Following an infiltration of the University, BUAV made a number of claims which, on thorough investigation by the Home Office, proved unfounded. The University was exonerated. In fact the judicial review does not relate specifically to either primate research or Cambridge.

The low point was Michelle’s appearance on BBC Two’s Newsnight on Tuesday. Against her barefaced lies, leading brain surgeon Professor Tipu Aziz from Oxford University, who didn’t know anything much about the judicial review or the Cambridge saga, did his best. Presenter Emily Maitless didn’t seem to know what was going on either.

Old Balls? Ah yes, that would be Balls, Michael, father of young Balls, Ed, and former director of alternatives organisations FRAME and ECVAM. He has been restyled as an eminent zoologist, former Home Office advisor and of course father of the aforementioned cabinet minister.

Balls used to be content with sniping at the scientific community from the relative safety of the pages of FRAME publications. But his family connections seem to have attracted the media spotlight, and he was unusually quick off the mark early on Monday, when he released a statement via FRAME, ostensibly about the judicial review but also commenting on the rise in animal procedures. His statement was out on the wires before the Home Office had even released the figures.

Balls popped up in the intro to the aforementioned Newsnight discussion. If you ‘listen again’ before a week is up, you can also hear him enjoying his new-found fame on BBC radio and claiming, unchallenged, that scientists ‘do unnecessary experiments on animals’. If he has evidence of unnecessary experiments, I wonder why he hasn’t given it to the appropriate authorities. He should put up or shut up, as they say. 

For the field of animal research, the small number of ‘scientists’ who claim that it is inherently flawed usually turn out to have animal rights beliefs. Typical is the group Europeans for Medical Progress (EMP), which is an animal rights group masquerading as a scientific organisation.

The mere fact that some individuals have a scientific background does not mean that a particular line of argument they promote is inherently credible. It remains an important task for the media to discern where the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence and expertise lies, before giving equal balance to extreme minority views.

Another lesson we can learn from the MMR debacle is that any type of research can be flawed if it is badly carried out. EMP currently argues on its website that we should use research tools and methods ‘focusing exclusively on human biology’. Yet that is exactly what Andrew Wakefield and his co-authors did in their research. The alleged link between MMR and autism came from studies of human bowel samples and other data from human tests. The results were flawed and highly misleading. No form of research guarantees the correct answer. Only the animal rights groups focus exclusively on the limitations of animal research. Such short-sightedness and selective use of evidence makes no sense.

The BUAV fails to explain its totally contradictory approach. On the one hand it describes research using animals into such drug abuse as a ‘complete waste of time’. On the other hand, it states that the funds would be better spent on other relevant facilities, such as ‘improving drug rehabilitation centres’. If this drug use is entirely avoidable, then why is it wrong to research treatments for the problems of illegal drug use, but worthwhile spending money on rehabilitation?

The BUAV states that the government already refuses to issue licences for animal tests on other non-essential products such as tobacco, alcohol, weapons, and cosmetics. It is ibeing economical with the truth. It is true that the testing of such products themselves has been banned. But it is still permissible to administer tobacco and alcohol to research the diseases that are caused by them. This is acknowledged in a press release from the BUAV in 2004 which accepts that ‘researchers are still able to get licences in the UK to test tobacco and alcohol on animals for health related research such as lung cancer, liver disease etc.’

The BUAV has also grossly distorted information that they received from the Medical Research Council (MRC) under a Freedom of Information request. The MRC informed BUAV that it provided a total of £1.6 million over five years to one university for research on addictive drugs. The £10 million figure for expenditure over a decade is a BUAV invention.

The BUAV appears to be getting frustrated that the debate is not going its way. It actually made the absurd claim in a letter to The Guardian that organisations representing researchers are seeking to highlight the activities of ’one or two isolated extremists‘. Presumably the fact that there are many more than ‘one or two’ animal rights extremists are in jail is not a reason for BUAV to check its facts more carefully. It seems that only by resorting to gross distortion and exaggeration can it get the publicity that it needs to feed its fundraising activities.

