The history of animal testing and examples from the field of neuroscience help us to reconsider the meaning of animal testing. While animal testing has contributed to human progress, it has also been criticized for its practicality and ethical issues. Modern scientific and technological advances are reducing the need for animal testing.
Animal testing has long been used extensively in the natural and applied sciences, including medicine, pharmaceuticals, biology, and space science. Animal testing has always been behind some of humanity’s most remarkable advancements, which is why it continues to be so controversial. In this blog post, I’d like to reconsider the meaning of animal testing by looking at the history of one of its most prominent applications: neuroscience.
The study of the brain, which we often refer to as “neuroscience,” is more accurately called neuroscience. Neuroscience is the study of the entire nervous system, including the brain. It focuses on understanding how we perceive and experience the external environment and how we interact with other people. Because of this, neuroscience is closely linked to other disciplines such as genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, and pathology.
The development of neuroscience dates back to the time of ancient Greece, when the natural sciences began to develop. If we look at the human record, we can find stories like the following Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, recognized the existence of the cerebrum and believed that the mind is built from it. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato, in his exploration of the brain and mind, also said, “Reason or intellect is the mind of the gods, and appetite, sexual desire, etc. are the mind of man and come from the brain. The existence of the brain has been known since the ancient Greek era, and its functions were first explored.
However, it was not until the 19th century that the brain was studied in earnest, when its anatomy began to be investigated. There are many famous experiments from the 19th and 20th centuries that are still talked about today. For example, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov discovered the conditioned reflex using dogs in 1904, and Hans Berger’s EEG experiment, which is said to be the first to record brain waves, was conducted in 1929. The reason why neuroscience was able to advance so much in the 20th century is because anatomical access to the brain was not available before then. Before the 19th century, neuroscience was based on people with severe brain damage, so there was no systematic and gradual progress. However, after the 19th century, with the development of anatomy and experiments on animals, neuroscience began to develop gradually.
One example is the experiments conducted by the Italian Dr. Camillo Golgi (1843-1926). In order to understand the structure of the human brain, his team conducted an experiment using the brain of a chimpanzee, which is considered the most similar to the human brain. The experiment went like this First, they put two flickering light bulbs in front of the chimpanzee and taught it to raise its left hand when the left bulb flashed and its right hand when the right bulb flashed. Then, they drilled a hole in the chimp’s skull and injected dye into its brain. They wait for the chimpanzee to react to the light before ending the experiment. After the experiment, the team euthanizes the chimpanzees and removes their brains to investigate how the dye spread. After a long period of study, Golgi’s team was able to determine how different parts of the brain are connected to each other. Neuroscience, the study of the brain, requires an anatomical approach to understand its structure and workings, and in each of these cases, animal experiments were used. These examples are not limited to neuroscience, but can be found in other disciplines as well.
But can we really justify animal testing just because it helps human progress? First, let’s learn more about animal testing. Animal testing is any experiment or scientific procedure performed on laboratory animals for educational, testing, research, and scientific purposes. It is estimated that more than 300 million vertebrate animals are used as laboratory animals worldwide. Animal testing is used not only for pure research to observe genetic traits, growth processes, and behavior, but also for xenotransplantation, drug testing, and poison testing. Proponents of animal testing argue that advances in medicine and other industries in the 20th century were made possible by animal testing.
While I’m positive about the benefits animal testing has brought to industry, I think we should rethink animal testing for two reasons. First, is animal testing effective? While most animal testing advocates claim that animal testing has been a crucial bridge in the development of many industries, this is far from the case. Take, for example, the field of medical testing on animals. Clioquinol, an antidiarrheal drug, was tested on rats, cats, and dogs, but in 1976 in Japan, more than 10,000 people who took it suffered blindness, disability, and paralysis, and hundreds died. Similarly, the arthritis drug Opren, which showed no problems in animal studies, was responsible for 61 deaths, and the heart drug Eraldin was responsible for 23 deaths. This all stems from the fact that humans and animals react differently to certain medicines, and crucially, with only 1.16% of diseases shared between humans and animals, the results of animal testing cannot be extrapolated to humans.
The second reason I am against animal testing is that I believe animals have an inherent right not to be used in experiments. The history of humanity has been one of broader respect and protection of fundamental human rights, and the reason why we have moved from a state of weakness to a state of strength is because differences in power do not give us the right to undermine fundamental rights. I don’t think this line of thinking is unique to the human species. I believe that every entity on the planet has an inherent right not to suffer or be exploited by other entities.
Does this mean that the development of human civilization is no longer possible without animal testing? I do not believe that advances in science and technology should necessarily involve animal testing. There are two main reasons for this. First, modern science and modern technology have advanced to a point where we can question the raison d’être of animal testing. Let’s go back to the history of neuroscience. Until the second half of the 20th century, neuroscience was based on animal experiments on patients with brain diseases. This is due to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. MRI can provide information about any area, any tissue, almost as if you were opening up the brain. The map of brain structure established by Dr. Golgi can now be obtained in as little as 10 minutes with MRI, and at a better level. A second reason to argue that animal testing is not necessary is the evolution of the clinical trial process. As we’ve already pointed out, testing drugs on animals has distinct limitations. In an effort to move beyond this, experiments are being conducted on human bodies. Clinical trials, which are mainly conducted on volunteers through hospitals and other institutions, are conducted under a very thorough and safe process. In other words, the necessary tests for medicines can be conducted through clinical trials on human beings, and verification through such a process will lead to more reliable research and development.
In this article, we have used the example of brain science to question the significance of animal testing and reconsider whether the process is inherently necessary for the development of humanity. There may have been moments in human development up to this point where animal testing was necessary. However, through these processes, humanity has achieved a level of scientific and technological advancement that is sufficient to eliminate the need to use other animals that share the planet with us. Perhaps it’s time to start giving back to them the technological advances we’ve received from them.
