April 22, 2009

Introduction

Hi, my name is Tony and I used to work at OHSU, performing research on animals in the name of science. Now I know that animal research is not just horrible, it is also scientifically unjustifiable.

Background

I graduated with a double major in Neuroscience and Psychology from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Most of my professional career has been spent in behavioral neuroscience, a discipline that is based almost exclusively on animal research.

For three months, until November of last year, I was working on animal models of drug abuse as a research assistant in a behavioral neuroscience lab at OHSU. My job consisted of lots of rat handling, including restraint, injections, blood draws, anesthesia, and surgery.

Perhaps I should briefly elucidate what these sterile-sounding euphemisms actually mean. When I describe my job as studying the effects of alcohol and nicotine on impulsive decision making in rats, it sounds far more respectable than it really was. For the most part, my job was to move rats from their cages into experimental chambers, or “boxes,” and once they were finished performing a task for food, I would remove them and record data that was already recorded by the computer. This required transporting rodents from cage to box and back again, and I had to dangle them by their tails because they were so aggravated that they would bite any human within reach. I also routinely gave injections to animals who were constantly struggling to escape. In order to do this, you have to secure a rat in a special device or you have to tightly wrap them in cloth and then apply an incredible amount of force to their trapped bodies until they stop struggling. This is called restraint.

I performed blood draws on rats by puncturing major veins in their legs. The procedure often caused bruising, which would obscure the veins, which would force the researcher to try to blindly perform the procedure, which would then lead to more bruising. In order to perform a surgical procedure, you have to anesthetize your subject, which in a rat lab means disorienting the rat by swinging them in a circle, dropping them into the anesthesia chamber, and then watching them urinate and defecate – classic signs of an unconditioned fear response. Anesthesia itself is a dangerous procedure – once, I was given an almost empty oxygen tank, and if I had not noticed that it had run out in the middle of another animal’s blood draw, the anesthetized animal would have been dead even though they might have passed for unconscious.

Surgery is another procedure that probably requires more training than is actually given to research assistants. I received one half-hour training session, in which I practiced implanting a piece of bubble gum into the subcutaneous space in one rat’s back. I was being trained to conduct similar surgeries in which a mini-pump filled with a nicotine solution would be inserted, which would then continuously pump nicotine at a fixed rate, 24 hours a day, for the next few weeks. This method was supposed to simulate the habits of pack-a-day smokers. We used bubble gum because the pumps themselves were deemed too expensive to waste on a practice surgery.

At the end of the surgery, after we sewed up the rats, it was apparent that the skin was stretched. Some rats showed obvious discomfort and difficulty moving. The night after surgery, two rats succeeded in ripping out their stitches with their teeth, pushing the plastic pumps out of their bodies, and then eating them in order to destroy them. They ate everything except for the metal tubes, including a lifetime’s worth of nicotine in one massive dose. I don’t know how they survived. Our experiments were fatally flawed by this event as well as by innumerable other factors: improperly placed injections, cuts caused by kicking syringes, stitches that were too tight, and digits injured by having doors closed on them, just to name a few. Any one of these commonly observed and commonly ignored accidents could significantly affect an animal’s performance on a behavioral task, and therefore significantly affect the results of the experiment.

At the end of every day, I would return these rats to a room where they were stacked floor-to-ceiling and caged individually, in isolation from one another. Each one of these rats spent most of its waking hours trying to escape, a goal they would only accomplish at the end of the experiment, when they were euthanized.

Scientific Problems

Although the daily grind was mainly spent doing dirty work, I was willing to do it in the service of higher causes like ‘humanity,’ ‘progress,’ and ‘truth.’ In fact, the reason I got into science was because I thought I could make the world a better place, but I quickly learned that the reality of animal research is far different from the public opinion that it is a necessary evil.

Now I know that we are conducting animal research at the expense of prevention efforts, treatment programs, and human clinical studies. Beyond this, the results of animal research are fundamentally flawed: human and non-human animals often react differently to drugs and other treatments due to significant differences in their physiological profiles. In their attempt to ‘control’ independent variables by using experimental animals to study substance abuse, researchers are often unwittingly introducing other significant variables, including metabolic differences, unrealistic dosages and routes of administration, and the effects of stressful and isolated housing conditions, as well as eliminating relevant variables such as environmental triggers, social support systems, and even the addictive behavior itself. Meanwhile, people who actually have these diseases and disorders are suffering and dying.

