Chris Magee

The Welfare of Lab Animals Should Be Considered Every Day, Not Just Once a Year

2013-04-22T10:44:08-04:00

This Wednesday, April 24, is the World Day for Animals in Laboratories, held annually to consider the use of animals in scientific and medical research. It is typically marked by small-scale protests, big money campaigns and, no doubt, articles such as Peter Tatchell's in the Huffington Post in which protest groups push their individual brands.

Although it is often claimed that it is "UN recognised", the day does not in fact appear anywhere on the UN list of observances. However, that does not mean that the welfare of animals in labs should not be taken seriously - on the contrary it should be considered every day.

One criticism of World Day for Laboratory Animals, is that protest groups tend to paint a very one-sided picture of animal research and are rather selective in their reporting. The picture below, for instance, originates from 1970s America, yet is still used today. Not representative, not this country, not even this century.

There are fewer pictures of the rodents and fish that today make up some 95% of the animals used in UK research. In fact around half of "experiments" are the birth of a laboratory mouse.

There is scant acknowledgement that it is illegal in the UK to use an animal if there is an alternative, or that research is done for the benefit of humans and animals alike, such as the badger TB vaccine, or that UK researchers are the most highly regulated in the world. Whilst we should never deny that suffering can occur, considering only cost does not help us determine value.

However, internationally, the welfare of animals should be of concern. Countries outside of the UK, and particularly outside of Europe, do not have nearly the same concern for animal welfare as is found in UK society and law. For instance, UK researchers do not use monkeys caught from the wild and it is illegal to use Great Apes. Some protesters ask why mice are used when they are only up to 90% genetically equivalent to humans; the answer to that conundrum in some other countries is to use a chimp.

A key criticism, then, is that potential suffering in labs should be something considered every day, everywhere, not just once a year. Internationally, animal protections that match the UK's high standards should be enshrined in law, and taken to heart by individual researchers. Domestically, the emphasis should be on individuals upholding the "3Rs" i.e. reducing the number of animals used, replacing them where possible and refining practices or experiments to minimise any potential suffering, held to account where necessary by those they are working with.

It is far more effective that those working in labs take this message to heart than it would be to generate thousands of hours of grainy and unremarkable CCTV footage, or hire an army of inspectors to jump out from behind the fume cupboard in the faint hope of catching somebody doing something illegal.

In the UK, the government-backed National Centre for the 3Rs (NC3Rs) leads the way in funding projects that promote replacement, refinement and reduction, with the 3Rs now also enshrined in law and embedded in the Home Office licensing system.

Some exciting replacement technologies are on the horizon, such as the recent news that a research team from Harvard was awarded the NC3Rs prize for animal replacement potential for a micro-device containing hollow channels lined with living human tissue cells. This 'lung-on-a-chip' can 'breathe' when a vacuum is applied to part of it, and was used to successfully model the development of pulmonary oedema, or water in the lungs. In addition this research was able to suggest several new avenues for drug development research.

Devices like this have been used to simulate the heart, kidney, arteries, bone, cartilage and skin. At present, organs-on-chips are still very basic and heavily reliant on data from living animals and people to validate their results. However, in the future, a whole network of organs-on-chips might be able to accurately model disease progression in the human body.

In other areas, it has been possible to replace mice with fruit flies to study Alzheimer's disease. In 2010, researchers from UCL published the results of a study in which they identified a potential drug target and successfully "treated" Alzheimer's in transgenic flies.

Hopefully, the government will retain and increase its funding for the 3Rs. There will be natural technological limits, such as limits to computing power, and one cannot virtually model what one does not yet understand. However, every effort should be made to achieve what can be achieved.

Nobody uses an animal if there is an alternative but, when they must be used, minimising their numbers and the avoidance of suffering must continue to be paramount in researchers' minds. Exciting new technologies are part of the solution, but nothing can replace constant vigilance in applying the 3Rs during the inception of experiments, the licensing of experiments and in the lab.

This means considering the potential for suffering every day, not just once a year.

