As originally printed in The Physiologist, 
February 2001, Volume 44, Number 1
Page 1

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44:1 (2001), 62-75. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Personal Reflections on the “Animal-Rights” Phenomenon
Adrian R. Morrison, 
University of Pennsylvania

Personal Attention
    The phone rang on Sunday morning, January 15, 1990 while I was sitting on my living room couch completing a paper on the use of animals in biomedical research for a symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Associated Press had called to get my reaction to the news that the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) had broken into my laboratory. My heart sank as I thought: “They finally got me.”
    The raid focused on my office, which they trashed while ransacking my files. I learned later that someone wanted evidence the government was paying me to defend biomedical research. They were wrong.
    I was shocked but not surprised—indeed, surprised that I was so shocked. The animal rightists had good reason to be angry with me so I knew I was vulnerable. Nevertheless, nothing prepared me for the media barrage [including a grossly distorted article featuring me in The Village Voice (26) later sent by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to all in my community], hate mail and death threats over the telephone during the following days, weeks, and months.
It all began long before, of course. Probably the germ of an idea seeded itself in 1981 when I began to defend a neuroscientist, Dr. Edward Taub of Silver Spring, Maryland, from trumped-up charges he had treated his monkeys with deafferented limbs cruelly (18). Taub suffered greatly: he was abandoned by all but a few of us; he used up his personal savings defending himself; and he was without a job for six years. Ultimately, he triumphed. Because court battles kept the animals alive for several years beyond the purposes of the original experiments, recordings from the cerebral cortex (when they were eventually released by the court for a four-hour recording session prior to euthanasia) revealed a degree of reorganization in the brain in adult monkeys that was unexpected (24). Furthermore, Taub and his colleagues have demonstrated that stroke victims can be trained to use an arm rendered “useless” by a stroke (132, 38). This is accomplished by forcing the patient to employ the affected limb for various tasks by restraining the normal one. Taub had come to this idea with his studies in monkeys that had demonstrated that they could be trained to use the affected arm without sensory feedback following section of the dorsal roots. 
    Certainly, PETA had noticed my involvement in the Taub case. For example, they included a newspaper’s quote of my rejection of the idea that researchers are sadists in a cleverly edited half-hour video made from 60 hours of tapes the ALF allegedly handed them after they raided the Head Injury Research Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine in 1984. PETA grossly distorted the case for its own benefit. Responsible scientists and veterinarians were in honest disagreement over the actual conditions of the baboons used during the experiments. Even the executive director of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals felt compelled to observe that in spite of numerous violations of National Institute of Health guidelines, such as substandard laboratory conditions and record keeping, the baboons used did not suffer because of the infractions.
    Later, in PETA’s newsletter, the person who had stolen several animals from my own school’s animal quarters a few weeks after the medical school raid stated, “I had the additional incentive of knowing about two veterinarians at the school, Adrian Morrison and Peter Hand, who had traveled last year to Maryland to appear in court and defend yet another infamous experimenter, Dr. Taub (23).” Clearly, PETA had not forgotten me.
    The stakes rose, though, after I agreed to chair the Committee on Animals in Research of the Society for Neuroscience in November 1987. The Society for Neuroscience, then about 13,000 strong and now numbering over 20,000, had taken the lead with the American Physiological Society in countering the animal-rights threat; for it was our members who were bearing the brunt of the attack, particularly the brain scientists. 
    I was determined to do a good job—and did; too good for my own good eventually. But I felt compelled to carry the fight forward because even as late as 1987, ten years after the publication of Animal Liberation (32), the book that became the “bible” of the animal-rights movement, relatively few scientists, or even organizations representing them, were resisting the anti-science forces. Indeed, in those days I used the analogy of the British Spitfire pilots who had held off another determined (and evil) enemy in the Battle of Britain: a few of us were holding on waiting for the big guns to come to our aid. (Unfortunately, they have yet to appear in any numbers!)
