The University of Oxford animal house is nearly completed. Now, animal rights extremists are desperately trying to ‘deploy new tactics’ for the time after the lab’s opening. Mel Broughton told The Oxford Student, ‘there will be a battle that we take to the University and the lab. Our tactics are evolving. We will be there fighting.’

Leading activists like Broughton and his friends from the ALF seem to have realised that they have lost all hope of stopping the Oxford lab. It looks like the extremists are under pressure from their supporters to show some action. The leaders of the animal rights movement have to justify why they are rapidly loosing public support. I could imagine many supporters of the movement are frustrated because the animal house is going to open soon and their (violent) tactics, justified by Broughton and his friends, seem to have clearly failed.

Presumably concern for the environment is not something that bothers Jerry Vlasak, the extremist animal rights advocate from the US. He flew 10,000 miles to speak for 10 minutes in a debate on animal research in Dublin last week.

What was remarkable was the man’s ability to make such a bad impression in such a short space of time. Not only was he the only speaker who refused to take questions, much to the frustration of those present, but he managed to spectacularly misjudge the mood of the audience.

Vlasak, who has advocated violence against researchers who use animals, spent most of his speech likening his movement to the French resistance during the Second World War. Such rhetoric seemed absurd in what was an otherwise genuine debate about a difficult ethical issue. Vlasak clearly lives on a different planet to the rest of us.

It was difficult to take seriously Vlasak’s bizarre vision compared to the reality of well-regulated and carefully conducted humane animal research. It conjured up extraordinary visions of commonly used animals in research, such as fruit flies and fish, being overrun by Nazi stormtroopers!

No wonder the other proposed speakers from the UK backed out at short notice. Sharing a platform with a man locked in a mental mind trap from the last century would surely have been an embarrassment.

At the end of the evening, much like a similar debate at Cork University the month before, the vote was overwhelmingly in favour of animal research. Indeed, it was difficult to find anyone hanging around afterwards at the students bar who thought that animal rights was issue at all in Ireland!

Antivivisection groups continue to churn out pseudoscientific reports at an astonishing rate. One organisation, the National Anti Vivisection Society, must be very confident of its expertise, since it has recently challenged in some depth in a written report a scientific opinion paper produced in 2002 by the European Union’s Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) on the use of non-human primates (NHP) in biomedical research.

But scratch the surface of this report, and it is obvious that it’s just the same old arguments that the antivivisectionists have been using for decades. Sweeping assertions that no animal research can be relevant to humans because of species differences, and broad claims that there are already alternatives for any type of animal research, are the standard fare.

Some time ago we highlighted the nonsense written by the NAVS about ‘quantum pharmacology’ in one of their research papers.

Perhaps an even more bizarre example of the lack of scientific credibility, however, comes from a report exactly 20 years ago entitled ‘Biohazard’. In this document the antivivisectionists claimed that ‘AIDS came out of research on animals’, and was ‘created by people in a laboratory’. The report is still referred to on the NAVS website, where it is described as ‘a two-year investigation into the hazards of the creation of new diseases in animal laboratories, and in particular the story of the simian and human versions of the AIDS viruses’.

NAVS claim that the report ‘shocked MPs and scientists alike’. They are right. Shocked at the sheer absurdity would be a good description. Perhaps not surprisingly, we don’t hear much about that report anymore!

The threat of animal rights extremism to the UK science base has been a defining theme of the debate about animal research in the UK for the last decade. But just as that threat is appearing to subside, new problems appear.

The prospect of a slow death for high-quality animal research in the UK at the hands of excessive regulation, increasing costs and a declining skills base is looming ever closer. By the time our international competitors gain ground on us, it will be already too late.

But the good news is that the problems are at least being recognised, and plans are in place to put things right. A new report has just been published into animal research skills for the future.

It was five years ago, in October 2002, that the Chief Inspector released his report Aspects of Non-human Primate Research at Cambridge University. This had been in response to allegations made following an infiltration by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV).

