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Approximately 250 University of Wisconsin students, faculty, researchers, Madison citizens and animal rights activists did anything but monkey around when they gathered to debate the rights of non-human primate research subjects Monday.
Department of Ophthalmology Chair Paul Kaufman — who regularly uses monkeys in his research — debated Co-Director of Alliance for Animals Rick Bogle — who said he ate his last animal in 1972 and has been campaigning for animal rights ever since — on the ethics of non-human primate research.
Before the debate began, Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics Susan Lederer gave a presentation on the history of animal use in scientific research.
She said animal research dates back to the 2nd century, when Roman physician and philosopher Galen documented his experiments on many animals. She said one well-known experiment involved severing the spinal cord of an ape to observe the ape’s lack of mobility below the cut.
She said the ethics of non-human primate research are a relatively new discussion. She gave the example of Claude Bernard, a French scientist who experimented on one monkey and then decided he would no longer work on them due to their resemblance to humans in the 1800s.
Kaufman began the debate, saying his work on glaucoma would probably not be possible without the option of non-human primate research, adding a number of drugs currently in human clinical trials were made possible by monkey research. He said these drugs are not trivial things, but rather drugs that save lives.
“I would ask you how many are prepared to die earlier, sustain physical disability or disease earlier in our lives, or watch your child, or your spouse, or your sibling sustain one of those things,” Kaufman said.
He said the key question for him in deciding the ethics of the issue is: “Are monkeys us?” If monkeys are included in our group, doing research on them would be unethical. If they are not, we should be allowed to use them in research.
Bogle agreed the question “Are monkeys us?” is of central importance. He cautioned against making a quick decision on that point, however. He recalled many people over time — including women, African Americans and Jewish people — who are now accepted as part of the group, but were historically considered outcasts.
He said he thinks monkeys display many characteristics of humans, such as the ability to grieve, count, order things by quantity and deal with complex environments, yet their lives are being valued less.
During the question and answer portion of the debate, every public comment made was anti-animal research. However, overall the crowd was calm.
UW sophomore and debate attendant Jimmy Gowin said he thought researchers were taking emotion out of the question, but he feels it should be central to the debate.
“I don’t think it’s right to just discount emotion because it doesn’t fit,” Gowin said. “I think what makes us human is that emotion and our ability to feel.”
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Rick did an outstanding job. It was telling when only once during the entire evening, a sudden applause isolated to the back corner of the room, came in Paul’s defense. I hadn’t realized how physically segregated the audience was until then.
A constant overtone to Paul’s arguments seemed to be a common human desire to live as long as possible (“when we live to 100, we’ll want to live to 105”). I do acknowledge that this is strongly valued in our society. But a very near-sighted society are we. We want to extend life (via pharmaceuticals and medical technology) but we are failing miserably at managing the resources necessary to sustain our growing and aging population. We do a notoriously poor job of taking individual responsibility for our own longevity and health, but there is a widespread sense of entitlement in our culture when it comes to drugs and medical technology with the ability to reverse the damage we, ourselves, have done. Humans have evolved to think critically and adapt. We should not underestimate this when examining our quest to survive. Survival is more than simply living longer and stronger. We are intelligent enough to weigh the costs involved, the ethical implications, and the “quality” of life we’re sustaining for ourselves. We should focus our intelligence in that way.
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Well done Prof. Paul Kaufman for stepping in to the lions den that is the animal research debate. It’s a pity that a few more of his colleagues couldn’t have made the effort to attend in order to balance the audience a little more. Sometimes I think scientists have only themselves to blame when they complain about the debate on animal research being dominated by animal rights activists. Hopefully Paul’s example will encourage more scientists to speak up in future.
It’s worth pointing out that a lot of the research that monkeys are used for is for diseases that are not easily avoidable, diseases such as neurological disorders and infectious diseases such as HIV, and the eye diseases that Prof. Kaufman works on do fit in that category. This research is IMHO ethically justifiable so long as the information needed cannot be obtained in other ways (e.g. clinical research, in vitro studies, rodent studies) and the monkeys used are well cared for. As Paul Kaufman pointed out monkeys may share many human characteristics and even to a limited extent some of our cognitive and social abilities but they are not human, while they are certainly deserving of moral and ethical consideration they are not deserving of the same consideration that humans are.
There are uses that I’m not so keen on though, research on caloric restriction in monkeys might be non-invasive but I’m not sure that it is ethically justifiable given how unlikely the research is to have an impact on human health and the significant impact it has on the normal behavior of the monkeys involved. Even if it does prolong the monkeys lives significantly and the same happens in humans very few people will be willing to limit their calorie intake enough to make a difference. This kind of research would be acceptable if it was performed in rodents but doesn’t seem to me to be worth doing in monkeys.