to develop the proper warning label on chemical containers is a little sketchy.
At the same time, I think that large scale animal testing is necessary for important medical advances now and in the future. Even last year, useful discoveries were made concerning ALS, AIDS, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, as well as several forms of cancer, just to name a few. Also last year, early developments for a nicotine vaccine were explored, which may help people get unhooked from cigarettes. This may atone for Stamm’s claim that “animal tests led scientists to believe that cigarette smoke does not cause cancer in humans.” Besides, I thought the cigarette companies were being sued now because they’ve actually known very definitively and for a long time about these harmful effects.
Stamm also argues that some aspects of animals are very different from humans, and this is certainly true. On the other hand, the vast majority of the physical attributes and processes of rats and even non-mammals are extremely similar if not identical to our own. The fact that only medical doctors can legally experiment on human patients also leads to other scientists resorting to animal experimentation.
Just think about it, people. Wouldn’t you rather have a procedure for eye surgery or heart transplantation perfected on animals instead of botched many times on humans? Wouldn’t you enjoy it if we could repair spinal injury, develop new cures for cancer, treat infertility and more? All of these things would not be possible without animal testing, and will not be conveniently discovered through computer simulation or with limited in vitro studies.

–Alex Galaitsis
College sophomore