Animal Rights Movement Threatens Progress Of U.S. Medical Research

When I was a medical student in the late 1940s, we did weekly laboratory exercises in physiology and pharmacology. Each group of four students would anesthetize a cat or dog and do an experiment, investigating blood pressure or respiration or recording electrical activity from the brain. That was where we learned how complicated a live animal is, where we learned to cut and sew up skin, where we learned to control the loss of blood, and where we got over some of our squeamishness at the sight o

Written byDavid Hubel

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The cats and dogs were strays, picked up by the hundreds from the streets and taken to the pound. If unclaimed after a waiting period, they could be used for research or teaching, but more often the pound would simply kill them with an overdose of the same anesthetic we used. These animals cost the medical school about $5 each. Today, because laws in most states make the use of pound animals for research and teaching purposes illegal, a dog to be used for research in cardiac surgery has to be bred for the purpose and costs about $800. Ultimately, of course, the taxpayer pays the bill. Meanwhile, laboratory exercises like the ones I had in medical school have all but vanished.

The change has come about largely because of the activities of about 500 groups in the United States that are generally against the use of animals in medical ...

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