We did try to set out what some activists call the ‘scientific argument’, as promoted by the organisation Europeans for Medical Progress. We filmed a long interview with their spokesperson Kathy Archibald, her taking us through her arguments. We took these arguments seriously and investigated their credibility. Thus we interviewed on camera Richard Klausner, a former director of the US National Cancer Institute, refuting Archibald’s argument and how she had used a quotation of his ‘entirely out of context’. Moreover, we had also lined up to film a Gleevec patient and some of the scientists involved in the creation of Gleevec who also wanted to refute EMP’s arguments. We also asked Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation and Professor of Ethics at Princeton University, what he thought and he said it was ‘wishful thinking’ to assert that animal experiments did not benefit medicine. In the end, we felt that we could include none of these contributions. We simply did not have the time in the programme to delve into these complicated arguments.

EMP claimed to be backed by ‘a significant strand of scientific opinion’ and to have ‘abundant scientific evidence’ for their views:

There exists a significant strand of scientific opinion that animal experimentation is largely irrelevant and frequently harmful to human health. There is abundant scientific evidence to support this view, which lies at the very heart of the fascinating story about Oxford University’s controversial animal laboratory. There are spokespeople who would like to make this case and they were made available to the BBC but were denied the opportunity to be heard. This amounts to nothing less than censorship.

We have never been able to find out how a minutely thin strand is ‘significant’ or how the vanishingly small amount of evidence is ‘abundant’. Neither it seems, has the BBC. As well as refuting accusations of bias and censorship in some detail, they quote two of the newspaper reviews:

I would refute the idea that this was a biased programme. My contention is supported by two of the reviewers in the broadsheets. Lucy Mangan, in The Guardian, wrote, ‘this BBC documentary was superbly balanced’. And Tim Teeman in The Times said, ‘What distinguished Adam Wishart’s Monkeys, Rats and Me: Animal Testing (BBC Two) was the film-maker’s ambivalence, a refreshing grey area for a subject that normally polarises opinion. Clearly, those who would like to complain about the bias of this programme are too partisan to see my equivocation.’

EMP itself states ‘The BBC’s responses all contain a dismissal of the arguments of Europeans for Medical Progress and its director, Kathy Archibald, as not being credible.’ I’m sure EMP will understand why I took that quote out of context – it’s irresistible, isn’t it?

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to…demonstrate support for animal research.  (Submitted by Martin Piper)

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to…demonstrate a commitment to replacing animal experiments with more ethical and scientifically relevant non-animal research techniques, by committing to and publishing a targeted timetable for total replacement.  (Submitted by Wendy Higgins)

E-Petitions, Science, technology and innovation

[Another quick tangent: it’s interesting to note that the anitiviv one is from BUAV’s former?/current? (who cares?!  they’re a declining organisation after all) Campaigns Director; whilst the supportive one seems to be from a member of the public unconnected with the debate – admittedly I could be wrong, this is only based on quick Googling of both names – but it seems to show which way the wind of public opinion is blowing.]

Now, the antiviv petition seems quite reasonable (as long as we disregard the ‘scientifically relevant’ bit) – after all, no one likes using animals, so it makes sense to try and phase it out wherever and whenever possible.  The crucial point that non-scientist Wendy Higgins seems to have missed is that no one can predict the rate and direction of scientific and technical progress (although we’re influencing the direction as much as we can through well conducted, good science and the founding of the NC3Rs) and so it can’t be time-tabled. If our society wants medical progress and drug development to continue, then animal research will be a part of that for the foreseeable future: opinion polls show that the majority of people accept this.

The point I am trying to make, in a very roundabout way, is not whether a particular petition is right or wrong, but when should it be taken into account?  The hot topic this week is the e-petition against road pricing with 1.3 million signatories as of last night.  This petition is not really based on solid foundations – the idea is still at the drawing board stage, and no real, validated assessment has been done on how it would affect road users.  Many of those who signed the petition may be better off if road-pricing does goes through, but I can’t say for sure because it hasn’t been properly considered yet. It’s a good debate-starter, but nothing more.

