James McWilliams’ argument is not new in the literature of opposition to animal research. Nor is it a scientific argument. How could his claim—animal feelings and cognition are enough like human feelings and cognition to merit the right of animals not to be harmed in biomedical research—be empirically verified, as scientific claims require? That evolution conserves physiological traits across species is, of course, an empirically verifiable fact that McWilliams acknowledges as the basis for biomedical research.
No, McWilliams’ argument has to do with consciousness, and for that reason it is a philosophical argument. Not a particularly persuasive one. Animal researchers share with their opponents the conviction that animal feeling and cognition are on a continuum with human feeling and cognition. Hence, their concern for the avoiding any pain to their research subjects and providing for their well-being. But researchers are not prepared to go where even animal rightists don’t go—to claiming that research animals take responsibility for themselves and for others. That level of consciousness appears to be uniquely human. The prohibitions in law and morality against the use of humans in research come from the abundant evidence that humans believe that they have responsibility to dispose of their lives.
Other issues in McWilliams’ article are troublesome. He mentions “billions and billions” of animals used every year. Maybe he like to quote one of Carl Sagan’s favorite expressions, but the order is more on the scale of millions, even when rodents, who make up ninety percent of research animals, are included.
McWilliams boldly asserts that “It goes without saying that many of these [animal] experiments are a waste of time and resources.” Where is the evidence for that claim? To make his work easier, McWilliams might have tried to identify a medical treatment that has not come in one way or another, partially or fully, from the use of animals.
“I’m sure,” McWilliams admits, “that if one of my children were afflicted with a life threatening disease and experimentation on monkeys had a plausible chance of finding a cure, I’d reluctantly support that research.” His honesty is disarming, but this statement reflects a painful misunderstanding of research. Researchers can’t and don’t design research projects as one-to-one responses to individuals’ diseases or injuries. Instead, they examine what is known about a disease as it is found in thousands of cases, look for potential natural models of the disease, refine any such models of the disease to understand this or that physiological mechanism, scour the literature of basic and non-targeted research for clues about the etiology of the disease, conduct double-blind experiments of a number of different interventions, and test the effectiveness and safety of any treatment (first on animals, then on persons). This is a huge and necessarily collaborative effort, and it requires more than one animal or even one species for each afflicted child.
McWilliams’ most significant oversight is his neglect of basic research. When we talk of NIH-funded animal research, we aren’t talking, usually, of testing. Testing confronts a known condition with a fully characterized drug or procedure to be sure that the latter is effective and safe. Instead, we are talking about discovery, which has to do with the unknown. Most biomedical researchers are explorers, following one question or another to where it leads them. When questions are answered or even when they reveal that a certain path is a dead end, they lead not to immediate application but to the store of physiological knowledge. The time between discoveries and the eventual application of new knowledge has been estimated at about 40 years.
Finally, McWilliams fails to note an ironic truth: it is through animal research that scientists have learned as much as we know about the feelings of animals. This knowledge has contributed greatly to animal well being.
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