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Jewish World Review Feb. 1, 2001 / 9 Shevat, 5761

Dan Kane

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Consumer Reports


Do mice deserve same protection as dogs?

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- IN A University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill lab, molecular biologist Kim Kluckman anesthesizes several pregnant mice and breaks their necks to kill them so she can remove their wombs. She flushes out the tiny embryos and injects them with stem cells that she hopes will make their arteries harden as they grow.

At some point during the next year, she will kill those second-generation mice and study their organs to see how certain genes trigger atherosclerosis, a leading cause of heart attacks and strokes in humans. The three-year project will sacrifice hundreds of mice to achieve measurable results.

"There's no other easy way to do that other than using animals, unfortunately," Kluckman says.

At research universities tens of thousands of mice and rats each year are genetically engineered to a life of tumors, hypertension and other maladies. They are implanted with fingertip-sized transmitters, exposed to radiation and subjected to stressful behavioral experiments, such as seeing how long they will swim in a tank from which they cannot escape.

Similar fates are found in the local labs of pharmaceutical firms such as GlaxoSmithKline, where scientists use mice in their quest to discover the next wonder drug.

For decades, this business has operated with no direct government oversight. But that could end this year as animal-rights activists step up a decade-long fight for federal rules to guarantee that the workhorses of research -- mice and rats -- receive the same care and pain protection that have long existed for other lab animals, including monkeys, dogs and cats.

Activists hope the proposed changes, which would also apply to birds, will prod scientists to find alternatives to animal experimentation, such as computer models and human tissue studies. Researchers argue that mice, rats and birds are already adequately protected. They warn that burdensome new regulations could stall progress on life-saving scientific breakthroughs.

Animal experimentation played a role in nearly every medical breakthrough of the 20th century, from measles vaccines to heart bypass surgery to chemotherapy.

"This regulatory change that they are proposing is not about the care and treatment of animals," said Frankie Trull, president of the National Association for Biomedical Research, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for research institutions. "It is all about regulatory burdens. Animal-rights groups often say they don't want clean cages or bigger cages; they want empty cages."

Animal-rights groups agree that they want an end to animal testing. But they maintain that expanding the Animal Welfare Act, the 35-year-old federal law that sets standards of care for animals in captivity, is no threat to research. To them, it's a matter of fairness.

"The changes wouldn't stop animal testing, but at least it would get those very minimal rules extended to these animals," said Dietrich von Haugwitz, a former Duke medical center health systems engineer and board member of the North Carolina Network for Animals. "These are highly intelligent animals _ they are used to test in mazes _ and that means they should count morally, just as animals that have a larger body."

The clash, which renews long-standing ethical questions about how much pain humans have the moral right to inflict on animals, is coming to a head at a time when the Human Genome Project has made mouse models more important than ever to science.

Because they are cheap, reproduce quickly and have more than 90 percent of the same genes as humans, rats and mice are the animals of choice in about 95 percent of laboratory experiments.

"It's a travesty, basically," said John McArdle, director of the Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, the Minnesota nonprofit that sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture more than 10 years ago to expand the Animal Welfare Act. "It's not an error; it's deliberate. They were left out by choice by the USDA because it wanted to minimize (its) workload without following the intent of Congress."

Under that law, USDA inspectors visit research facilities once a year to ensure that protected species are properly fed and housed.

The foundation's fight produced a short-lived victory last fall when the USDA settled the court case with a promise to add mice, rats and birds to the protective law. The research community quickly fought back, persuading Congress to put the new rules on hold for a year.

Meanwhile, other reforms are in the works. The USDA has announced it will reexamine standards for animal research, which could force scientists to provide more detailed justification for any pain they will put animals through and to say how they will minimize it.

The Humane Society of the United States says that re-examination is long overdue. It recently reported that several researchers had classified their experiments as involving no pain or distress, even though primates suffered and died. Some were infected with parasites or viruses that caused them to waste away, abort fetuses and suffer inflamed joints, organs and lymphatic systems. Other experiments exposed pregnant primates to horn blasts to measure their stress levels.

"Our bottom line is if these are the sorts of things that are going to be done to animals, then at least the experiments should be reported properly," said Martin Stephens, the Humane Society's vice president for animal research issues. "Some of these animals were so ill that they died slowly from the experiment, and to say that those animals were not in distress is simply ludicrous."

Dan Kane is a writer with the Raleigh News & Observer. Comment by clicking here.

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