    Bullying me into silence was the ALF’s purpose. Ingrid Newkirk, national director of PETA at the time and a major apologist for the ALF, made this very clear in The Village Voice article published a few weeks after the raid. “PETA intends to use Morrison to persuade other vivisectors who were heartened by his strong stand on animal research that it doesn’t pay off,” says Newkirk. “Now the spotlight is on him and what happens next will deter others who might want to follow in his footsteps (26).”
    What stimulated the order to silence me? Well, according to that same article, the raid revealed I had written over 300 letters urging on colleagues, challenging misstatements by the media and certain politicians, arguing against overly restrictive legislation and probably more. I cannot verify the accuracy of the count because that stolen correspondence (Xerox copies we are told) is in PETA’s hands. 
    In 1989, however, I clearly went too far in the movements’ eyes. Three incidents quite likely made someone say, “Enough!”
    The first involved publicly defending a researcher at Texas Tech University, John Orem, who had been attacked by the ALF and then vilified by PETA in July 1989 (14). Then, only a few months later, the Foundation for Biomedical Research in Washington, DC asked me to debate PETA co-founder Alex Pacheco on a radio talk show via telephone hook-up. During that debate, I revealed that one of Taub’s monkeys that had been removed from his laboratory had become very debilitated over time and was near death. PETA and their associates were keeping them alive by court order, seemingly to keep a famous case alive. Pacheco was very, very angry because I had revealed the monkey’s condition to the public. He pleaded ignorance of the monkey’s condition.
    But my fate was sealed, I believe, by interfering with an animal-rights course being taught to young children—right under my nose in the basement of my school!—in a summer program conducted by the University of Pennsylvania. The movement had by then turned its attention to the schools. They were committed to a long campaign and were looking to the future before we were. One of their representatives was busily at work at Penn.
    During the summer, and on Saturdays during the rest of the year, children were participating in the Discovery Program at Penn, which offered courses on various subjects. One of these, called “Animal Welfare and Human Intervention,” had been given for a couple of years and was, not surprisingly, popular with the middle-school children taking it—except for one 12-year-old girl. She was the daughter of scientists, a participant in 4-H clubs—and was very discerning. She complained to her mother that the course was badly skewed toward the view that animal use is wrong. Her mother had alerted friends at the university.
    Asked to review the course by the university veterinarian, a colleague and I found that often the course materials were straight from the animal-rights literature, even including a boycott list comprised of 54 volunteer health agencies purportedly supporting research using animals. Included were the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, and Cystic Fibrosis Association. We found the teacher (later identified as an employee of the American Anti-Vivisection Society) to have been deceptive and the director of the program, ill informed. The program director had been hoodwinked; for even though she and the teacher had an agreement: “No discussion of animal research”—the course materials said otherwise. 
    Exactly one month after our disagreement with the course had been made public the ALF staged their raid on my laboratory. They were, of course, stupid for attacking me in the way they did. Instead of focusing on my research and attempting to characterize it as cruel and unnecessary at the outset, the scenario for all earlier (and subsequent) attacks on other scientists, they made certain that everyone knew they were punishing me for speaking out against the movement’s attack on biomedical research. Obviously, they counted on frightening me into silence, thus, removing a persistent and, it would appear, effective opponent.
    Consequently, there was no hesitation—and could not have been if the university stood for anything—on the part of the President and Provost to issue a statement to the press deploring the attack against me. Had there been allegations about the nature of my research, I believe the immediate reaction on the part of university officials would have been to ask: “Well, what is Morrison doing in his laboratory anyway?” An investigation would have followed, and a defense of my work would have been lost in the news days or weeks later—and I would have been left to suffer continuing harassment with the added indignity of being suspected having done at least something wrong to have deserved the attack. After all, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” 
    Immediate proof that I was “lucky” in the way I was attacked, at least as far as my relations with the University of Pennsylvania officials go, came in the aftermath of an incident at our Department of Psychology. A PETA investigator, later an investigator for the Humane Society of the United States, had been working undercover in the department as a technician. He stole several rats from a research laboratory in the department and then went public, claiming mistreatment of them. The university’s response: investigate the researcher and do nothing to the thief. Only after the researcher pressed the issue hard were charges filed. The court eventually convicted him and required him to pay for the market value of the rats (not the hours that went into their study) and do community service. The offended researcher felt alone and unsupported. He must have felt doubly so given the attention I had received earlier: a press conference a few days after my break-in attended by university officials, a representative of the National Institute of Mental Health and one from the “incurably ill For Animal Research,” which is a patients’ organization.