We All Agree About Cosmetics, But We Still Need Animals for Medicine

2013-03-27T19:00:00-04:00

The recent, fantastic, news that it will be illegal to sell cosmetics tested on animals across Europe has been a long time coming, and offers hope that the ban may one day spread outside of Europe. The use of animals for veterinary and medical applications, however, remains essential.

In the UK, it is illegal to use an animal if there is an alternative, and some species such as dogs have special protections which dictate that they can only be used if there is no alternative to that particular species, a general approach that has spread across Europe via a recently-adopted EU Directive.

The UK research community also seeks to minimise the number of animals used in experiments, replacing them where possible and refining the experiments to minimize suffering - the so called "3Rs" of reduction, refinement and replacement. In that sense, we enjoy common ground with organisations such as the Vegan Society, animal welfare and abolitionist groups.

Where we part company with the Vegan Society and the abolitionists (we continue to agree with animal welfare organisations) is their call for scientists to be forced to stop using animals in experiments altogether. In this, the Society has surprisingly adopted the stance of the research abolitionist groups not just in its misunderstanding of the science involved but also its misunderstanding of the industry that conducts the research.

Take for example an article by Jasmijn De Boo, CEO of the Vegan Society, who claims here that animal models are too limited to be worthwhile, and there are cheaper alternatives, yet:

"... the political will is not there yet to build on the Cosmetics Ban's potential and abolish all animal research and testing. An important reason may be that pressure from the pharmaceutical industry and similar establishments weighs heavily on the shoulders of our politicians."

This is a commonly-held, but flawed view, which it is surprising to hear repeated in an otherwise reasonable article but is fairly straightforward to unravel. The simple question is, if there are cheaper and better techniques available, and it is illegal not to use them, why would industry not adopt them?

What could possibly be in it for pharmaceutical companies to use an illegal method likely to cost them more money and yield dangerous medicines? Moreover, the Home Office licenses all experiments, and will turn down an application to conduct an animal experiment if there is an alternative available, and scientists generally don't want to use a model that doesn't work - that is not how one makes discoveries nor goes down in history, so there is a motive to use the most reliable methods available.

The truth of the matter is of course is a little more boring - animal models do have their limits but are, in fact, instructive. Most experiments are actually carried out by universities and medical schools, with only 26% carried out by industry. In the future we may see ever more partnership working between industry and academia, but the fact remains that animal studies are only one small part of bringing forward new medicines.

Animal research has also always been about more than "testing". It is about discovery and the application of that knowledge to human and animal medicine. Take for instance Sir John Gurdon, who 50 years ago took a cell from a frog's stomach and cloned another frog from it. More recently, Shinya Yamanaka, building on 40 years of science since Gurdon, reversed an adult human cell to a stem cell state, and work is already underway to use a skin cell from the arm to treat Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, or repair post heart-attack scarring. Gurdon and Yamamoto won a joint Nobel Prize for their work in 2012.

The striking thing about this example is that it contains many lessons about animal research and indeed science in general. Firstly, it can take 40 years or more for scientific knowledge to become medical application. Secondly, in 1963 Dr Gurdon would not have been able to tell you exactly what applications his discovery would have, which makes a nonsense out of the idea that research should only be conducted where the applications are crystal clear. Thirdly, in common with most animal research, the original frog experiment was a long way from the alarming old pictures of monkeys and cats that adorn protesters' placards. Indeed, around half of all "experiments" are simply the birth of a genetically manipulated laboratory mouse, which is counted as a medical procedure and which I do not think most people would find particularly unsettling.

Nobody is saying, then, that animal models are pointless and nor are they perfect - neither position is supported by the evidence. The value one places in them is essentially a moral view, but what is "ethical" or moral depends on your viewpoint. I might consider it more "ethical" for instance, that a vaccine for badger TB cases was developed using animal research, than it is to cull thousands of badgers. The fact that animals were used, demonstrates that the "alternatives", such as computer modelling and tissue samples which are in fact used alongside animals in studies, did not, on their own, lead to the vaccine. As we are the only species in a position to protect man, animals and the environment from the iniquities of nature, opponents of animal research have to accept the suffering that comes about by failing to act, whilst being honest about the level of suffering that research may entail.

