Animal Research Is Problematic And Unnecessary

To the editors:

As a Harvard and Cambridge-educated molecular biologist, I was disheartened by the Crimson’s recent uninformed attack on PETA’s campaign to convince health charities to stop funding experiments on animals (Staff Ed, “PETA’s Pedigree”, March 3).

Currently, our society blindly accepts that anything scientists choose to do in the name of medical research is automatically good, while questioning whether these practices are effective and ethical is characterized as “an insensitive approach to human…sickness”.

In fact, animals are so different from humans that they are extremely flawed systems for studying human diseases and therapies, resulting in harm to human health. There is a movement in the scientific community to examine its use of animals in research and promote more predictive research methods, such as human-tissue cultures and epidemiological studies. A Feb. 28 British Medical Journal article titled “Where is the evidence that animal research benefits humans?” authored by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and several British universities systematically examined animal research studies and found that “Clinicians and the public often consider it axiomatic that animal research has contributed to the treatment of human disease, yet little evidence is available to support this view.”

With the recent completion of the Human Genome Project, we have amazing opportunities to study human genes and diseases directly. Our limited resources should not be wasted on killing animals and guessing how the results relate to human biology.

Sadhana Dhruvakumar ’95

Norfolk, Va.

March 5, 2004