The Michigan Daily - Friday, October 29, 1993 - 3 'I think we have a responsibility to reduce pain and suffering to the minimum, but in the end I think it's appropriate to use animals to solve human health problems.' - Dr. Daniel Ringler Director, Unit for Laboratory Animal Medicine 'I'm against suffering, psychological or physical. ... Just because they are mice doesn't mean we can use them as if they were beans or something.' Maria Comninou Citizens for Animal Rights Founder and Director, Washtenaw+ A S 7kc I1 U i r sss msrr ag ns b University scientists weigh use of animals in research against benefit to humnt By DAVID RHEINGOLD DAILY STAFF REPORTER triding past locked rooms full of caged ani- mals, Dr. Daniel Ringler glances at signs on the doors to find a room he can enter without having to don gloves and a gown. This is the Unit for Laboratory Animal Medicine, the nerve center ofthe University's animal research facilities. Though animals can be found in 30 campusbuildings, the base operations are located beneath the medical school, where researchers in white coats scurry through a winding series of corridors like giant lab rats in a maze. Ringler, the unit's director, walks into a room and scans rows of mice sniffing inquisitively at the sound of visitors. These are among the more than 133,000 animals used annually in University research, three-fourths of which are rodents. Some are immediately euthanized so their organs can be removed and studied. The rest will be put to sleep at the end of the experiment so researchers can take tissue samples. "If we can use 10,000 mice to cure a kind of leukemia in children, then I think we ought to be using those 10,000 mice," Ringler said. "Billions of mice are born and die in nature every year. If we can use 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 mice to solve a human health problem that's causing pain and distress to humans-and to animals -then I think we should do that." Weighing the cost of animal lives with the benefit to human lives is a delicate balancing act, one that Ringler and reearchers must grapple with constantly. On one side lies promising new treatments that will save human lives. The landmark Salk polio vaccine, for instance, was tested on animals at the University in the 1950s. More recently, University researcher Francis Collins used 1,500 mice in order to pinpoint the gene for cystic fibrosis. On the other side lies the possibility of killing animals for medical techniques that will never prove useful. Always the question that plagues critics: Is the sacrifice justified? Monkeys in the middle An assemblage of local and national activists said the sacrifice wasn't justified when they rallied at last year's graduation and outside the Sept. 25 football game against Houston. The target of their ire was Dr. James Woods, a professor of pharmacology and psychology, who has conducted a series of drug-addiction experiments over the past 10 years. Woods is using monkeys to try to find treatment drugs for heroin addicts - drugs that do not have the addictive side-effects associated with methadone. "We think that we may be able to develop drugs that people are not addicted to.... I think it's a justified objective to use a monkey for that purpose," Woods said. "But don't misunderstand me in that I'm not alone in this, that I have a large scientific community that agrees with me." But the idea of heroin-addicted monkeys has enraged animal-rights activists. "I feel thatit's cruel and very unnecessary. It's definitely a waste of tax-payers' money," said LSA senior Jeff Zick, who protested the research. "Already we have cures for addiction, and we could be spending the money to rehabili- tate people with addictions." Woods agrees the government should increase drug- rehabilitation funding. "My own opinion is it's inappropriate to take funds from me and give them to rehabilitation. We need funds for both. If I had my way, I'd make sure that we had funds for rehabilitation and my work," he said. Activists charged the University with negligence after 11 monkeys, out of a total group of roughly 180, died in two years. Five suffered from infections related to the catheters that channeled narcotics into their systems, and one died of a drug overdose, necropsy reports show. "One of the risks associated with chronic catheter place- ment is infection," said physiology Prof. Louis D'Alecy. "You can't attribute the deaths to negligence. We're talking about an animal that costs several thousand dollars to get into the system, and then you've got to maintain them." uomo mr* uMr to squirrei feeders Woods' work is a small portion of the hundreds of projects at the University that involve animals. One experi- ment is testing whether a low-copper diet can slow down tumor growth in mice. Another project is tryingto strengthen weak hearts in goats by wrapping one of their back muscles around their hearts. Any University researcher who wants to conduct re- search on animals must first go to the University Committee on the Use and Care of Animals. "Anything that you do - if you put out a squirrel feeder Daniel Ringler, director of the University's Unit for Laboratory Animal Medicine, peers into container of mice used for campus research. - technically should go through the committee," said Philip Myers, an associate professor of biology who serves on the committee. Myers studies squirrel migration in Michigan, often putting radio-transmitter collars on squir- rels to test their movements. The 15-member committee comprises faculty, staff and some campus outsiders. Every year, it screens about 500 applications from University researchers for projects in- volving animals. Not all the committee's faculty members conduct ani- mal research; the committee has included English and philosophy professors in the past. Each brings a different perspective to the table, and almost all research