Mainstream Science Magazine Acknowledges Animal Model Failures
Friday, July 13, 2007

Three articles in the July 2007 issue of The Scientist discuss the failure of animal models in biomedical research.

In the July 2007 issue of The Scientist three articles appeared that discussed the failure of animal models in biomedical research: “The trouble with animal models”; “Why sex matters in mouse models”; and “Trials and error”. The articles discussed examples of where the animal models predicted one thing but human experience revealed another in areas such as stroke research.

This is an important breakthrough as it is one of the only examples of the research industry itself acknowledging such failures. The Scientist is a very pro-vivisection magazine and is widely read by the scientific community. While I would not say these three articles represented a reversal of their position, at least they printed something critical about the use of animals to predict human response.

Even so, the articles were definitely pro-vivisection as they went to great lengths to justify the use of animals despite the obvious failures of the animal models cited.

On a separate note, the articles showed a great deal of bias in quoting the RDS, a vested interest group in the UK representing animal experimenters, as claiming only 26 million animals are used each year in the US and Europe. This claim is nothing short of incredible.

In 2000 the Library of Congress published a report with the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service estimating the number of rats, mice, and birds used annually in the US to be around 500 million.

In the August 2004 issue of Scientific American, a former editor of Scientific American, Madhusree Mukerjee, estimated that more than 100 million transgenic mice were used in American labs alone each year.

The exact number of animals used annually in labs is unknown and likely to remain so since the real numbers would astonish most Americans. But 26 million is off by at least an order of magnitude. Nothing short of purposeful deceit on the part of the animal experimentation industry can explain such a claim.

But all in all the articles were a step forward. NAVS and AFMA have been saying for decades that because of our understanding of evolutionary biology, recent advances in a field of physics known as chaos and complexity, and knowledge gained from the field of genetics (for example the Human Genome Project), we now understand why even identical twins react differently to drugs and disease. Drug testing in animals has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be unreliable. If men cannot predict drug response for women and identical twins do not suffer from the same diseases it is nothing short of insanity to expect a totally different species to react like humans to diseases like AIDS, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and others.

NAVS and AFMA have been criticized by those with a vested interest in animal experimentation for saying some of the exact things The Scientist said in these articles. In our books, beginning in 2000 and on the AFMA website, we have laid out reasons, both theoretical and empirical, why the animal model does not and indeed cannot predict human response, is a waste of taxpayer money, and is misleading in general. Our criticisms are now being acknowledged.

Mahatma Gandhi said: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

The Scientist ignored the arguments from evolutionary biology and so forth, which would have completely destroyed all supposed scientific underpinnings for using animals in research. But at least they admitted to some of the flaws inherent with the use of the animal model.

This is a start.