There, friends, lies the dilemma.
From "Stealing Cats" to Heart Transplants
Bill Frist's medical training continued and after a lengthy residency in Boston, he entered the field of transplants, a longtime goal. At Stanford University in California, he studied under the renowned Dr. Bernard Shumway, then served at a hospital in Nashville, TN, where he performed 200 heart transplants.
The question we need to ponder is "How essential was experimentation on cats to subsequent success as a heart transplant surgeon? This is the crux of a long-standing debate between anti-vivisectionists and those who believe animal experimentation is crucial to furthering scientific understanding of the human body and its reaction to disease processes. An extreme example of the latter viewpoint was the controversial series of experiments at OSU by Associate Professor Michael Podell who induced FIV ("feline AIDS") in healthy cats, then administered methamphetamines to them, in an effort to prove that illicit drugs are harmful to AIDS patients. Podell left OSU in June of 2002 following three years of activist protests. Gary L., animal activist and former host at the About Cats forum, wrote his own views about this issue in a guest commentary .
The History of Animal Experimentation
Vivisection using animals has been around for a long time, as have been groups who protest it. "Success" in animal experimentation may have found its roots in 1908 when Viennese researchers Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper injected material from the spinal cord of a boy who had died of polio into the spinal cords of two monkeys. One monkey became paralyzed and both died. The spinal cords of the affected monkeys exhibited the same damage as those in humans with polio.
Landsteiner continued his experiments with rhesus macque monkeys, and in 1930 discovered the Rh factor, a blood factor shared by humans and monkeys. His discovery led to the subsequent development of a vaccine that blocked the viscous immune response to Rh incompatibility. 1
Notable Quotes on Vivisection "I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures."
--Christian Barnard.
How Successful is Animal Experimentation in General?
Merriam-Webster defines "vivisection" as
- 1 : the cutting of or operation on a living animal usually for physiological or pathological investigation; broadly : animal experimentation especially if considered to cause distress to the subject
In that context, anti-vivisection groups would tell you that vivisection is never successful, as a means of advancing human medical science, and that 2 Advancements in human medicine which are based on the human model are the only truly reliable and responsible research methods. They actually apply to humans rather than irresponsibly and dangerously extrapolating data across different species.
Footnotes:
1 Animal research: a scientist's defence
2 Vivisection.net
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