If you examine various websites or literature from animal rights extremists looking at the issue of animal use in medical research, the forms of the scientific arguments tend, when you boil them down to the very core of their essence, to take three main forms, which are related:
- Animal research doesn’t teach us anything of value or even misleads us (i.e., it is bad science).
- Animal research does not predict human physiology or response to disease, or animals are “just too different from humans to give reliable results” (i.e., it is bad science).
- There are better ways of getting the information that do not use animals (i.e., there is better science available than using animals.)
I tend to look at these arguments as three faces of what is in essence the same argument, specifically what I like to call an “argument from imperfection.” In other words, because animal models have many difficulties and flaws and all too often don’t predict human physiology or drug response as well as the critics think that they should, then by implication
all animal research is bad science. It is an example of demanding 100% perfection or certainty, a bar that no science can ever meet and of concrete thinking typical of extremists. (Creationists and “alternative” medicine mavens are particularly fond of this sort of argument against their hated “Darwinism” or “allopathic” or “conventional” medicine–usually said with a sneer–respectively.)
In its most ridiculous form, this argument takes the form of claiming that cell culture and computer models, among other modalities, can give us the same information without animals. The first reason that this argument is ridiculous is that cell culture models tend to be even less predictive of many responses than animal models for many questions and because much physiology depends upon the interaction of different cell types in their native three dimensional matrix. The second reason is that, for a computer model to be adequately predictive, it needs (1) sufficient information to input and (2) sufficient understanding of the intricacies of the physiology and biochemistry. We don’t have either. Finally, physiology requires understanding at the macroscopic level of how organs interact. Of course, these arguments are often made in less extreme forms, and I will discuss a some of these shortly. Keep in mind as I do, though, that the problem inherent in this sort of argument is that one has to look at what the alternatives to animal research are and compare their usefulness, accuracy, and reliability. If one can’t show that one’s alternative is better than animal research, then all the complaints about the imperfections of animal research don’t amount to much. It’s still the best that we have, and, as such, it’s bad science (and unethical, to boot) not to use it before trying therapies in humans. I have yet to see a compelling argument that any alternative modality predicts human response to disease and treatment well enough that we should rely on it instead of animal models.