The sorry story has continued right up to this month. The Home Office has just lodged papers at the High Court appealing against the recent ruling of a judge on one out of four points for which the BUAV took them to court.

What has been lost in this debate is proper publicity for the very high standards of animal care and welfare which are maintained at Cambridge University. It is worth re-visiting the Chief Inspector’s report. He found that:

The extremist group SPEAK recently put out a call on its website (strangely it now seems to have disappeared) for ‘supporters of all varieties who are keen to speak to SPEAK’. Apparently the solicitors engaged to represent Mel Broughton (sued as representative of SPEAK in the Oxford injunction) are behind this call. Apparently this appeal ‘represents the only method SPEAK has of identifying who its supporters are, where they come from and how they identify with the campaign.’ It suggests that SPEAK has little real idea how many (few?) supporters it is has and what they are up to; the support base is unlikely to be as big as it claims. What is for sure is that it doesn’t have a clue how many of its supporters are law-abiding. 

Bad politics or bad blood?

What is going on between the radical animal rights group SPEAK, and the newer organisation known as SPEAK Political? We assumed that SPEAK political was the political wing of animal rights group. But we now understand they have little or nothing to do with each other. Have they fallen out?

There are no links on the SPEAK website to SPEAK Political, and vice versa. Neither organisation mentions each other in the ‘about us’ section.

All of this gives room for speculation: was SPEAK too radical for SPEAK Political? Did they fear they would reduce the already narrow chances to win any votes in the political centre ground? Or did an internal leadership struggle occur? Was it about funding? We may never know. The animal rights movement is renowned for its infighting and constant fracturing.

What seems to be clear is that there are serious doubts in the animal rights movement about the future of extremism. Some activists now recognise that supporting violent and illegal actions undermined their credibility. They seem to have finally realised that the vast majority of the British people do not approve of such tactics. I don’t know if the whole animal rights movement understands these changes, but the leading figures in the movement certainly have to answer some inconvenient questions now.

Hot off the press:
Two British-born scientists, Sir Martin J Evans and Oliver Smithies, and an Italian-born colleague, Mario R Capecchi, share this year’s Nobel ’for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells‘.

In layman’s terms, they developed a way to make ‘designer mice’ that meant that the role of different genes in human development and disease could be tracked. The technique could be used (i) to discover the function of a gene, and (ii) to create of animal models of human disease such as cystic fibrosis, diabetes and heart disease.

This incredibly powerful technology – referred to as a ‘magic wand’ by Prof Ira Herskowitz in 2001 when she presented the Lasker prize to the trio – has had a revolutionary impact on medical research:

A new Centre for Integrative Mammalian Physiology and Pharmacology opened recently at Imperial College London. The aim of the Centre is to provide a focus within the College for the development of in vivo research and to provide postgraduate training in in vivo physiology and pharmacology.

The enormous expansion in molecular biology over the last 15 years has been accompanied by a slowdown in the rate of development of new medicines. The concern is that we may have lost sight of how molecular components and cells act together in whole living systems—hence the funding of these new centres around the country.

So whilst molecular biology can shed light on structures and interactions of genes and proteins, integrative studies using animals are key in translating information from the genome into advances in understanding of human and animal disease and in developing the next generation of new medicines.

The most vitriolic antivivisection group in the UK, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) has spun out of control in its account of the single point it won in the court case against the Home Office this July. The Home Office has appealed against the ruling.

In its latest mailing to supporters, the BUAV claims that the government was ‘found guilty of turning a blind eye to the substantial suffering of animals’. No such verdict was made by the judge in the full court transcript. He never claimed that the suffering of animals was not taken into account, but rather that the severity limits for certain experiments were incorrectly assigned when project licences held at Cambridge University were renewed in 2003 (he said they should have been ‘substantial’ rather than ‘moderate’). The Home Office remains clear in their original assessment of this case that changing the severity limit would not itself alter the experience of an animal undergoing regulated procedures.