I suspect, then, that most people will find themselves somewhere on a scale, where some experiments are more acceptable to them and others less so, depending on their values and the individual experiment in question. It is as misguided to say there should be no animal experimentation in the absence of alternatives, as it would be to support experimentation on animals whatever the reason.

The position of Understanding Animal Research is to base the debate on the facts, bearing in mind that only animal experiments deemed medically and scientifically valuable receive a licence in the first place. We are "conditional acceptors" meaning we see experiments as valid only when there is no alternative and potential suffering is minimised. We cannot and will not try to tell you what to think, but can at least clear the air so that individuals can reach their own conclusions about the value of animal research.

The 100 Year War: Why Diseases Can Take Generations to Tackle

2012-10-26T19:00:00-04:00

When the UK's Sir John Gurdon won the Nobel Prize along with Shinya Yamanaka, it acted as a reminder that the practical use of scientific discoveries can take decades to reveal themselves.

Gurdon's work used frogs to prove that a single cell in your body contains all the DNA you need to make another you. Taking a cell from the intestines of a frog, he inserted the genetic information within into a frog egg, creating a clone frog. The same technique was used by the next generation of scientists to make Dolly the Sheep in 1996.

Forty years later, Shinya Yamanaka built on Gurdon's work to 'reset' cells. The cells in our body start out as stem cells, before specialising to do different things. Prof Yamanake managed to reverse this process, to render specialised cells in a state where they could develop into anything. This is particularly exciting for medicine, for a number of reasons. As Yamanaka himself puts it "My goals over the decade include to develop new drugs to intractable diseases by using iPS cell technology and to conduct clinical trials using it on a few patients with Parkinson's disease, diabetes or blood diseases."

In the same way that Prof Yamanaka's work was informed by the breeding of that cloned frog 40 years previously, Prof Gurdon was himself inspired by other scientists including Robert Brigg, Thomas J. King and Donald D. Brown. What this again shows is the incremental nature of scientific discovery, with different scientists, often across different generations, each providing a piece of the puzzle.

In that sense, there is really no such thing as a failed experiment - an experiment shows something to be the case or not and sometimes leads to surprising discoveries that could not have been foreseen. The sequence of discoveries that led to breast cancer drug Herceptin, for instance, started decades earlier with the discovery of a mouse hormone, which is not in itself particularly useful.

Scientists are often criticised, particularly by people with only a lay understanding of their work, because people cannot see the immediate application of their research, but this does not mean that there will not be an application in the future.

Some benefits, of course, are obvious, such as vaccines. Dolly the sheep was killed by the JSRV virus, which causes cancer in sheep if contracted and for which there is currently no vaccine. In contrast, Western lowland gorillas, which have lost 25% of their natural population to the Ebola virus in recent years, can be treated with the human Ebola vaccine. What seems clear in this respect is that all of nature is in an arms race against communicable diseases and mankind is more or less doomed to be forever working on developing new treatments to emerging natural threats to humans, animals and the environment.

However, other discoveries take longer to become practical. Work done involving animals in the 1970s, for example, is now used to keep premature babies alive. Back then, protesters were calling for that work to be stopped because it involved animals, yet this research will be a gift that keeps on giving as generations of children benefit. Imagine, too, that scientists discovered that when testing a potential cure it caused other health problems - the drug trial might be considered a commercial failure, but its scientific value and its value to you and I is nevertheless considerable.

Every life scientist is standing on the shoulders of the previous generation. As we make ever greater inroads to understanding the functioning of living bodies, we should remember that, just because the utility of a piece of knowledge is not yet clear, doesn't mean the process of obtaining that knowledge can be considered a waste of time. We should always bear in mind that, when thinking about science, There Is No Such Thing As A Failed Experiment.

