Reflecting on a decade in academic neuroscience

At dinner over the holidays, my mother-in-law asked me what happened to “the rats”, as she affectionately called the subjects of my postdoc research, which had ended in March. This was a light-hearted question, and “they went to the gas chamber” was not a light-hearted answer, but it was the truth. I didn’t say more than that, but these rats were lucky compared to others. The topic quickly changed. 

For an academic career of 11 years, I toughed out what I have recently learned to call moral injury. My research used models of chronic injury and disease in rodents (mice and rats) to study the spinal neurons that recognize pain.

To perform this work, I suppressed moral and ethical concerns while I was carried away in the current of scientific research, which necessarily prioritizes the potential for advancement over animal life and wellbeing. I left academia earlier this year, and I’ve come to realize that I hated my work, and that I came to hate myself because of the ethical dissonance inherent to my work. I experienced the deep psychological and emotional toll that it takes to actively do harm in the name of something you don’t believe in: moral injury.

I don’t mean this story to demonize those who do animal research. I want to communicate my experience and offer an ear for anyone undergoing similar feelings. 

From the outside, it may be surprising that it took so long to reach this conclusion. It surprised me as well, but there exist a variety of ways that labs, universities, and researchers themselves ignore the ethics of the work they do.

In some cases, this is probably intentional, but for the most part, I believe it’s simply part of the culture of academic research to assume that published methods work and that community ethical standards are sufficient.

In my case, I:

1) genuinely believed that my work had the potential to impact human health,

2) that the animal models I used were useful experimental tools, and

3) that animals were as well-treated as possible in the context of this work.

I think these ideas are shared by most researchers. Today, I don’t believe that any of these three statements was true, and believe that I ignored my misgivings for years.

I was stuck in an academic trajectory that required my ignorance. This dissonance ruined my mental health for years and is something I continue to struggle with. It’s hard to come to terms with actively and personally doing harm to animals for so long. This is my account of how moral injury was inherent to, ignored, and conceptually disparaged in my academic animal research.

As framed in academic neuroscience (and I assume other fields where animal research is common), we, as scientists, are responsible stewards of research animals, whose lives and bodies are predestined for experiments that will enhance human health. An animal researcher must believe that animal sacrifice allows us to uncover key truths about the human experience, improve scientific methods, and develop better medicine.

The decision of whether an experimental plan accomplishes these goals is largely up to granting agencies, including government bodies like the National Institutes of Health and privately-funded grantors.

Funded projects are staffed by early and late career researchers, staff, and students, all of whom have a direct stake in the success of the project. Those who work on these projects rely on one another’s progress and are constantly reminded of the importance of their work. Every presentation is headlined by the potential for this research to improve human health, if successful.

The irony of this, as I now understand, is that animal injury and disease models are poor analogs for the human conditions they’re used to study. Biomedical science, irrespective of attempts at translation to humans, suffers a severe reproducibility crisis (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11537370/). Worse yet, there is a question as to whether any animal disease models have external validity due to species differences (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30404629/).

It seems to me that the better we understand animal physiology, the less useful animal disease models, especially chronic, become to advancing human health. Yet these models continue to expand in usage, and there is little internal discussion of their glaring shortcomings.

As early career researchers, we are told that the work we do is necessary for scientific progress. There is recognition that it is emotionally difficult to harm animals, but this difficulty is held as a virtue. “It should be hard” and “it’s not for everyone” are common responses to those who have a hard time with the realities of animal work. It is expected that researchers experience emotional pain when they harm and kill animals, but it is also expected that they suppress or move past this pain.

In my experience, there is no discussion of whether this harm and pain is necessary. If an animal research project is funded, it will continue. As a PhD student, either you perform the procedure, or another student will do it.

Throughout my career, I received general advice about mental health resources, but have never seen or heard about resources directed toward addressing the emotional difficulty of animal work itself.

Projects move quickly, and it’s not uncommon that hundreds of rodents will move through an experimental pipeline by the time a publication is completed. The end of this pipeline is necessarily euthanasia. Academic research claims to seek to ameliorate animal suffering in research settings through oversight committees that are guided by the 3Rs: replacement, reduction, and refinement. 

