Last Thursday, the Vassar Animal Rights Coalition (VARC) sponsored a presentation entitled “Testing 1...2...3: Behind the Scenes of Vassar’s Laboratories.” The presenter was Dr. Alka Chandna, a lab oversight specialist from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The title and subject attracted a decent crowd to the event: about 50 students and even the local news. Gauging from applause and reactions to controversial slides, the audience seemed to be about 50 percent VARC members and supporters, 25 percent curious scientists and 25 percent mostly neutral attendees. The presentation was a PowerPoint about 45 minutes long, but contrary to what was advertised in the title, only a few slides and about ten minutes worth of time were devoted to discussing Vassar labs. Most of the presentation was criticisms of the cosmetic, pharmaceutical and food industries along with animal testing at other universities.
I have no issue with the concern shown about animal testing procedures and conditions. My primary issue—and the concern that many science majors in the audience expressed—with the event was the manner in which VARC and the PETA representative went about making their point. Prior to the event, flyers accusing Vassar faculty of abusing animals in research circulated about campus using unnecessarily harsh language to describe controlled procedures. In the presentation itself, Chandna identified three Vassar faculty members and criticized their research on animals as reckless and without restrictions. Furthermore, she showed the faculty’s publications that resulted from their work and pointed out that none had been fined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). If this research was so crude, Vassar itself, the peers who reviewed those publications or the USDA would have shut down these operations. In response, Chandna claims that since the animals tested were not protected under the Animal Welfare Act, no complaints could be filed against these researchers. This begs the question: Why are people condemning these researchers when they are conducting research by federal regulations? Isn’t the animosity shown in the flyers misplaced, and shouldn’t it be directed towards the USDA in hopes of reform?
During the rest of the presentation, Chandna made her case against the practice of all animal testing. She used slides containing evidence showing that no drug or therapy tested on animals had ever cured a human disease—including HIV, cancer, and diabetes—even though a drug may have cured these diseases in an animal species. This data was very misleading. The key to this argument is the term cure: it is true that no drug has been proven to cure these diseases, however, many drugs that have been tested on animals have been approved that are proven to manage a number of symptoms associated with serious diseases. For example, fatal diseases such as HIV can now be considered chronic diseases thanks to antiretroviral drugs that were first tested in animals. For many, if not all, of these drugs, preliminary testing in humans could have proven dangerous or fatal. But, as Chandna made clear, peta2 does not support human testing either. Instead, the organization supports alternative testing methods that do not involve higher-order organisms (animals or humans) such as computer modeling of human biological systems. Nonetheless, predicting how a compound, mutation or whatever a researcher may be testing would be processed within the body without a real biological reaction is difficult. If organism-less experimentation were possible and accurate, wouldn’t the government and private companies have saved money on animal testing long ago?
Regardless of one’s stance on the ethics of animal testing, the issues ought to be presented in an straightforward and honest manner. The event “Testing 1...2...3” did not truly present the facts of the issue and went about pushing forward its own agenda at the expense three professors’ reputations. If it existed, the “People for the Ethical Presentation of Arguments” would be outraged.
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