Home Office Stats Shine a Light on Animal Research

2012-07-17T19:00:00-04:00

Recently, the BUAV's Michelle Thew, who campaigns against animal research, asked "wouldn't it be nice if the debate about animal experiments could be based on what is really involved?"

Helpfully, the Home Office has just released its annual statistics demonstrating how many animals of what type are used for what purpose.

In this document, each experiment is termed a "procedure". Roughly 3.8 million procedures are undertaken each year and some animals can be used for more than one procedure.

So, what is a procedure? At minimum, it's defined as the "skilled insertion of a hypodermic needle", - taking a blood sample or giving an injection to you or me. The Home Office also has similar definitions for psychological stress or changes in diet.

There are a number of reasons a researcher might want to undertake a procedure. They can range widely from breeding mice with a high chance of developing cancer, so the early stages of the disease can be studied using MRI scans or to trial treatments, to drugs testing, to developing animal vaccines. Since research can involve such a broad range of activities, the Home Office classifies each procedure by the probable level of suffering, or lack thereof, that the animal is likely to experience.

Procedures are thus classified in three degrees of potential severity - "mild", "moderate" and "substantial". Although the Home Office has previously stated that only 2% of procedures are "substantial", this is an average across projects and the figure is likely to be closer to 5%. The number of procedures that are unclassified is 3%, so the remaining 92% of procedures are mild or moderate.

Table 1 of the Home Office stats shows that almost half of "procedures" refer to the birth of a Genetically Modified (GM) or Harmfully Mutated (HM) animal (such as those likely to develop cancer), which are nearly all mice. Since the mapping of the human genome was completed in 2003, the focus of much research has been on finding out what these genes do, with the hope of preventing diseases such as cystic fibrosis or breast cancer. Hence, mice are born missing certain genes to study their function, and this is classified as a procedure.

Needless to say, GM animals do not necessarily suffer at all as a result of this branch of research. The designation of their birth as a procedure is due to the fact there is a chance they will suffer, rather than there being any evidence that they did. However, we can say with certainty that this work will ultimately prevent suffering in those animals and humans that would be born with various diseases in the future.

Overall, 93% of procedures carried out on animals in 2011 involved rodents or fish. This year's statistics show a 3% rise in actual (non-breeding) procedures, which is mainly due to an increase in research involving fish and domestic fowl. Almost all of the fowl were used for veterinary purposes, while fish are increasingly used for basic research into medical problems such as heart conditions.

The rise also masks work to reduce, replace and refine the use of animals in research, such as using fish foetuses or fruit flies in preference to mice. In many ways, the annual statistics are a measure not of animal suffering but the current level of investment in UK research.

The statistics also dispel one of the other great myths about animal research - that it is mainly undertaken by the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, only 26% of procedures are undertaken by commercial organisations of any kind, while the rest is undertaken by non-profit organisations, public bodies, public health labs, hospitals, charities, universities and medical schools. Far from being a secret, you can download this information from the Home Office website, from a page called "Research and testing using animals". As hiding places go, I've seen better.

This mix of researchers also largely explains why UAR's membership and funding list looks like it does.

That said, there is a long way to go to encourage complete openness. For instance, UAR works with researchers at universities around the UK to increase openness, but there are obvious pressures around the risk of misrepresentation of their research and potential risks to staff safety. Although attacks are now largely a thing of the past, we are less than 10 years from a particularly dark age of animal extremism, including car bombs, threats to families and the exhumation of one animal supplier's dead mother-in-law.

We must nevertheless continue to demonstrate to researchers that it is in their interests to be open about their work, because once the public see what really goes on and why, they are highly likely to understand its value to humans and animals alike.

So I agree that we should be talking about what's really involved in animal research. I agree that we should acknowledge that 95% of procedures are mild or moderate, and that nearly half of procedures are the breeding of a mouse. I believe that the debate should be measured and avoid superlatives. I believe that anti-research campaigners should be a lot more honest in their descriptions of animal research. Finally, I believe that we should continue down the long road to greater openness, the start of which is civilised debate, not extremism or misleading accounts of what goes on in the lab.

