Why I Can No Longer "Justify" Animal Research

Animals have been used as stand-ins for humans when conducting biomedical research since classical antiquity when this approach was pioneered by the likes of Aristotle and Galen. But, after thousands of years, are these methods still necessary or can we make progress in science without the mistreatment of animals? 

I am a research scientist. I have performed biomedical research for over 5 decades during which time I have been involved in killing many thousands of rats and mice. This is typical for scientists of my type working at research universities throughout the world.

Over the last decade, I began to critically question my actions and now I have ceased performing experiments on animals and support the efforts of organizations like Justify.

So, what changed?

Richard J. Miller & Lightning the horse

Since my earliest childhood, as far back as I can remember, I have always loved science and continue to do so today. That hasn’t changed at all. My interests led me to investigate the functions of the brain and how we might treat psychiatric and neurological diseases.

As an undergraduate, I studied the subject with increasing fascination. However, all of this was theory; it wasn’t until I joined a laboratory as a graduate student that I actually had to engage with a live animal. One of the first things I was asked to do was to kill several rats and remove their brains to provide tissues for my experiments. Faced with this task, I immediately found I had a major problem. I had always been a lover of animals and now I was being asked to kill them! I found I just couldn’t do it.

Eventually, I was able to overcome my revulsion; this was the way science was done; killing or mistreating animals was just a “necessary evil”, because we couldn’t carry out experiments directly on humans. I wanted to be a scientist, and so this was just the price I had to pay. Somehow, I buried my feelings of disgust and carried on.

I think this is how many scientists deal with this problem. The biomedical research enterprise demands this kind of behavior. Scientists are not sadists. Many of them have pets that they love. So, the problem of cruelty to animals at work is something they just decide not to engage with. Science is a very competitive enterprise, and universities put tremendous pressure on faculty to obtain grant funding to pay for their research and salaries. There is clearly no time to consider things like animal welfare.

Scientists convince themselves that what they are doing to animals is absolutely necessary and will help them produce important scientific data. They are not prepared to consider the possibility that neither of these things are actually true.

Eventually, I began to think seriously about what I was doing: I asked myself several questions and realized that some things about the use of animals in biomedical research simply didn’t make sense.

For example, scientists perform experiments on animals to find new cures for things like pain or psychiatric diseases like depression. In order to do so, they have to inflict pain on animals or abuse them so that they become “depressed”. This approach relies on the idea that animals can experience pain and depression in a fashion that is similar to humans. We don’t perform such studies on humans because they are sentient creatures and so this approach is deemed unethical. Animals are sentient creatures which is the reason why scientists think they are good models for finding out about pain and depression.

If we don’t perform studies on humans because they are sentient creatures, then why is it reasonable to do these things to animals? The answer, of course, is that it isn’t, and scientists are just trying to have things both ways; they are just not prepared to think critically about what they are doing.

Scientists stress animal sentience when they want to show that their experiments are relevant for human biology and conveniently forget about it when the subject of ethical responsibility comes up.

I came to similar conclusions when I thought about the other questions that I had asked myself. Most of the ongoing assumptions about the utility of animal research just didn’t stand up to critical analysis. I also realized that the landscape of biomedical research is changing and that humancentric research models based on things like stem cells and genomics are rapidly becoming more and more sophisticated and useful for the research enterprise.

If I was the government, I would ensure that science is well funded. Current talk about reducing funding levels for science is completely shortsighted and unreasonable. But I would try to make sure that future funding was increasingly directed to nonanimal based humancentric research and this now seems to be what is happening. If you want to obtain funding from the NIH, you had better make sure that your suggested studies are centered on human biology.

My personal deliberations led me away from performing research that involved the mistreatment of animals. I am still involved in biomedical research but view my role as trying to help my colleagues perform their studies using new humancentric methods that don’t involve animals. Science is still “necessary”; let’s make sure that it is no longer “evil”.

Purchase the book and leave a review here.

The Rise and Fall of Animal Experimentation: Empathy, Science, and the Future of Research

By Richard J. Miller

Biomedical research makes extensive use of animals even though it is frequently extremely cruel. The book examines the history of animal research, how it arose in antiquity and the history of the animal welfare movement that opposes animal research. The book asks several important questions about animal research including whether it is really effective in today’s world, whether it is ethical and whether it is necessary in the face of many current technological developments. The book discusses how modern research technologies such as human stem cell research is rapidly making animal research obsolete.