The National Research Council (NRC) recently produced a report titled Toxicity Testing in the Twenty-first Century: A Vision and a Strategy. In it, they outline a plan for utilising new technology to streamline toxicity testing.  The plan’s aim is to increase efficiency whilst decreasing costs, time, and numbers of animals used.

The report notes that one of the ‘challenges’ of developing an in vitro test system to evaluate toxicity is "The current inability of cell assays to mirror metabolism in the integrated whole animal." (p5)

They go on to note that targeted testing in the future may be in vitro or vivo:

It is satisfying to hear that Julia Didrikson from Poole, Dorset has been sentenced to 5 months in prison for sending intimidating and threatening hate mail to employees of Huntingdon Life Sciences. Clearly these threats, described as vicious by the police, were very distressing for those involved. Didrikson used SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) websites and her own research to conduct an email hate campaign. She is the first person in the UK to be convicted under a section in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which deals with intimidation of persons connected with an animal research organisation. People who send threatening letters to individuals and their families are not above the law.

Antivivisection groups have been extremely active lobbying in Europe against the use of animals in research. It is important that we get our arguments together and our message across to MEPs. A short summary of the situation in the UK, titled ‘Talking Point on the use of animals in scientific research’ has just been published in the Journal of the European Molecular Biology Organisation. 

Friday morning at the BA Festival of Science in York saw a whole morning devoted to improving the robustness, relevance and transferability of data from animal experiments which are intended to evaluate potential clinical interventions.

Interesting points were raised by several speakers, particularly about the importance of properly designed experiments. Not only should sample sizes be correctly calculated to ensure that the data produced are statistically significant, but randomisation(1) and double-blinding(2) should be standard practice.

Investigations into the published literature on stroke showed that the majority of studies have not fulfilled these criteria, and it is likely that other areas of research are similarly afflicted.

This is similar to the state of human clinical trials 10-15 years ago, and we can only hope that experimental design is improved as quickly as possible.  Recognition of the issues is the key first step. The speakers at the event are doing the vital job of highlighting these problems, whilst stressing exactly what this does and does not mean.

Just as historical bad design did not render the concept of clinical trials as being flawed, the speakers noted that this did not mean that animal models were not a valuable tool in biomedical research:

"This isn’t to say that animal models of stroke are bad… it’s that we can do them better and we must make substantial efforts to improve the quality and reporting of those studies.”
- Dr Malcom Macleod, CAMARADES

Dr Ian Roberts, who spoke on the important of statistical analysis, recognised in a BMJ article that analysis of information is currently limited to stroke research. Based on such limited information he wrote,

"it would be inappropriate to make general statements about the value of animal research"

RDS supports every effort to improve the quality of data gained from animal studies.

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(1) Where allocation of which animals get the trial substance and which get the placebo is randomly determined.
(2) Where those giving the substances as well as those monitoring the results do not know which animals have received the trial substance or placebo.

We see from a new post on the SPEAK website that the monkey named Felix who they were campaigning to save from Oxford University has now died. SPEAK claimed that Felix was been tortured and that he lived in a small cage, although in fact this primate appeared on a BBC documentary allowing people to make their own judgements about how the animal was looked after.

But we should not shy away from the reality of research. Almost all animals are humanely killed after research, usually to study their tissues to gain further information. Animals are not simply research tools, they are sentient beings. It is regrettable that any animal has to be used, and then die, in research. But it would be even more regrettable if research to advance knowledge and potentially help treat or cure people with distressing and disabling diseases such as Parkinson’s or stroke could not go ahead. And we should not strive to keep animals alive for no good reason if it simply makes them suffer.

In true SPEAK style, their initial pronouncements on Felix sounded sinister; as in their message to Oxford University ‘if for any reason you feel it’s in your best interest to kill Felix before you had intended to, then think again. Or if Felix mysteriously dies, then we urge you to think very seriously about this course of action. The British public will take a very dim view on this course of action, should you choose to take it, and at SPEAK we will never forget such conduct’.

But presumably unable to carry through any threat, SPEAK has now decided apparently that Felix is just a symbol.