BUAV and the Art of the Red Herring

2012-07-04T06:28:19-04:00

An interesting row has arisen around the transposition of an EU Directive into UK law. It has been sparked by a claim that stray or feral animals will be used in animal research, and tells us a great deal about how anti-animal research lobbyists sometimes mislead their supporters by raising phoney "issues".

Although the BUAV often do good work in promoting the welfare of selected animals, their latest campaign was based on a self-generated myth that really seemed to spiral out of control.

The basic claim of the BUAV was that a change to the law meant, from January next year, there was a chance that former pets would be snatched from the street by scientists and "tortured" in laboratories. BUAV's Michelle Thew gave examples in a recent Huff Post piece that implied the animals would be electrocuted and forced to swim.

A shocking claim indeed. So why was it that the UK's most respected animal welfare organisation, the RSPCA, disagreed that there was any such risk? As the RSPCA themselves stated "...we have looked into this very carefully and believe there will not, in fact, be any change to the current situation in the UK - and that the intention of the Home Office remains NOT to allow the use of any stray animals."

The answer lies in the full text, and the wider context, of the proposed legislation. In it, there is a presumption against the use of strays, but with the caveat that they may be used in certain extreme situations, such as if a serious disease was sweeping through a community of stray or feral animals, or that this serious disease looked as if it was likely to infect domestic pets.

It makes sense that our animal welfare laws are not self-defeating and that we are able to help animals that are suffering by conducting "animal research" like, for instance, taking a blood sample.

That said, it remains massively improbable that strays would be used for this research because of important caveats in the legislation that explicitly state that it must be unavoidable, and in no conceivable circumstances would the research involve the measures described by the BUAV campaign.

Meanwhile the Home Office, which would licence such research, stated both that the proposed legislation was identical to current arrangements with regard to justified exceptions (and therefore there would be no actual change), and restated that it could not envisage any situation where strays would be used. Furthermore, the UK biosciences sector, which would theoretically be doing any such research, actually lobbied against the use of stray or feral animals in laboratories at both the domestic and European level.

The BUAV's claims at first seemed like a harmless attempt to look busy - worrying supporters with a false claim that there would be any de-facto change in the use of strays. As usual, they misrepresented what animal research really is and glossed over the fact that, in UK law, even the breeding of a mouse, the testing of veterinary cure or the taking of a blood sample can be classified as an experiment.

The trick seemed to work. Supporters were outraged and wrote to their MPs, some of whom tabled EDMs and asked questions in Parliament. One of these EDMs praised the BUAV, and requested a Parliamentary debate on the issues it was raising.

It is at this point that we must ask ourselves whether it is right that the BUAV, which has been happy to misrepresent both the legislation and the true nature of animal research, should be setting the terms of a Parliamentary debate on legislation about animal research.

The BUAV are now falsely claiming victory for achieving a "change in government position" on the use of strays. There has of course been no such change in government position, but the BUAV may simply have realised that their scheme is rumbled, and their red herring pickled, so it's best to draw the campaign to an end before anyone notices it was spurious.

Well, the RSPCA, the government and the scientific community noticed - and I wonder if MPs will be less willing in the future to accept the BUAV at face value the next time they make an hysterical claim about animal research.

We Need to Hear the Whole Truth About Animal Research

2012-06-06T19:00:00-04:00

Michelle Thew recently wrote a piece for The Huffington Post on the use of stray or feral animals in medical research labs. Unfortunately, the article was missing vital information that may change the way that readers understand the issue.

Ms Thew was referring to a Home Office consultation response document relating to EU Directive 2010/63/EU, which is set to raise animal welfare standards across Europe.

Ms Thew's thesis was this - the Directive would also mean that stray animals such as lost pets could be caught, with no attempt to return them to their owners, before being poisoned, electrocuted or forced to swim in laboratories.

