When Science Made Me Sick: Why I Left the Lab for Good

My initial exposure to animal experimentation came during my high school and undergraduate years, where I participated in dissections using preserved specimens. A vertebrate zoology assignment involving a cat preserved in formalin was upsetting, but I was an impressionable undergraduate and completed the task. I didn’t know the term “cognitive dissonance,” but that was what I experienced. I didn’t learn anything from those dissections that I couldn’t have learned from models. It was the early 1980s, so virtual models/simulations were not options.

I also had a work study position in the animal care facility as an undergraduate. I was responsible for cleaning the litter trays for all the mice and rats being used in research. No one warned me that mother rats in captivity are so stressed that they bite the heads off their newborns and drop them in the litter. There were also brand new alive baby rats in the litter that I was instructed to toss in the trash along with the used litter. I asked for and eventually received another assignment where I prepared solutions for research labs. I had nightmares about those baby rats for a while. 

Following my undergraduate studies, I pursued microbiology for my graduate studies, focusing on the disease processes of streptococcal infections where there are no animal models. As a postdoc, I participated in one experiment with newborn rats, and it made me physically ill. A kind colleague held my hair and handed me a cold compress as I threw up in the parking lot. This latest affront to my innate compassion led to my transition away from bench research to pursue teaching.

I know first-hand how traumatizing animal experimentation is for the non-human and human animals involved. I wish that people knew the abysmal success rate for animal models translating into human-relevant medical treatments. The failure rate for clinical trials of drugs that passed animal testing is 96%! (AKHTAR, A. 2015). The financial burden and trauma caused to humans and non-human animals is far too high to continue this outdated and irrelevant practice. New approach methods (NAMS) are becoming more sophisticated and more relevant. It’s far past the time we move away from torturing animals to support flawed studies. 

Justify’s work is so important so that students and researchers who feel trapped by working in labs performing animal experiments know that their feelings of disgust, fear, and trauma are very real and a normal reaction of compassionate people witnessing mistreatment/torture. The scientific community has normalized the othering of non-human species as being there to serve our “needs,” no matter the cost to the non-human animals or the people who care for them. The ways something has always been done are never a justification for continuing an irrelevant practice.

“Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people” (Laura Greenwood, Fangs For Nothing). 

Dr. Diqui LaPenta, PhD with Jackson the Wonder Chihuahua

AKHTAR, A. (2015). The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 24(4), 407. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963180115000079