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In the 1880s, Louis Pasteur carried out what must be one of the most
unpleasant series of animal experiments in the history of the fight against
infectious disease. Unable to see the organism that causes rabies with the
microscopes available, or to culture it in an artificial medium, he nonetheless
convinced a sceptical medical community not only of the microorganism’s
existence but of the possibility of vaccinating against it. He did it by
work on rabbits and dogs. In 1885, after much heart searching, he tried
out his rabies vaccine on a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been
bitten 14 times by a rabid dog. Thanks to Pasteur’s vaccine, the boy lived.

Defenders of animal research regularly cite such stories, while antivivisectionists
try to pick holes in them. But the debate over the relevance of animal experiments
to medical progress is a red herring. The necessity of some animal research
for the advance of biomedical science is not what is at issue, or at least,
it should not be. While a small minority of animal rights protagonists who
wish to abolish all animal research genuinely would eschew all medical treatment
developed from it, for the rest of us there are real ethical dilemmas to
be wrestled with. Most of us want the minimum number of animals used, we
want them used humanely and we want the conditions under which they are
used to be strictly controlled. Who ensures that this is the case?

The 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act now requires that the Home
Secretary, in determining whether and on what terms to grant a project licence,
shall weigh the likely adverse effects on the animals concerned against
the benefit likely to accrue as a result of the research. So the real issue
is the way this balance is decided in practice.

A crucial question is, who defines ‘benefit’? It can be argued that
any new knowledge, whether or not it can be applied in a practical way to
some pressing problem, is of some benefit to someone somewhere. What constitutes
a benefit of sufficient importance to justify the infliction of pain or
distress on sentient creatures? And who decides that this is the case? This
is the central ethical question which lies at the heart of the debate surrounding
the new legislation.

If the weighing of such deep societal questions was what was intended
by the people who formulated the new act, the legislation has not yet begun
to bite. The control system has been greatly improved, and individual project
licences are sometimes refused or the projects modified on the grounds that
the degree of pain inflicted on animals – its ‘severity’ – is not justified
by the projected benefits. But the act and the way it is administered sets
up no forum for a real ethical debate about the justification of specific
areas of research, or even individual projects. To those concerned with
animal welfare who campaigned hard for this balancing of cost and benefit
in the 1986 act, the word ‘benefit’ meant something of clear and demonstrable
importance to pressing questions in biomedical science. But it is far from
clear that ‘benefit’ is actually judged in those terms in practice.

The Animal Procedures Committee set up by the act is supposed to provide
one mechanism for such ethical debates. The committee has 21 members appointed
by the Home Secretary, some of whom represent animal welfare organisations.
But the committee does not vet all applications for licences and deals with
only a few cases referred by the Home Office. Moreover, it can be argued
that the committee has failed to deal adequately with issues of particular
concern to the public.

For instance, it is four years since the Home Secretary referred to
the committee the thorny question of cosmetic testing. The committee has
satisfied itself of the relevance of the tests to consumer safety and of
their generally mild nature. But it has made no statement about the ethical
justification of using animals for the development of new products which
at least a substantial proportion of the public thinks it could do without.
Is the committee even charged with weighing the necessity of products against
the suffering caused by testing them? The act does not specifically say
so, although it does say that the committee shall have regard not only to
the legitimate requirements of science and industry and to the protection
of animals against avoidable suffering but also to the avoidance of their
‘unnecessary’ use. Clearly, if we don’t know whether we ‘need’ the products
in the first place, testing them begs the ethical question rather than answers
it.

The recent case of a retired professor, Wilhelm Feldberg, also casts
doubt on the effectiveness of current assessments of ‘benefit’. Videotapes
made in Feldberg’s laboratory by undercover animal activists depict, among
other things, the ageing professor operating on an insufficiently anaes-thetised
rabbit (see New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, This Week, 9 June 1990). The system failed at
every stage. The Medical Research Council’s inquiry ruled that the Home
Office inspector, the named veterinarian, the person responsible for day-to-day
care of the animals and the holder of the institution’s ‘certificate of
designation’ had all failed to appraise the situation and prevent the chain
of events that led not only to animals suffering unnecessarily but to the
sad exposure of this once distinguished professor in the media.

The case does more than cast doubt on whether the act is working as
effectively as it should. It also raises the question of whether the act
has set up the machinery to implement the controls its framers intended.
In the Feldberg case we saw the attempted induction of hyperglycaemia (high
blood sugar) by the heating of intestines with an Anglepoise lamp, conducted
by a scientist who succeeds in burning the animal, continually forgets what
he is doing, falls asleep over the experiment and candidly admits not knowing
about other research in his field because he never bothers to read scientific
papers. It is surely legitimate to ask whether this research was of sufficient
scientific importance to merit an MRC’s retired person’s grant and a Home
Office project licence.

THE PUBLIC’S RIGHT TO KNOW

Without the covert operation of the animal activists, the public, in
whose name and with whose money such work is carried out, would have been
none the wiser. It may be that this case was unique, a mere anomaly. But
surely the public has the right to question the legitimacy of animal research
and to have a say in how it is controlled?