Whilst it is true that stray animals could be used in research, in the field or in the lab, this is not the whole truth. The document actually reads:

"Article 11 prohibits the use of stray and feral animals of domestic species except in essential studies relating to the health and welfare of the animals, or serious threats to the environment or to human or animal health. There must also be a scientific justification that the purpose of the procedure can be achieved only by the use of a stray or a feral animal."
Page 17, Consultation on options for transposition of European Directive 2010/63/EU on the protection of animals used for scientific Purposes. Summary report and Government response, May 2012.

The use of stray or feral cats would, then, be either to treat diseases in that species, or the very highly unlikely situation of a 'serious' threat to humans, animals or the environment that could only possibly be studied in stray animals. It would otherwise be illegal.

It is not possible to know what the nature of the threat could be, so the government has not ruled anything out. However, animals like humans are vulnerable to outbreaks of diseases such as rabies, or environmental changes that have a profound effect on their chances of survival. In the case of a disease, the 'use' could be the testing of a vaccine, perhaps by pill or injection rather than the gratuitous electrocution of a beloved family pet. It might equally be the study of feline HIV in feral cat populations, which is unlikely to involve taking them for a swim.

Researchers proposing a vaccine or treatment would have to prove that testing the vaccine on a stray or feral cat, rather than via another technique or animal (including laboratory-bred cats), was literally the only way to proceed, in order to get a licence from the Home Office that allowed them to do the work. They cannot simply grab animals off the street. In doing this research, they would be attempting to protect Europe's cat population from the spread of a deadly disease.

Animal welfare groups such as the BUAV often do good work, rightfully exposing breaches of the law and helping to refine policy around, for instance, conflicts of interest. Unfortunately, some of them have also convinced themselves there are alternatives to animal research, when this viewpoint is both scientifically bogus and a self-defeating argument: It is already illegal to use animals if there is a proven alternative. Although work continues apace to find alternatives and reduce the numbers of animals used, we are not there yet. If there are genuinely alternatives, available now, all protesters have to do is produce them and a grateful scientific community will be legally compelled to use them.

The article also exposes other examples of rhetorical tricks that anti-vivisection groups can use to make their case. These include neglecting to mention the key safeguards of the legislation, exaggerating the probability of stray animals ever being used, examining only the costs of animal research rather than the net benefits to animal welfare, building a 'straw man' argument using the definition of 'severe procedures', concealing government safeguards outside of the legislation, listing experimental techniques that are highly unlikely to be used, divorcing research techniques from the purpose of the procedure and making a false claim to moral authority when animal research is key to both human and animal welfare.

There is also a tendency for anti-vivisection lobbyists to resort to emotive language when describing research, which can be easy to do when describing any medical procedure. Even a visit to the dentist can be made to sound pretty hair-raising if you use enough colourful allusions and ghoulish imagery. If you then omit the reason you were there in the first place it begins to sound like an outrageous assault, rather than an entirely necessary procedure.

It is absurd to claim that the researchers who create the drugs found at the vet's clinic are opposed to animal welfare. They may instead be making a decision to sacrifice one animal's welfare for that of many, but this, surely, saves more animals from suffering and premature death.

In contrast, anti-vivisection lobbyists champion not animal welfare but "an" animal's welfare, advocating the rights and welfare of individual animals, but not the majority of animals or animals as a whole. To call it "Animal Libertarianism" is taking it a bit far, but it is a type of 19th century individualism which has found itself advocating individual welfare over the welfare of the community or wider species. As with every set of rights, there is a conflict at some point between the rights of the individual and the welfare of others. By wholly backing the individual, they find themselves ignoring the greater needs of a larger population.

Animal research is a tough topic to discuss, a task made harder by breathless but groundless anti-vivisection narratives that mislead the public over various aspects of the issue. Whilst not doubting that anti-vivisection organisations are well-intentioned, it is time for them to consider how, if their beliefs regarding alternatives happen to be misconceived, this affects their moral position.

In an echo of Mark Henderson's Geek Manifesto, we too call for the public, and particularly scientists, to write to their MPs, asking them to stand up for human and animal welfare by supporting the scientific community and animal research, and at very least reassess some of the claims and concerns of lobbyists like Michelle Thew in the light of their tendency to mislead.

Click here to write to your MP today.