Brute Science:
Dilemmas of Animal Experimentation
by by
Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks
Routledge 1997 (Philosophical Issues in
Science Series)
"This book . . . is everything a
philosophical tome should be: timely, important, factually informed,
responsive to the scholarly literature, analytical, scrupulously fair, and
rigorously, vigorously argued. It is, if I may say so, a model specimen of
practical ethics."
Keith Burgess-Jackson (Ethics and the
Environment)
"Brute Science should also be read by philosophers of
science. . . . [A]s we [philosophers of science] grew into respectable
professional middle-age in the latter part of this century, we seemed to
lose our stomach for public controversy. . . . Of late the situation has
begun to change for the better. [We have seen several] recent examples of
philosophers of science deploying their considerable philosophical and
scientific skills in addressing issues of broader public concern. Add Brute
Science to this short but distinguished list."
Don Howard (Metascience)
"This book is a tour-de-force of the issue, and should be on the
required reading list of every animal experimenter, bio-ethicist, and
animal liberationist. . . ."
Merry Maisel (Metascience)
"This book is must reading for all those interested in the debate
about the use of animals in experimentation. One need not accept all of
the authors' arguments and conclusions to benefit from their clear and
perceptive analysis of the scientific and philosophical issues involved.
Their policy recommendations deserve serious consideration from both
scientists and animal rights advocates."
John Parascandola ( Ph.D., Medical Historian)
"Brute Science provides a careful, historical,
interdisciplinary analysis of scientific experimentation using non-human
animals. Everyone seriously interested in biomedical experimentation -
those who use animals and those who use the results of experimentation -
should read this book. It sets the tone for future work concerning the use
of non-human animals in the 21st Century"
Marc Bekoff (Environmental, Population, &
Organismic Biology, U.of Colorado)
"This is as important a book in applied ethics as one can hope to
find. It mounts an an impressive scientific and moral case against the
current practice of animal experimentation, demanding that we either
provide an adequate defense of that practice or radically change it."
James P. Sterba (Philosophy, University of Notre
Dame)
The American Medical Association (AMA) estimates that biomedical researchers in
the US use between 17-22 million animals each year (1992:15). It is evident that
scientists use a sufficiently large number of animals in biomedical research to
warrant a scientific and moral evaluation of the practice.
Most readers are probably familiar with the ethical debate about the practice
of animal experimentation. Often parties on both sides of these debates assert
the scientific validity of animal research, even when they disagree about its
moral appropriateness. Admittedly, some opponents of animal experimentation
argue that some/all types of animal research are not scientifically valid. But,
many of these objections, although perhaps suggestive, are inadequately
developed and, quite frankly, scientifically uninformed.
However, there are legitimate scientific questions about the validity of
animal experimentation which merit serious consideration by both sides of this
debate. A careful assessment of scientific and methodological principles
indicates that the claims about the enormous benefits of animal research claims
made in both public policy statements designed for public consumption and in
scientific texts are exaggerated. Specifically, there is reason to question the
appropriateness of extrapolating the results of animal experimentation to
humans.
Doubts about the grand claims made on behalf of experimentation emerge from a
careful examination of evolutionary biology. Evolutionary theory is no mere
adjunct to biology. Rather, it is at the center of contemporary biology. It is
intricately connected to genetics, population biology, systematics, and ecology;
it is the theoretical glue which holds these disparate fields together. Of
special importance to the current inquiry, evolutionary theory helps us
understand the biological significance of speciation. Since modern physiology
and biomedicine assume we can legitimately extrapolate laboratory findings in
non-human animals to humans, then a proper understanding of the nature of
species and species' differences will be central to a scientific evaluation of
these practices.
In the popular debates about animal experimentation these deeper scientific
questions are not raised at all, or are, at most, discussed only superficially.
Neither the critics nor the defenders of these practices tend to pursue these
arguments as deeply as they should. Thus, even when they are discussed, they are
discussed in ways which often distort the issues rather than clarifying them. We
wish to remedy this deficiency. We will carefully analyze the scientific,
methodological, and epistemological merits of the practice of animal
experimentation to sift the argumentative wheat from the chaff, for there are,
contrary to some critics, legitimate uses of animals in the context of
scientific research. This illuminates the views of both the critics and the
defenders of contemporary biomedical experiments using non-human animals. An
in-depth understanding of the scientific issues will inform the ethical and
public policy dimensions of such practices.
