Sacred
Cows and Golden Geese : The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals by
C. Ray Greek, Jean Swingle Greek DVM, Jane
Goodall
Comparative medicine may not be everyone's idea of a
riveting dinner topic, but it is ours. This book grew out of our
meal-time conversations during the 1980s. Those were the years of our
professional education, one of us as a veterinarian, and the other as an
anesthesiologist.
When our animal and human patients exhibited the same
symptoms, discussion became its most heated. This was because diagnoses
and treatment plans for animals frequently differed for humans. Pitting
the veterinarian's dictates on the one hand against the physician's on
the other, we would each get huffy and self-righteous, then whip out our
textbooks to prove our accuracy. Many references later, sure enough,
according to the books, we were both right. Well, this was
puzzling!
These discrepancies flew in the face of what we had
been taught to revere. Animal experimentation was an inviolable
convention - a political sacred cow. Everything we had been taught, from
fetal pigs forward, suggested that animals were just like humans, a bit
furry and funny looking perhaps, but otherwise just the same. Like
everyone, we had been convinced by many familiar determinants: animal
experimentation for human medical research had a time-honored history.
Milestones supposedly garnered from animal studies were constantly in
the media.
As medical students, we were well familiar with the
government's requirement for animal assays in drug development and its
financial rewards to research institutions. Certainly, grant money for
such projects was vital to the incomes of our teachers and universities.
Indeed, our medical training pivoted on assumed anatomic, biochemical
and physiological characteristics shared by man and beast. This sizable
and persuasive rationalism averred that animals were ideal test beds for
human therapies.
So, why then was Ray's human patient with high
cholesterol developing coronary heart disease and Jean's dog with high
cholesterol experiencing a thyroid disorder? Why do women who have had
hysterectomies need to fight osteoporosis while neutered cats live
longer, healthier lives? And why are humans not vaccinated for parvo and
dogs for rubella? Our dinner conversations suggested that most animal
diseases simply do not occur in humans. Conversely, the major killers of
humankind are extraordinarily rare among the four-legged set.
Plainly, if there was parity, it was not universal.
Sure, the basics are the same. Fundamental cell activity and metabolic
processes - the stuff of research decades ago - correspond in animals
and humans. Still, we thought, why did scientists use animals back when
human autopsy, tissue culture techniques or human observation could have
provided the same information? Some animal experimentation led to
developments. But in how many cases were the animals necessary? Animals
can be used to grow viruses, but so can Petri dishes and human tissue
cultures. All mammalian blood - animal and human - has components in
common, so why not use human blood for totally accurate results?
Moreover, when it came to present-day research -
mostly involving microbiology on the most complex levels - why
scrutinize species whose physiologic response to disease, disease
manifestation and disease incidence so clearly deviates from human
response? Logic, it seemed to us, even back then when we had but few
comparisons, was somehow amiss. -- Excerpted
from Sacred Cows and Golden Geese : The Human Cost of Experiments on
Animals by C. Ray Greek MD, Jean Swingle Greek DVM, Jane Goodall, C. Ray
Greek. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
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