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Animal Experiments
Nuffield bioethics report provides strong support for 3Rs
[26 May 2005] - The Nuffield Council on Bioethics launched their report on "The ethics of research involving animals" on Wednesday, at the British Library in London. Naturewatch warmly welcomes the report, as it provides a carefully nuanced account of the issues, and gives strong backing to the importance of the 3Rs approach to animal research (reduction, refinement and replacement).
Dismantling stereotypesThe report sought to dispel a number of fallacies about animal research which the committee believed were unhelpful. For example, two are that:
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According to Professor Steve Brown of the Medical Research Council, neither of these extreme views are correct or helpful. For example, effective animal models have been found for rheumatoid arthritis, polio and hepatitis C; however for HIV/AIDS and for cancer, the animal models have been very poor. The efficacy must be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
Another fallacy, as Dr. Lewis Smith pointed out, is that "adverse drug reactions (ADRs) show animal research does not work." About 5-6% of hospital cases are due to such reactions, of which half are from one class of drugs (NSAIDs, such as aspirin) which have often been overdosed. Dr. Smith did not point out, but might have done, that ADRs actually argue against the full efficacy of the whole drug-testing regime which includes clinical trial, and not just the animal-testing part of it: if animal research were ended tomorrow, ADRs would still take place because clinical trials are not perfect.
Ethical perspectives
As the report was largely about ethics, one of the panel members is a professor of Philosophy - Jonathan Wolff of University College London. He identified four broad ethical viewpoints:
- Anything goes: humans can do anything they like to animals. This may have been a widely-held view in the nineteenth century but few would advocate it now.
- On-balance justification: weighing up the pros and cons, animal experiments are justified on balance. This is essentially the view enshrined by the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and supported by the present Government.
- Moral dilemma: moral philosophy will not tell us how to resolve the dilemma confronting us. Essentially this acknowledges that solving the evil of human disease seems to require the evil of animal experiments, and that the two may not be trivially separated.
- Abolitionist: the view of anti-vivisection organisations is that animal experiments should be abolished immediately because they are unethical. This was not a view endorsed by the committee although there was representation from the former head of BUAV, Michelle Thew.
While much dialogue is conducted as if people exclusively hold either the first or fourth viewpoint, the reality is that most prefer one of the middle two. He emphasised that, although moral disagreement will remain, public policy requires that progress actually be made. To that end, there needs to be an improved quality of debate, for which the full application of the 3Rs is absolutely vital. (Indeed support for the 3Rs is a feature of the consensus statement by the committee).
The need for transparency
David Thomas of BUAV, representing Michelle Thew who had returned to California, stressed the need for transparency: without this, informed discussion and decisions about animal experiments cannot be made. Thus he regarded the recent publication of abstracts of licences by the Home Office as insufficient, and that the full licenses (suitably anonymised for security reasons) should be released instead.
The need for the Three Rs
Professor Robert Combes from FRAME re-capped the history of the 3Rs and pointed out that it provides a way out of the moral dilemma identified by Professor Woolf earlier. It is therefore a central dogma of the resultant report. He noted that the 3Rs is not a fashionable field, and that therefore it is vital to provide generous funding in order to attract the brightest people to it: the committee has therefore recommended that a professorial chair for the 3Rs be set up. He also emphasised the need for monitoring the progress of the 3Rs.
The ultimate aim of 3Rs research
One of the key themes in the question-and-answer session was the ultimate aim of 3Rs research - the end of all animal experiments. Tony Gilland from the Institute of Ideas questioned whether this was actually realistic, and thus whether or not there was something deceptive about promoting an impossible vision. David Thomas from BUAV agreed that this was a key problem with the 3Rs concept; Professor Martin Raff from University College London also could not see how animal experiments could ever be eliminated because they would always be needed in order to check the non-animal methods. These views drew strong responses. Professor Woolf commented that, just because we can't achieve the elimination of world poverty does not mean that we shouldn't aim for it. Professor Michael Balls, recently-retired head of ECVAM (the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods) pointed out the central fallacy of Professor Raff's comments: the non-animal methods should ultimately be tested not against their performance in animals, but against their use in humans. Thus, a future without animal experiments is a realistic vision.
Overall the committee sought to counter the polarised nature of much of the debate about animal experiments, and to show that, in reality, people tend to hold rather more nuanced views than the superficial over-simplifications that get propagated both the media and by extremists on either side of the debate. They also stressed the importance of the 3Rs and warmly backed the new National Centre for the 3Rs, and called for it to receive substantially greater levels of funding.
For a copy of the full Nuffield report on the ethics of animal experiments, click here.
