This is by Marius Maxwell MBBChir, DPhil - a Cambridge/Oxford/Harvard educated neurosurgeon and neuroscientist:
As a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist with two decades of research experience, I feel qualified to contribute to the debate on non-human primate vivisection. The arguments of the Weatherall Committee defy much current scientific evidence, and have served only to confirm my view that the data supporting non-human primate vivisection are profoundly flawed and together with the moral case are indefensible.
I concur with the findings of the crucial Perel study in the December 15th (2006) issue of the British Medical Journal (
www.bmj.com), which represents a comprehensive and quantitative statistical meta-analysis to test the usefulness of a broad spectrum of animal based drug testing in predicting human outcomes. This analysis, which undermines the conclusions of the Weatherall Committee, found that only three of the six categories actually succeeded in predicting the results of subsequent human trials and that in all animal experimentation studied "the quality of the experiments was poor." No better than the toss of a coin in other words. The predictive power may actually be even worse, since the study found evidence of broad publication bias in those experiments that did predict human outcome. They concluded that "Discordance between animal and human studies may be due to bias or to the failure of animal models to mimic clinical disease adequately."
It is important to bear in mind that these six areas represent a vast cross section of animal based drug studies including stroke, head injury, systemic haemorrhage, neonatal respiratory distress and osteoporosis. A total of 228 published animal studies were evaluated representing many thousands of animal test subjects including non-human primates. This is only the last in a long series of studies critical of the predictive ability of animal experimentation to human health care with some yielding concordance rates as abysmally low as 5 per cent.
The ultimate effect of such imprecise animal-based research is reflected in tens of thousands of unnecessary human deaths before the responsible drugs are finally withdrawn. Examples include the use of steroids in human head and spinal cord injury; amrinone for heart failure; hormone replacement therapy (which is still in use) and Vioxx - the word's greatest ever drug catastrophe, which killed up to 140,000 people between 2000 and 2004. Other drugs have been abandoned before reaching the market, after harming or failing to help volunteers in human trials. Examples include TGN1412 at Northwick Park hospital; an Alzheimer's vaccine in 2001; and 80 HIV/Aids vaccines which have failed in over 100 clinical trials, despite prior testing in non-human primates on a massive scale. The gratuitous use of non-human primates in much psychological and behavioural laboratory experimentation does, based on my review, infrequently fall short of scandalous. Alternative, state of the art non-animal-based methods of accurately predicting drug safety include microdosing and in vitro assays, human DNA chips, and virtual human organs.
The Weatherall Committee stated that research on animals, including non-human primates, might alleviate "continued suffering to very large numbers of humans..." But it is now clear that the use of animals in drug-screening is actually endangering countless human lives. Extensive, unbiased, and dispassionate meta-analyses of the accuracy and validity of animal research should be the only yardstick employed in this debate.
Doctors, pharmacists, and patients groups in the Netherlands are now demanding government action after a national study has found that drug related problems caused twice as many hospital admissions as motor vehicle accidents (
www.bmj.com, 15th December 2006). The December 13th (2006) issue of Nature (
www.nature.com) also has a timely but troubling review of animal research and demonstrates that the tide is changing inexorably against animal vivisection. There is discussion of the recent (December 2005) Swiss reform of an animal welfare law to protect the "dignity of creation" of animals. This rightly has had the effect of progressive denial of funding for non-human primate research.
Many are fond of claiming the importance of animal research to early scientific discoveries as if the same historical models bear any relevance at all to contemporary science. Obviously animal research in the past century, in the absence of better alternatives, has benefited mankind as did ancient studies of human anatomy. Michelangelo's anatomical drawings and William Harvey's description of human circulation spring to mind, but who would seriously argue that cadaveric dissection represents cutting-edge science today?
The field of Parkinson's Disease (PD) research was greatly stimulated by the therapeutic attempts of neurosurgeons using dopaminergic brain transplantation in animals and humans which came to the fore in the 1980's and have since largely receded. There have been too many false positives to record here. Many possible false negatives may also have been ignored as part of widely documented publication bias. The most common non-human primate model of PD results from monkeys being poisoned with the neurotoxin MPTP. It is widely acknowledged that profound disparities (anatomical, physiological, neurochemical, pathological, and temporal) exist between the MPTP non-human primate model and humans with idiopathic PD. Despite these paramount concerns of human reproducibility, hundreds of studies involving thousands of animals have followed with conflicting and non-predictive results. There is no evidence to suggest that their overall predictive concordance to human PD treatment, if subjected to the meticulous quantitative analyses of Perel and co-workers above, would exceed the best case 50:50 coin toss probability established.
Neurosurgeons have employed precise coordinated stereotactic techniques in the treatment of PD, with subtle variations in deep brain nuclear targets, since the 1950s based on human observation. The technique of deep brain stimulation (DBS) was discovered through experimentation in patients with PD (not in animals) in 1987. Though not a cure for PD, it does ameliorate some of the symptoms and is accompanied by a troubling incidence of depression, often suicidal. It is important to understand that ethical clinical research of actual consenting end stage human PD patients themselves has been conducted now for decades. Those are precisely the results that can be accurately translated to other human sufferers. Although researchers have rushed to duplicate and extend these studies in the neurotoxin non-human primate models, I am not persuaded that the nuances in deep brain nuclear therapeutic identification could not have been more accurately identified in the very PD patient cohorts which gave rise to the technique of DBS itself.
As an Oxford graduate I am appalled by the decision of Oxford University to proceed with the construction of the animal research laboratory on South Parks Road. They are swimming against the tide of international medical and ethical opinion. I fear that history will judge their animal rights opponents as less extreme than the very scientists who persist in non-human primate research in the face of an increasing body of consistent and compelling evidence that the resulting data has and will continue to endanger countless human lives.
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