Bekhzod Aliev: Animal testing best option in absence of viable alternatives

The proverbial hammer has come down on UCLA researchers testing the effects of methamphetamine withdrawal on animals.

On April 22, the campus was ablaze with the furor of the Animal Justice Project, protesting what they believe is the unfair treatment of animals by members of the university. This has become an annual occurrence on campus, as the experiment’s funding has now gone on for 22 years.

The issue at hand is a federal grant of more than $30 million that funds UCLA to test morphine treatments on rats. These experiments involve injecting their brains with said opiate. Ellen Ericksen, one of the protest organizers, said she believes it is “unethical, unnecessary and no humans benefit from it.”

But that’s much too unambiguous. Animal rights are very important from an ethical standpoint, and this is why we have legislation such as the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 and the Health Research Extension Act of 1985. These are not perfect laws, but they do provide some basic guidelines, such as defined standards of care for all warm-blooded animals, and as long as they are followed it would be unfair to call researchers unethical.

Unfortunately, animal testing cannot be abandoned yet, and protestors could better channel their efforts by lobbying for more legislation to protect the animals still in the system. Lobbying has recently directly lead to the complete ban of cosmetics tested on animals in European Union member states, and in the U.S., the Beagle Freedom Project achieved a victory when Minnesota allowed dogs used in taxpayer-funded experiments to be adopted after the end of experimentation – previously, they were euthanized. New regulations, such as tighter restrictions on the use of mice and rats, which represent the majority of all animals in experiments yet are not covered by the AWA of 1966, could also encourage researchers to develop new and improved research methods that do not involve animals.

Twenty-five years ago, children died 70 percent of the time within five years from leukemia, but after experimentation from animal testing, 80 percent of children now survive longer than five years with the disease. Insulin for diabetics was created by injecting pancreatic cell extracts into dogs. Inhalers for asthmatics, who number 300 million, of which 250,000 die every year were developed by testing on the lungs of guinea pigs. The testing currently in dispute, concerning meth addiction, has the potential to help about 1.2 million people who reported using meth to the National Institutes of Health.

At the same time, Robert Kavlock, the previous director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency National Center for Computational Toxicology, told Science magazine, “We’re a long way away from animal-free toxicology.” Maurice Whelan, head of the Systems Toxicology Unit at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, told Science that models still cannot predict the bioavailability and biodistribution of a chemical or how it will be processed in the liver. Therefore, long-term testing is currently next to impossible to conduct without the testing of live organisms. There is almost no way that scientists with limited budgets working in capitalist countries would forgo cheaper and faster alternatives “just because.” There is obviously a need for further experiments of this nature if the transition has not been made. Scientists should aim to wean themselves off this reliance, but it is still a necessity because we lack the technology and knowledge.

And there are certainly alternatives to animal testing that can be lobbied for, namely in vitro testing, computer modeling and in some cases, human volunteers. The Humane Society of the United States points out that many common tests are quite easy to mimic in vitro, and that they can be much cheaper as well. The goal should be the eventual replacement of animals with models, and researchers have stuck to the the three R’s: reduce the amount of animals used, refine testing to reduce pain, distress, et cetera and replace animals with other methods. By following these principles and with new regulations, we can streamline the efforts of science toward developing animal-free alternatives.

We must look toward a future where we no longer need to use animals in labs, as we now have methods that are faster and even cheaper than the alternative. We must do it because, as the dominant species in the world, we must show empathy toward the plight of lab animals. But we cannot blindly ignore the benefits we have reaped from them. We cannot ignore that we are not yet proficient enough to abandon these methods entirely.