Today’s Guardian has an excellent leader about this issue, A signature issue for government.  For those of you who don’t have time to read the full article:

The real issue that is at stake in the road-pricing row is not the rights and wrongs of petitioning but whether, and how far, the government ought to take account of the protest…
Whether Mr Alexander should not just listen to the protest but give in to it is not a question to which there is only one irresistible answer. This is not a matter of principle. The truth is that it depends. It depends on the substance of the argument, the scale of the protest, the perceived strength of feeling, the influence of those involved, the importance that the government and the party attach to the issue, the strength or weakness of the government at the time, the political cost of defiance, the national interest, the alternative, the precedent, the timing - and a kaleidoscope of other considerations. A million people can be right or wrong, or a bit of both at the same time, and in a representative democracy, MPs and ministers have to weigh the issues and then use their best judgment

‘In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.’

The first mention I saw of Cargo Cult science was in Saturday’s Bad Science column in The Guardian by Ben Goldacre, in which he has another pop at ‘nutritionist’ ‘Dr’ Gillain McKeith

‘Maybe this pamphlet is just a shortened and simplified version of [Gillian McKeith’s] PhD text, but if it is at all based on her thesis it is not a good advert for that as a scholarly work. Inside is what I could only describe as Cargo Cult science: she’s going through the motions, but the content, only closer inspection, is like an eerie parody of an academic text.’
Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, The Guardian 3 February 2007

Then Channel 4 aired the theories of the extraordinary Dr Aubrey De Grey on Saturday evening in Do You Want to Live Forever? (If you follow this link, you don’t get any information about the programme, unfortunately). He calls his theories – which do not seem to have been tested by any real experimental science – SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). Anyway, half watching this programme, which made a reasonable stab at debunking De Grey’s ‘science’ there was a sequence showing the South Seas cargo cult – probably a re-creation.

De Grey’s theories do have some relevance to animal research, in that they don’t yet involve any. Calling De Grey a ‘well-informed flake’, Thomas Sutcliffe in today’s Independent TV review (unfortunately I couldn’t find it online) says:

‘It doesn’t help Dr De Grey’s standing with the bench scientists (the people who do the hard grind with fruit flies and rhesus monkeys) that his disciples range from the wilder frontiers of scientific prognostication.’
Thomas Sutcliffe’s TV review, The Independent, 5 Februay 2007

But wait a minute ... De Grey co-founded the Methuselah Foundation and the Methuselah Mouse Prize: ‘the premiere effort of the Methuselah Foundation and is being offered to the scientific research team who develops the longest living Mus musculus, the breed of mouse most commonly used in scientific research.’

How to define the longest living and thus trigger the award? Unfortunately I couldn’t work it out from a quick read of the website – life’s too short to get stuck into in all this Cargo Cult nonsense, I thought. I’ll just stick to debunking the antivivisection Cargo Cult.

And we met a senior member of BUAV staff and explained why the Sky News report was pulled—so it is being doubly dishonest in pretending it doesn’t know.

Sky News spent some time on the phone to RDS as well as the Home Office and other research organisations. Sky News already had doubts about the truthfulness of the story put to them by BUAV. We pointed out that BUAV always portrays everything it sees in the worst possible light—to the extent of totally distorting the reality of any situation. We described how it makes almost every allegation possible in an attempt to smear the organisation which it has infiltrated. We highlighted the extensive investigations which were carried out following the BUAV infiltrations at Harlan UK and Cambridge University which showed that none of the major contentions made by BUAV were true. The review by the Chief Inspector of ‘Aspects of Non-human Primate Research at Cambridge University’ is available on the Home Office website.

If BUAV thinks that its continued mistruths and distortions will get it any further in 2007 than it got in 2006, it is sadly mistaken.