In this experiment, Associate Professor Michael Podell will inject the cats with FIV and methamphetamines, and then use spinal taps to measure how the disease is progressing. The experiment has no lofty goal such as finding a cure for AIDS. It is merely going to infect cats with FIV and meth and see what happens. In my view, and the view of other scientists and even AIDS activists, the experiment is a waste of money and will needlessly sicken and destroy cats. And by siphoning funds away from truly useful research, this experiment not only destroys cats but possibly endangers the lives of humans. The first cats have already been shipped to the lab. (See sidebar link for an article written by the Cats Guide last November.)

This experiment will not add anything useful to the AIDS knowledge base. The real advances in AIDS, which I'll summarize below, have all come from in vitro testing and studies on humans, not animals. Funding for the experiment - paid for by your tax dollars - will line the pockets of OSU, however, and I'm sure Mr. Podell will get a research paper out of it.

(Warning - I'm going to criticize animal research on AIDS in general here - on scientific grounds. I welcome your criticisms. I'm not an expert, and if you find some errors or misinformation in this commentary, please let me know.)

Some Background on AIDS Research on Animals:

The biggest problem with doing AIDS research on animals is that AIDS is a uniquely human disease. Other animals do not get AIDS. Other animals do not naturally get infected by the HIV virus. For years, researchers have tried numerous ways to coerce chimpanzees to get AIDS. Although they've made the chimpanzees sick, none of them has contracted AIDS.

A primate's immune system is different than a cat's immune system, which is different than a human's immune system. And FIV is different than SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) which is different than HIV. The differences are significant and render comparisons useless. HIV infection is a complicated, multi-step process that depends on a number of distinctly human properties of the immune system. The ratio of killer T-cells to helper T-cells, the types of receptors on the helper T-cells that allow the HIV virus to bind to and invade the cell, the change in T-cell formation rates in response to an HIV attack, the locations in the body where T-Cells unwittingly harbor HIV viruses, etc. The list goes on.

Attempts to make mice develop AIDS have failed, also.

Scientist are disappointed in animal-based AIDS research

A number of prominent scientists have publicly stated their disappointment with animal-based AIDS research. Some examples:

"What good does it do you to test something [a vaccine] in a monkey? You find five or six years from now that it works in the monkey, and then you test it in humans and you realize that humans behave totally different from monkeys, so you've wasted five years."
- Dr. Mark Feinberg, leading AIDS researcher

"Animal models do not fully mimic the characteristic tissue pathology of human HIV infection. For this reason, we have developed a tissue culture that retains the complex three dimensional spatial cellular organization found in normal human lymphoid tissue."
- Dr. S Glushakova et al, in Nature Medicine

"I just don't see much coming out of the chimp work that has convinced us that is a particularly useful model."
- Thomas Insel, director of the large Yerkes Regional Primate Center

"No animal models faithfully reproduce human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection and disease in humans, and the studies of experimental vaccines in animal models of disease caused by lentiviruses have yielded disparate results, making it difficult to determine what is required for a successful HIV-1 vaccine"
- Science Magazine

This last quote underscores a major problem with animal testing. Different species contract different diseases, the same disease agent (e.g., a virus) has a different effect on different species, the same disease manifests itself differently in different species, and the same vaccine differs significantly in its efficacy and side-effect generation across species.

But research labs still maintain that animal testing for AIDS is valuable. It certainly is valuable to the institutions doing the research. Billions of dollars have been spent on animal-based AIDS research. But because of the numerous disparities between animals and humans, the research has been, for the most part, fruitless; findings in animals about HIV or SIV or FIV or manufactured viruses cannot be applied to humans, who react to HIV in uniquely human ways. The researchers are great at PR though. Every time they find something in the lab, there is big media blitz, and a vaccine for AIDS seems just around the corner. This has been going on for years now. If you look carefully at the stories in the press, however, you find the following:

• They are filled with caveats.
• They use the term AIDS loosely. The headline typically says something like "Experimental Vaccine Halts AIDS Progression in Primates". But this is inaccurate. Animals do not get AIDS - only humans get AIDS. The animals always have a different disease - real or manufactured - which differs from AIDS in a number of significant aspects - enough to render the experiment nothing more than an expensive guessing game.

Experimenting on animals in the name of AIDS research is an institution and a very profitable business, but not good science.