Public accountability over animal experimentation would mean that the
public would know what was being done to animals, why it was done, how it
was controlled and that, by and large, it condoned the practice. In fact,
none of these conditions is fulfilled today. Members of the public have
little idea about what is done to animals in biomedical research or why.
Where would they obtain such information? The annual statistics published
by the Home Office provide some detailed information, more than any other
country in the world, regarding what numbers of what species are used in
what broad areas of research. But that is all that they do give. There is
very little information about the kind of procedures performed, their effect
on the animals, whether or not suffering results, and why the research needs
to be done.

More information can, of course, be obtained from the scientific literature.
But this is not generally available to the public; it is housed in academic
libraries to which laypeople have no access. Persistent individuals might
succeed in obtaining a day ticket to such an institution, or visit the Science
Reference Library in London. Having then decided which of the 25 000 current
biomedical journals to browse through, they would encounter yet more difficulties,
as scientific papers are not written for laypeople and are therefore largely
incomprehensible to them. In any case, such papers seldom describe the exact
procedures carried out, the ill effects upon the animals or what measures
were taken to alleviate such effects. Nor do they usually give much explanation
of the ‘need to know’ the answer to the question posed by the research project.

There is ‘information’ more readily available in the public domain.
But more often than not it is misinformation, either inaccurate or misleading
because it presents only half of the facts. Lurid tabloid exposes, antivivisectionist
propaganda and anodyne platitudes issued by the Research Defence Society
are good for reinforcing one’s prejudices; they do little to inform the
genuine inquirer about what is actually going on and why.

The responsible media, particularly radio and television, do somewhat
better but are hamstrung by the fact that they can hardly ever get inside
laboratories to film research. Moreover, few scientists – quite understandably
in today’s climate – want to put their heads above the parapet in order
to describe and explain their work.

Members of the public can, of course, write to the Home Secretary, or
persuade an MP to put down a parliamentary question. The replies are likely
to be rather general; for justifiable reasons of confidentiality, detailed
answers to specific questions about specific research projects are never
given. Similarly, the annual report of the Animal Procedures Committee gives
a good deal of general information about how the control system is working
but it cannot describe the details of research at specific institutions.

So in real terms there is very little public accountability under the
1986 act. Laypeople have no idea what is going on in laboratories, supposedly
for their own protection, funded by the taxes they pay. Nor is there any
way it can find out. Moreover, there is no machinery in the act’s administration
for weighing costs against benefit in an ethical sense. No-one defines ‘benefit’,
no-one defines ‘necessity’ and no-one defines ‘justified’ in any way that
would be meaningful to an ethical philosopher or to those critics who want
to see animal research restricted. Moreover, no-one representing the public
is present when most adjudications about what should or should not be done
to animals are made.

COMMITTEES FOR THE PEOPLE

Despite these obvious shortcomings, the 1986 act remains the best piece
of legislation enacted in the world to control animal experiments. It defines
the conditions in which laboratory animals are kept and cared for, and what
can be done to them. And indeed, a way of weighing the ethical problems
could easily be set up within its framework. One way to do this is through
institutional ethics committees – alternatively known as ‘research review
committees’. In Sweden, Denmark and Australia, such committees have lay
members, often from outside the institution, who represent local people.
They can ensure that what goes on in laboratories is considered and approved
by a cross section of researchers in the instititution, not just the department
in question. Such committees would also ensure that the research institute’s
vet could not fail to know the details of every piece of approved research.

In Australia, members of such committees frequently tour facilities
unannounced, not so much to act as a police force but to inform themselves
and to converse with researchers, vets and technicians. Thus there is a
regular open scrutiny of a facility by a respected body of responsible people.

The members representing the community can, if well chosen, fulfil to
some extent the notion of public accountability behind the legislation.
The committees can debate the real necessity of a research project and so
go a long way towards filling the moral vacuum that now surrounds practical
decision making in this area. In Britain, such bodies might also ease the
burden falling upon the Home Office inspectorate, answering initial questions
within an institution before the project licence is even applied for. The
existence of such committees might prevent another incident like the Feldberg
affair.

Responsible debate on this heated subject would also be much improved
by the availability of more useful information, which could easily be provided
without compromising the identity of licensees. Detailed information is
now held centrally for each project, including the species and numbers of
animals, the aims of the research and its ‘severity banding’ – how much
pain or distress would be inflicted on animals. If research projects were
coded in some way, this information could be published, or at least made
available on request, without jeopardising the security of any institution
or individual.

Public disquiet about animal research will not go away. Rather, it is
likely to increase. If it is to be allayed then true accountability must
be assured by a mechanism for informing the public about what is done and
why, and by giving society some real say over what shall be done in its
name. As the Littlewood committee, set up by the government in the mid-1960s
to review the Victorian legislation on animal experiments, concluded: ‘Animal
experimentation is a complex and highly specialised subject. It is also
a moral and social problem of the first magnitude and one which does not
exlusively concern the expert.’ Yet for too long, only ‘experts’ have played
any real part in its evaluation and control.

Judith Hampson is an independent consultant in animal welfare. She was
animal experiments officer for the RSPCA during the passage of the 1986
act, and is a member of the Animal Procedures Committee.