Your article, “Improving The Lot Of The Laboratory Animal” (The Scientist, January 9, 1989, page 1), epitomizes the narrow-minded perspective of animal experimenters and their followers. Few of us today seek “blue boxes” to entertain caged primates, but a termination to the system that imprisons them to begin with, causing harm to humans from reliance on animal data.
I speak from the vantage point of having worked in two animal labs, training under a protégé of the infamous Harry Harlowe in psychological studies.
Newspapers are replete with drugs pulled off the market after they cause birth defects, kidney failure, and death that were not manifested in animal studies. Accounts are rampant of preventative studies (like fat causing breast cancer in humans) not being funded; as extensive monies are funneled into senseless and redundant animal studies that help only the wallets of the animal experimenters.
The Animal Care Committees touted in ...