    Meanwhile, I was hardly feeling jolly. The attack was frightening, mainly because of the attention focused on me, seeing myself the subject of newspaper articles and newscasts. Fame is no fun when you know you are famous because someone hates you. My head was above the crowd. A number of colleagues said they were right behind me, but my interest was in having people beside me, or better yet, in front of me.
    Many efforts were made to frighten and discredit me. Two of the attempts to ruin my reputation were particularly despicable, but, fortunately, they were unsuccessful. PETA sent a letter with a copy of The Village Voice article to my neighbors, informing them that I was an animal abuser. My neighbors ignored or openly rejected the letter: one builds up credibility as the local Scoutmaster. A series of scurrilous articles on my contributions to science that were commissioned by the American Anti-Vivisection Society were laughed at by my colleagues. That society later protested publicly when the American Association for the Advancement of Science awarded me their Academic Freedom and Responsibility Award just a year after the raid. 
    A terrorist attack is debilitating. It required a year to handle the situation with equanimity. Yet, fear was not the worst of it. The lack of immediate outspoken local support in the early days from the veterinary school’s administration and all but a few friends, colleagues and students—I received dozens of letters from friends and strangers from around the world—both angered and saddened me. Fortunately, my chairman counseled me not to ask people to support me, for I would make them face their fear. That early silence was one of the worst aspects of the ordeal, and it took me several months to come to grips with what I then thought was unforgivable but now view as understandable. (John Orem suffered the same depressing lack of local support.) Indeed, Penn’s Institute of Neurological Sciences awarded me its first Director’s Award and hundreds at Penn signed a statement at the end of the year deploring the American Anti-Vivisection Society’s attempt to destroy me.

A Decade Later 
    Ten years have passed. Some things have changed, but one thing remains the same: a continuing lack of interest of many scientists in confronting the animal rightists’ attack on biomedical research, largely out of fear, I am sure. Terrorism works. Also, there is the all-too-human reaction of letting “George” do it. The understandable, if unhelpful, fear and disinterest of individual scientists is magnified by the woeful lack of significant action, even indirect, by large, powerful organizations such as drug companies. While one can appreciate why a company would also fear animal-rights terrorism—the attacks on officers and shareholders of Huntingdon Life Sciences in Britain provide a despicable example (19)—this does not excuse them from not contributing funds in far greater amounts than they presently do to poorly financed, understaffed support organizations, such as Americans for Medical Progress and the National Association for Biomedical Research/Foundation for Biomedical Research. For example, although the majority of the populace supports the use of animals in research, the annual budgets of the two major animal-rights organizations, HSUS and PETA, were still $31,697,292 and $13,438,018 in 1995. The three with anti-vivisection in their names, the American Anti-Vivisection Society, the National Anti-Vivisection Society and the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, had combined budgets of nearly $4 million, more than quadruple the size of that of the Foundation for Biomedical Research (6). But expecting companies to contribute more is wishful thinking. I am certain that the depredations of the animal rights movement are simply calculated as being a part of doing business. 
    As for the federal government, it is essentially silent, only responding to letters protesting various scientists’ research but never defending them publicly with one shining exception. When Dr. Frederick Goodwin headed the former Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration and, later, the National Institute of Mental Health about ten years ago, he was outspoken in his condemnation of the animal-rights movements’ depredations. Fred produced a number of educational brochures that were so popular the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) led a deceptive campaign to eliminate two of them. He even invited me, a publicly maligned scientist, to be his Director of the Program for Animal Research Issues from 1991-1994.
    The animal-rights organizations collect so much money because people really care about animals. Lurid descriptions of conditions in laboratories or claims that experiments are silly and wasting animal lives quite naturally generate funds from caring individuals who lack insight into what is really behind the fund-raising. It is, therefore, very important that researchers acknowledge their own concern for animal welfare.