Animal experiment oversight is performed by institutional committees (most importantly, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, IACUC, which is made up of university and community members). IACUCs ensure the “humane” care and use of vertebrate animals in research, ensure compliance with federal regulations by reviewing protocols, inspect facilities, oversee animal well-being, and investigate reported concerns.

The IACUC has immediate oversight over which procedures can be performed throughout a study. Every vertebrate animal experiment needs to be cleared by the IACUC, and deviations from standard procedures must be individually discussed and approved by the committee. Nationally, guidelines upheld by IACUCs are set by the USDA and NIH. 

Essentially, the IACUC is tasked with balancing capacity for scientific advancement with animal welfare. Given the assumed necessity of animal research, animal welfare is defined as “humane treatment” in the context of whatever research is being performed. This may sound like a reasonable system for preventing abuse of research animals.

The reality is that, by virtue of the expectation of progress, “scientific advancement” supersedes animal welfare in nearly every case.

For the most part, the public grants I mentioned above are multi-million dollar, multi-year projects that are essential for the financial wellbeing of both individual labs and the home university. For now, animal experiments are the default modality in biology-adjacent research.

In the work I personally performed, animals were subjected to chronic spinal cord injury and diabetic neuropathy without analgesia. Animals were maintained in these painful conditions for months while we performed tests, culminating with hours of experiments during euthanasia. These procedures were both successfully funded, one publicly, and one privately, and approved by IACUC committees at two universities.

I will admit that pain research is particularly ethically fraught, but it is difficult for me to conceptualize how this work could be considered humane by any standard. It takes absolute minimization of the importance of animal wellbeing and a vast overemphasis on the necessity of any given experiment. 

Matthew presenting on his research.

Sometimes, the inefficacy of oversight was even more obvious. In one lab, I was repeatedly told that it was acceptable to perform procedures that had not been approved by the IACUC, as long as we had submitted a proposal that would “eventually be accepted”. In one case, the proposed procedure involved withholding analgesic drugs after major surgery.

The expectation for a proposal to be approved is common among researchers. Often, all it takes is that a similar procedure is described in a paper published from another university and that the procedure is “necessary for the project”. I never witnessed an IACUC proposal be denied. Often, more detail was requested, but I never witnessed a denial.

The reality is that animal researchers and IACUC members exist together in an ecosystem where animal suffering and death are given frighteningly little consideration. For the large part, I don’t blame individual staff members or researchers. The culture of the entire enterprise is that animal wellbeing and lives are secondary to scientific results. Individuals are over-worked, underpaid, and constantly told that the harm they do is necessary for scientific advancement. There is no other view that is compatible with animal research, but most are unaware, at least consciously, of the horror of this claim. 

In my experience, whenever the morality of animal work was brought up in lab settings, IACUC oversight was used as strong evidence that animals are well cared for. I think it’s obvious that this argument is as hollow as most arguments that rely on the efficacy of bureaucratic oversight. Nonetheless, in academic settings, the whole question of experimental morality relies on IACUC oversight. Outside of that standard, ethical and moral conversations are virtually nonexistent and disparaged as the domain of animal rights activists. 

Animals, particularly rodents, are cheap to breed, relatively easy to experiment on, and the academic world has become comfortable with the type of results they provide, despite the fact these results are often of little translational value. We’ve developed poorly considered animal models of human diseases and used them en-masse for decades.

Now that I’ve exited the world of academic animal research, I believe that, through this complacency, we have created a profitable machine that perpetuates both human and animal suffering and produces dubious and largely non-translatable results.

The psychological consequences of being a cog in this machine are not discussed and are far worse than anyone imagines.

To those who are in this world or considering becoming a part of it, I ask that you seriously consider your own ethics before you find yourself within a framework that comfortably ignores suffering.

More broadly, I hope that the world of scientific research can rethink its relationship with animals. There is room for massive improvements to animal wellbeing and the quality of experimental results.