Structure of the Argument
In Part I, Understanding the Issues, we set out the
background information which is crucial for a scientific evaluation of the
practice of biomedical experimentation. We begin by presenting prime facie cases
for and against animal experimentation. These expose the reader to typical
argumentative strategies which have been employed by both sides of this debate;
specifically, it will reveal that both cases have a surface plausibility.
Neither case, though, plumbs the deeper epistemological and methodological
questions which we think so important. Both sides rely heavily, indeed, almost
exclusively, on examples to defend their respective cases. Although this is an
understandable strategy, it is not an especially productive one: it fails to
illuminate the centrality of animal experimentation in the current paradigm of
biomedicine.
We first explore the roots of this paradigm in the work of 19th century
French physiologist, Claude Bernard. Then, when setting out the contours of the
current paradigm, we highlight the role of the Intact Systems Argument,
the use of scaling principles, and the paradigm's underlying commitment to
biological reductionism. We end this section by explaining the contemporary view
of evolution, focusing specifically on those elements of evolution especially
relevant to a critical assessment of the current biomedical paradigm.
In Part II, Scientifically Evaluating Animal Experimentation, we
explain how a proper understanding of the theory of evolution, in tandem with
laboratory findings, undermines the belief that we can straightforwardly
extrapolate findings in laboratory animals to humans. We then explore a variety
of modified versions of the defense of animal experimentation, including the
claim that animal models, though weak, are still useful. We show how the study
of nonlinear systems may be relevant to an evaluation of these defenses of the
current paradigm. Finally, we discuss the potential relevance of transgenic
animals for biomedical experimentation. Throughout the book, and in this section
particularly, we will quote extensively from evolutionary biologists and
biomedical researchers. At times these citations may seem excessive. But it is
important that we show, beyond a doubt, that we are being fair to the
researchers' position.
Although the arguments in this book will expose the weakness of animal
experiments whose results are to be directly "extrapolated" or
"applied" to humans, their relevance to other uses of animals is
unclear. Animal experimentation is not all of a piece there are different uses
of animals, and these must be evaluated differently. Some uses of animals will
not be touched by the methodological arguments raised in this section (though
perhaps some of the moral arguments developed in section three will be relevant
to their assessment). Thus our methodological arguments will have less bearing
on much that takes place under the rubric of basic research, be it anatomical,
physiological, toxicological, virological, and so on.
Furthermore there are specialized uses of animals which are untouched by our
methodological arguments -- for instance, using animals as hosts for viruses of
interest (e.g., the early use of rhesus monkeys to preserve laboratory strains
of polio virus). Or using animals as "bio-reactors" to produce
biologically active compounds. Nor do we have a methodological message for
epidemiologists and pathologists who experiment on wild animals to uncover the
natural hosts of human viruses of interest, for example the ebola virus.
Moreover, our methodological arguments have little bearing on the use of animals
in educational training contexts.
In Part III, The Moral Evaluation of Animal Experimentation, we use
the analysis from the previous sections to undergird our evaluation of animal
experimentation. We first set the moral debate in historical context, showing
how the moral understanding of non-human animals has evolved over time
especially after the advent of evolutionary theory. We conclude that, although
the arguments that humans have strong moral obligations to animals are certainly
plausible, any widely accepted evaluation of experimentation must be based on
weaker moral assumptions. The assumption that non-human animals have some moral
worth is sufficiently weak to be acceptable to most people, while also being
sufficiently powerful to generate potent questions about the morality of the
practice.
We first discuss speciesism, and, more generally, deontological defenses of
animal experimentation. Then we consider the utilitarian defense of the
practice, which claims the practice is justified because of its enormous
benefits to human health. We conclude that the practice of using animals in
applied medical research is highly questionable (since we cannot
straightforwardly apply findings in animals to humans). But the evaluation of
basic research, will, by its nature, be somewhat different.
We end the book with some public policy recommendations about the continued
use of non-human animals in biomedical experiments.