    I make it very clear when I speak to the public that I believe we have a strong obligation to behave decently to any animal under our control, and not just in biomedical research. We are the only species capable of recognizing our power and the obligations that go with it. To ignore these is to deny our humanity. A passage I somehow have remembered from one of the horse books I read as a horse-crazy boy captures this sense of obligation simply and beautifully. The following comes from My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, where Rob McLaughlin was talking to his elder son, Howard, about responsibility to animals. A wild mare, Rocket, was carrying the noose of a lariat around her neck because she had broken away from him and was impossible to catch. He worried the end might get caught causing the noose to tighten and choke her:
    “What if it did choke her?” asked Howard. “You always say she’s no use to you.”     “There’s a responsibility we have toward animals,” said his father. “We use them. We shut them up, keep their natural food and water from them. That means we have to feed and water them. Take their freedom away, rope them, harness them. That means we have to supply a different sort of safety for them. Once I’ve put a rope on a horse, or taken away its ability to take care of itself, then I’ve got to take care of it. Do you see that? That noose around her neck is a danger to her, and I put it there, so I have to get it off (21).”
    Rob McLaughlin could have been speaking for researchers and other animal users. People generally want to do the right thing. Researchers, themselves, have ignored this fact and have tried to distance themselves, foolishly, from other animal users. They have too often fallen for the same kinds of lies about others who use animals, fur farmers, for example, that have been used against them. Nevertheless, I think the care of laboratory animals has improved as a consequence of stringent laws enacted in 1985 that are administered by the United States Public Health Service and the Department of Agriculture (16). Both agencies require strict accountability regarding the appropriateness of animal care during experiments. The recommendation that institutions have an oversight committee, an animal care and use committee that includes non-scientists and individuals not associated with the institution, is now law. The exposés referenced in the first section, although greatly distorted by the animal-rights movement and a gullible press, drew attention to the need to assure that animals receive optimal care.
    I am very much in favor of such oversight. Many excellent scientists, although as caring as the non-scientific public, lack training in veterinary medicine. They, their animals and their experiments benefit from the expert advice and oversight of veterinarians specializing in laboratory animal medicine. Scientists know how rapidly ideas and techniques change in their own area of expertise but, I wager, do not consider that events move rapidly in the field of laboratory animal medicine as well. Yet, this new knowledge can save scientists time and money and even improve the science (10). 
    Furthermore, having to demonstrate to a diverse committee that one has planned an experiment intelligently with thought given to welfare of the animals to be used can only improve one’s experiments. With this system in place, laboratory animals are now receiving the best care humanly possible in my opinion, better than the general pet population. Of course, that improving animal care was not the aim of the animal-rights activists in the 1980’s is tragically clear: laboratories continue to be destroyed and scientists harassed.
    With official oversight, of course, comes the danger of stultifying bureaucracy. Currently, some US Department of Agriculture inspectors, I am told, can go beyond reason (or the Animal Welfare Act that directs them) in demanding the compliance of institutions. Local overseers are themselves overseen by the government and so are susceptible to the very human concern not to be accused of inadequacy. I believe that most scientists have experienced overly careful oversight: a committee can always find something wrong that demands some sort of response from the investigator. The healthiest response to bureaucratic excess is to regard it as “the cost of doing business,” rather than rail continually against the system. Both committees and investigators can make honest mistakes. 
    Concern for perfection in the treatment of laboratory animals extends well beyond the local committees of course. What I would call a “community of concern” has developed that attends frequent meetings centered on laboratory animals. The programs are rather repetitious, as are the names on the speaker lists. These include governmental officials and laboratory animal veterinarians, of course, as well as non-scientists who administer institutional animal care committees, but very few active scientists. Present as well, even on at least one of the planning committees for these meetings, are individuals representing organizations with a clear bias against research that harms animals in any way. The problem I see is that there is no provision for dialogue with scientists whose creativity is vital to medical progress. If scientists are not involved in a meaningful way with this increasingly powerful community, animal welfare regulation will always be seen as coercive, which does not benefit the animals. Perhaps such interactions could be achieved at the local level.
