Stacked away in my basement is an old 8-track cassette player that I used as a kid in the late 1970’s. I keep it to remind me how far science can advance if there is the will to do so.
Did you know that tens of thousands of dogs each year are subject to experimentation in the name of medical science? The beagle is the most used dog breed. Why? Beagles are favored because they are gentle and put their trust in humans: a trust that is broken when they become experiment subjects
Stacked away in my basement is an old 8-track cassette player that I used as a kid in the late 1970’s. I keep it to remind me how far science can advance if there is the will to do so. The 8-tracks first hit the market in the mid-1960’s and were considered state of the art sound-recording technology at the time. If anyone here remembers those devices, you will recall how big they were, unwieldy, and frankly, ugly. But the science of sound recording and playing has dramatically improved since then. I can now play any music in the world on a small phone, and with amazing sound quality. And who knows what the next technological breakthrough in recording and playing will be?
But the point is that music technology and pretty much every other
area of science and technology is always changing, always
innovating. But that isn’t happening with medical science. Sure,
there are slight changes here and there, but when it comes to
medical research, the scientific community still largely clings to a
very old, and increasingly archaic “tool”: animals.
Despite the increasing evidence of the ineffectiveness of animal
testing today, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still requires
all new drugs and vaccines to be tested on two different species.
One of the most used animals for drug testing is dogs, specifically
beagles. Why beagles? Not because they mimic human biology, but
because they are so gentle and trusting. They are bred in
factory-farm style puppy mills. In 2019, 60,000 dogs were used in
experiments, often for toxicity testing, in which the beagles are
poisoned with chemicals and drug compounds.
The act of experimenting on animals has been around for centuries,
starting from the days of public evisceration of screaming dogs and
cats. Back then, one could make the case that what we found in other
animals was often applicable to humans because we were looking at
basic anatomy and physiology. The heart does pump in the same basic
ways in dogs, cats, mice, and humans. But today, medical research is
now looking into the subtle nuances of molecular biology, genetic
expression, and biochemistry. Even minor differences between humans
and other animals can cause misleading and erroneous results in
study outcomes, leading research in the wrong direction. And
so-called animal “models “of diseases are really artificial models,
because the diseases are artificially created in them, making the
diseases different from what actually occurs in humans. We now know
how poor animal testing is in informing human health and predicting
whether a drug or vaccine will be safe and effective in humans.
Isn’t it time to discard the legacy of cruel and ineffective animal
tests and modernize medical research? Think about it, would anyone
today argue that we should still use the original Mercury space
capsule for space travel? Of course not, significant advancements
have been made that render space travel much safer.
Significant advancements have also been made in medical research,
such as the human body on chip technology that have the potential to
better predict whether a drug will be safe and will work in humans
than animal tests. But agencies such as the FDA must change their
policies to allow more of these advancements to be used in place of
artificial animal testing.
We now have a chance to change the FDA’s policies. This October,
with CCS’s assistance, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced the
FDA Modernization Act of 2021. This new bill is beautiful in its
simplicity. It merely changes the word “animal” to “nonclinical,” in
FDA regulations, something I tried to do internally in my ten years
at FDA. By making this one change, the bill will expand the types of
testing methods that can be used for drug development, including the
use of the newest and most advanced tools available.
CCS is embarking on a major campaign to help pass the FDA
Modernization Act. With your support, we can save tens of thousands
of beagles and other animals each year. And save us. Medical science
is in urgent need of an update, only then can we feel confident that
we are doing the best we can to find the cures we need.
Together, we can modernize medical science to save both human and
animal lives. Support CCS's work at
Center for Contemporary Sciences.