For instance, people in my lab often joked about the absurdity of injecting alcohol into the abdomens of rats. We all realized that the route of administration, the dosage, and the concentration of the drug were unrealistic and didn’t really resemble drinking in humans. At the same time, animals are paying the price for research that cannot offer any reliable results. Two rats had to be euthanized because a previous member of our lab improperly delivered these alcohol injections, causing severe sores and painful tissue irritation.

Welfare Problems

Animal welfare receives a lot of lip service from scientists whenever anyone attacks animal research, but what they don’t tell you is that animal welfare is not their first priority. Their first priority is to get their job done as quickly as possible, and this means sacrificing the health and well-being of animals to the demands of efficiency. In my experience, mistakes are accepted as an inevitable part of the job. As an animal researcher’s career progresses, the source of experimental error systematically shifts from inexperience to carelessness.

As you may know, the Animal Welfare Act does not cover rats, mice, or birds, which means that it doesn’t cover about 95% of all animals used in research. Also, the Animal Welfare Act only sets standards for animal care and housing; it does not limit what can be done within the experiment itself. So, in principle, you could legally perform any experiment, no matter how inhumane, as long as your experimental protocol passed a review by your organization’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, or IACUC. How hard is it to pass an IACUC review, you might ask?

From my experience, it is not hard, and the ease is evident in the nonchalant attitude that researchers adopt towards the IACUC review and animal welfare in general.

I left my job because I was appalled at the apathy expressed in one specific experimental protocol. The protocol called for the administration of lead in the drinking water of pregnant rats as well as their babies. The purpose of the experiment was to test the hypothesis that high lead levels in drinking water caused or exacerbated Attention Deficit Disorder. Now, the diagnosis of ADD is already problematic to perform in humans, due to its high comorbidity with mood, learning, and behavioral disorders, so you can imagine the difficulty in rats – but we will leave aside that issue for now.

The cavalier attitude towards animal welfare was reflected in the carelessness of the methods and measurements in our experimental protocol. There was no power analysis to determine the minimum number of rats. There were no procedures included for our behavioral tests, our blood draws, or our administration of lead acetate. There was no toxicity information to indicate which doses of lead would cause which symptoms of lead poisoning, much less to justify the range of doses actually proposed. These omissions were made absolutely unacceptable by the additional absence of any post-procedural care plan, which would be initiated in the very possible case of lead poisoning. There was no plan for regularly monitoring rats for symptoms, no plan for giving care to rats with lead poisoning symptoms, and no plan for determining humane endpoints when a rat becomes so ill that it must be euthanized.

Instead of taking this seriously, some of the members of our lab seemed to think this was funny. I actually heard people laughing about their own inability to administer veterinary care in the case that a rat started convulsing or showing other signs of lead poisoning. This is not an abnormal occurrence: it is simply another, somewhat more obvious indicator of the institutionalized indifference that is standard practice in a system where you are conditioned not to care about animal welfare.

In addition to our proposal’s lack of animal welfare precautions, there also was no biosafety plan to protect the researchers from lead exposure. Given the massive methodological omissions, the veterinarian and the experimental analyst rejected the first draft of the proposal before full committee review. This means the IACUC is doing its job, right?

Economic problems

When I asked my boss whether she thought the study would pass the IACUC approval process, she said something that seemed strange at the time. Her words were: “It will pass, because it already has funding.” The experiment passed after I left. What I did not know then is that federal grants given to researchers also include general funding for those researchers’ institutions. This means that the institution as a whole has a vested interest in approving every experimental protocol under review, as the grant for the experiment includes indirect costs like building maintenance and employee salaries as well as direct costs for the actual experiment. This corruption is simply one symptom of a broken system, one in which knowledge of government grant politics is more important to a researcher than knowledge of one’s own field and one in which federal funding selectively supports seniority, conservative research proposals, and experiments that can be quickly conducted and quickly published. If we want to invest in innovative technologies and young scientists, we need to stop funding animal research.

Since I left my job, I have made the difficult realization that every single cent that was spent on my research and my salary could have been used more effectively elsewhere. Animal research, which produces questionable and contradictory results when applied to human medicine, is leeching much-needed funding from treatment and prevention programs, which directly engage with the lives of addicted, recovering, and at-risk populations. Generally, physicians are very wary of the results of animal research if they have not been corroborated in humans, preferring more accurate and less costly clinical and epidemiological studies.

From my experience, animal research is a waste of time, money, and life.

Thanks for your time.