    My belief is that underlying the admirable wish of many to treat animals as humanely as possible is a feeling of guilt: “What we are doing is wrong so let us at least do it as close to perfectly as possible.” At these gatherings the commendable concept of the “3R’s”— reduction, refinement and replacement with regard to the use of animals in research (28)—is repeated over and over again like a religious mantra. The Humane Society of the United States is capitalizing on this phenomenon with a well-publicized campaign to eliminate pain and distress in laboratory animals by 2020. Their program ensures more bureaucracy and promises no changes in the pain and suffering of human beings.
    There is a distinct danger that animals, and more to the point, the bureaucracy associated with their care, can become more important in the minds of regulators (in a day to day sense) than the humans the animals are destined to relieve from suffering. As Tannenbaum has observed, there is an increasing tendency among the “community of concern” to go beyond the traditional concern for welfare to a new paradigm of “well-being,” even “happiness,” however that might be defined, unwittingly leading us in to trouble. He notes that, “Wanting animals to live happy lives is wanting something most animals do not ordinarily have, something that can require special and sometimes very costly manipulations of their environments and lives (including good veterinary care)” (37).

“Fudging” the Data
    These last concerns lead directly to some personal reflections on the maturation of my own thinking since 1990. I believe there is something useful to be learned here by those new to the problem but ready to address it. Perhaps my words will encourage them to respond with confidence to various claims and actions of the animal-rights movement. My ideas may be found in full in a recent collection of the thoughts of both scientists and philosophers (17).
    I could not have spoken as boldly about the “community of concern,” or at least as coherently as now, in the early days of defending Taub nor even as late as 1990. The charges against us, i.e., biomedical researchers, were too overwhelming—we were engaged in an evil enterprise—even though I was sure in an unformed way that our critics were wrong in most cases. Philosophers, such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan, had published treatises demonstrating that humans could lay no claim to special treatment and so were unjustified in using animals in research (25, 32). Others with medical credentials were presenting historical evidence demonstrating that claims for a key role for animals in the advances of medicine were greatly exaggerated and that a number of clinicians agreed. Even Scientific American allowed such an article on its pages as late as 1997 (1). Of course, I was certain all of this was nonsense, but one needed to respond with evidence. Gathering such evidence took time and required those willing to undertake the task.
    We were fortunate that a few scientists bothered to examine the claims of the revisionists of medical history. Prominent among the former are the husband and wife team, Charles Nicoll and Sharon Russell (20); Neal Miller (15); Jack Botting, who wrote a long series of articles for the newsletter of the Research Defence Society in England and joined me recently in debunking the aforementioned Scien-tific American article (2); and Earnest Verhetsel (40). I have provided further debunking (17). Clear examples of obviously deliberate distortions, a bizarre “fudging” of the data will be cited later, but there are other aspects to discuss as well.
    One has to consider the possibility that some of these revisionist commentators have little or no understanding of the process of science and how scientists think. For example, some seem to assume that scientists are wedded to the idea that animals are the ultimate for solving a scientific problem and that all other approaches are only secondary to animal experimentation. Because Leader and Stark presented evidence for the important role animals had played in the work underlying the awarding of many Nobel prizes in physiology and (12), Stephens of the Humane Society of the United States thought it necessary to point out how important other techniques had been to such work (36). But of course, what scientist thinks otherwise? Scientists use the best means available to solve a particular problem.
    Another example of naïve (one hopes) thinking appeared in the form of an entire book by Kenneth Shapiro, Executive Director of Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. His thesis is that many physiological psychologists have been blindly and uselessly studying animals with the hope of unraveling the very serious eating disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia (31). Furthermore, the author reported that clinical psychologists never cited these papers. However, a review of the basic studies cited (and condemned) by the book’s author and conversations with some of the authors revealed that their research was directed at understanding the basic physiological mechanisms of ingestive behavior. They were not conducting their research with these disorders in mind. In essence, the book’s author had erected a straw man: basic researchers were harming animals searching for cures for anorexia nervosa and bulimia when, in fact, this was not at all the purpose of their research. Actually, one of the researchers dissected in the book had already noted that there was no suitable animal model for these very debilitating disorders (34).
