After two weeks, Jessie was up on all fours again, barking at the mailman. And now, a year later, she's "her beautiful, bouncy, Great Dane self again," says Papich.
"Her owners had given Jessie the [anti-inflammatory] drug thinking it could help her, but they didn't know it would hurt her," adds Papich, an associate professor of clinical pharmacology at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
The development of the drug Tagamet and its successful application in Jessie's case is a prime example of a not-infrequent occurrence of research originally performed on lab animals for the sake of humans that is eventually found to benefit animals as well. Today, for instance, veterinarians routinely perform prosthetic hip replacements and pacemaker implants on dogs--two procedures initially tried on dogs before they were done on humans.
The sorry side of this, in the view of many scientists, is that, with rare ...