proposals end up getting revised. Researchers must justify the type of animals and the number of animals to be used. They also must explain how the project will benefit society. One observer who watches the committee with a keen eye is Maria Comninou, a founder and a director of Washtenaw Citizens for Animal Rights. Comninou con- tends the committee does not adequately balance a project's merit with the cost to animals' lives. "It's just a committee that tells you how you're going to die, not whether you're going to die or whether you're going to suffer," she said. "It's like a jury where you are presumed guilty, and the only thing they decide is what sentence you're going to get, what method of capital punishment and how long you will stay in prison before you get executed." "They may say, 'Go back and change it.' But they all come back and get approved. But that doesn't mean I want it to go away. I'm glad it's there --it's better than nothing." Prof. D'Alecy, who chairs the committee, counters that each research proposal faces a rigorous examination, and almost all are revised. "These people are a very diverse group, and they're far from a rubber stamp," he said. "They're in many ways more demanding than scientific review groups because they make investigators explain it in a way that the layperson can understand." Research applicants also must predict how much dis- comfort or pain the animals will feel. About 60 percent of all projects fall into category A - experiments that cause little or no pain to the animals. The remainder lie in category B, experiments that cause some pain, with 5 percent to 10 percent in category C, experiments that cause significant pain. Not surprisingly, category C research often generates the most uproar among animal-rights activists. A 1* er'uaWi I t t o anuials r'esearseha? Such critics commonly call on institutions to use other research methods instead. "I'm opposed to most of it because a lot of times things are done unnecessarily.... I prefer to use alternatives in any form, because animals are not willing," said LSA junior Laura Cieslak, a member of Students Concerned About Animal Rights. Cieslak and others say researchers should rely more on computer models. Still, the difficulty is that they cannot accurately predict how a body will react to a new drug or treatment. "If a computer model came along that was better than an animal model, that's what we would use," said David Moody, a research scientist at the University's Kresge Hearing Research Institute. "We're not using animals just for the sake of using animals." Comninou of Washtenaw Citizens for Animal Rights said some animal research at the University, such as testing whether automobile air-bags leave abrasions on pigs, should be tested on humans instead. , Comninou opposes research projects that confine ani- mals or cause animals to feel pain. She also said the University uses too many animals, particularly mice. ("Just because they are mice doesn't mean we can use them as if they were beans or something.") Avegetarianwhohasfourdogs and threecats, Comninou opposes research that confines animals or harms them. "I'm against suffering, psychological or physical," said Comninou, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University. But she doesn't mind researchers who observe animals in their natural habitat, and she said scientists should test experimental treatments only on already sick animals. Yet waiting around to obtain enough sick animals could mean a delay in testing human treatments. "You might have to wait three years toget enough dogs that have the sametype of cancer," she said. One difficulty with bypassing animal research is meet- ing strict federal requirements for medical research. U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations require extensive testing of any new drug, and this inevitably means animal research in the preliminary stages. "In this day and age, it's virtually impossible to have a procedure or compound make it from the laboratory bench to the bedside without being tested in not one animal model, but in several animal models in different laboratories," D'Alecy said. Fearing animal-rights terrorism, University safeguards laboratories By DAVID RHEINGOLD DAILY STAFF REPORTER Animal-rights terrorism has never happened here. And the University would like to keep it that way. The University has spent more than $100,000 on an elaborate security system - which includes computer voice-print identification - for its Unit for Laboratory Animal Medicine. Though expensive, the costs pale next to the damage that terrorists have inflicted on some research institutions 'In an in the United States. The University of Cali- environment fornia at Berkeley has spentwhere you're more than $1 million pro- tecting itself against ani- trying to be open mal-rights terrorism. When t itbuiltanewresearchbuild- o the needs of ing in 1990, the university - and allow for had a dog sniff the site for access to bombs every day. At the University of professors by - California at Davis, the Animal Liberation Front students, it's was suspected of torching a tough to balance lab under construction in securityaainst 1987, costing the school more than $3.5 million. the academic "Previously, the Mid- west had been relatively mission of the spared from that. It was University.' mostly West Coast and East Coast," said Dr. Daniel Louis D Alecy Ringler, director of the physjioogy University's Unit for Labo- professor ratory Animal Medicine. _____ ssr But last year, an ani- mal-rights terrorist firebombed mink research facilities at Michigan State University, causing more than $200,000 in damage, officials said. The University of Michigan locks every door to labs holding animals and deletes their room numbers from documents released to the public. The difficulty is preventing terrorism while maintaining an open campus. Mice, jab,.-