    A common argument found in the anti-research literature, including Shapiro’s book, states that animals are simply not suitable for modeling human disease: animals and humans are not identical. The latter is true, but it does not recognize that we share more features than not, from the sub-cellular level to that of systems and that mechanisms of disease are studied at all levels of organization of organisms. The most obvious demonstration that we are, in fact, brothers under the skin is our sharing of many diseases. As I stated in a debate with one of the physicians so strangely committed to the theme that animals and humans differ too much for extrapolations from one to the other, only his lack of a tail and fur would distinguish him from a rabid dog should he not seek immediate treatment following a bite by the poor beast.
Worse than ignorance and confusion, though, are the cases of misrepresentation of the writings of scientists, either their conclusions or their actual words, that I mentioned earlier. When alerted to how their thinking has been misinterpreted, scientists will write to journals to correct the record (29). The patently deliberate rewriting of the words of others is simply astounding. For example, in order to persuade the reader that animals did not contribute to the development of a heart-lung machine, Brandon Reines, a veterinarian, constructed one paragraph out of three, omitting the description of the use of dogs in the middle paragraph (16). In another case, Neal Barnard, a psychiatrist who has been medical advisor to PETA, developed a paragraph from sentences in a report on AIDS research that reached a conclusion on the need for animal models that directly contradicted the actual sense of the document (20). Most recently, a physician trained as an anesthesiologist, Ray Greek, has continued the tradition of using the writings of scientists to suit his purposes (9; Sir Roy Calne, personal communication). Clearly, the cause for which these individuals work is greater than Truth.

An Unnatural World 
    Although time-consuming, revealing the mistreatment of the scientific literature by these medicine men and others is quite straightforward. What I found harder to address was the challenge presented by philosophers who had taken up the animal-rights banner. Frankly, as one untrained in philosophy I was intimidated. I remember exulting in the arrival of an excellent book written by philosopher Michael A. Fox, who presented the case for the appropriateness of using animals for biomedical research clearly and brilliantly (7). Then, to my chagrin, he recanted what he had written, urged on supposedly by a radical, feminist friend (8). That served me right: why did a scientist have to have someone tell him how to think about this issue?
Intimidated at first, I soon realized that one could construct any world he wished with words. The animal-rights movement’s major philosophers, Tom Regan and Peter Singer, had done just this (25, 32). In addition, to accomplish his task, utilitarian Peter Singer had to misrepresent the value of animal research to reach the conclusion that research causes too much pain to animals for the medical benefits it brings to human beings (27). Because he follows the rights branch of ethics, Regan did not need to resort to this tactic. And then, as Vance (39) informed us, they proceeded to demolish each other’s world! I credit Vance with opening my eyes to the silliness of it all. It is more than silly really, for such thinking has led to evil in the form of a diminution in the unique value of each human being in the minds of some and attacks on life-saving research (17). 
    In any event, the world they have created is, in the words of my plumber, crazy. [Conservation writer Richard Connif put it more elegantly when he wrote that they had “elevated ignorance about the natural world almost to the level of a philosophical principle (5).”] It is a world these philosophers and the animal-rights leaders who worship their ideas refuse to live in themselves, for none of them have done the moral thing and publicly rejected the use of medical knowledge based on animal research. If they can reject eating meat because slaughtering animals is wrong, they must also reject medicine (35). 
    What is the nature of their world? Simply put, Singer reduces mankind to its capacity to suffer pain, which is a feature of animal life in general. Any use of animals that harms them simply because they are animals is evidence of “speciesism,” a deliberate play on racism. As a utilitarian, he does not speak in terms of rights. Indeed, he rejects that idea because rights are a political concept. On this last point we agree. Of course, Singer is seriously out of tune with the realities of the natural world as Connif pointed out so humorously.
    Regan, too, rejects the rational, natural world with this famous statement from his book, The Case for Animal Rights: “If that (abandoning animal research) means that there are some things we cannot learn, then so be it; we have then no right against nature (because nature is not a moral agent) not to be harmed by those natural diseases we are heir to (25).” This conclusion is reached because animals have “inherent value,” which bestows the right not to be interfered with. Anyone who has watched a cat playing with a mouse knows that the animal world does not play by Regan’s rules. To wind up with the most intelligent brain in the world and then not use it to improve one’s chances of survival would be ridiculous.
    Philosophers and others have rejected these ideas quite nicely (3, 4, 11, 22, 30). Ironically, Fox’s discussion remains one of the easiest to follow if one is not trained in philosophy (7). My own rebuttal has been published in extenso, and I close with this simple, unelaborated quotation from that work (17):
    “Several beliefs or principles have governed my life as a scientist using animals to solve the questions he addresses. Foremost, I believe human beings stand apart in a moral sense (they know right from wrong; they care for other species—to mention two obvious characteristics) from all other species, while I also believe them to be a product of the same physical, evolutionary forces operating on all life. Further, I am certain that animals have been and will continue to be indispensable agents in advancing medical knowledge for many years. Thus, my position is that using animals in biomedical research is necessary scientifically, justified morally and required ethically.
    “Clearly, all scientists using animals in ways that harm them must have similar views unless one is prepared to believe many are sadists. We can immediately dismiss that as a preposterous proposition. Interestingly, belief in the appropriateness of animal use in research among biomedical researchers does not appear to depend on particular religious beliefs. I feel certain that one could elicit a wide variety of religious views, from the formally devout to avowed atheists among scientists who choose fellow human beings before other species, even chimpanzees, although I know of no survey to support this statement. While God may ultimately be behind every research scientist having a belief in the sanctity of human life (whether the scientist recognizes it or not), He rarely enters modern ethical conversations on the question of animals’ rights. When reference to God does appear in discussion, it is usually in animal rightists’ pejorative reference to the idea in Genesis that Man was given dominion over the natural world. But without God’s blessing how can one defend, for example, the use of perfectly healthy animals for research in place of severely brain-damaged infants? This is, in so many words, a challenge frequently raised by the animal-rights movement (for example, Peter Singer). My response to this particular concern: having stood on the grounds of Auschwitz, I am ever mindful that one man’s Jew, gypsy or homosexual can be another man’s guinea pig. If for no other reason, then, I can argue self-preservation. I speak, really, of self-preservation in the larger sense, of protecting the weak and helpless from those who consider themselves competent to decide the fate of others based on their view of what is “best.” I abhor (Singer’s) idea that ‘we cannot justifiably give more protection to the life of a human being than we give to a non-human animal, if the human being (a brain damaged infant for example) clearly ranks lower on any possible scale of relevant characteristics (33).’” 

Acknowledgements

I thank all those individuals who have provided moral or financial support during this interesting decade of my life.

References

1. Barnard, N. and S. Kaufman. Animal research is wasteful and misleading. Scientific Am. 2:80-82, 1997. 
2. Botting, J and A.R. Morrison. UnScientific American. “Animals Rights or Wrongs: An Op-ed.” HMS Beagle: The BioMedNet Mag. 25:1-7, 1998. http://biomednet.com/hmsbeagle/1998/25/people/op_ed.htm.
3. Carruthers, P. The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992. 
4. Cohen, C. The case for the use of animals in biomedical research. N. Engl J Med. 315:865-870, 1986. 
5. Connif, R. Fuzzy-wuzzy thinking about animal rights. Aud. Mag. 11:121-133, 1990.
6. Foundation for Biomedical Research. FBR Facts. Washington DC: Foundation for Biomedical Research, 1997, 4/5. 
7. Fox, M. A. The Case for Animal Experimentation: An Evolutionary and Ethical Perspective. Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1986. 
8. Fox, M. A. Animal experimentation: a philosopher’s changing views. Between the Species 3:55-60, 75, 80, 82, 1987. 
9. Greek, R. and J. Greek. Animal research and human disease. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 283:743, 2000.
10. Hampshire, V., J. Davis, and C. McNickle. Red-carpet rodent care: Making the most of dollars and sense in the animal facility. Lab Animal 29:40-46, 2000.
11. Heffner, H. E. The symbiotic nature of animal research. Perspect. Biol. Med. 43:128-139, 1999. 
12. Leader, R. W. and D. Stark. The importance of animals in biomedical research. Perspect. Biol. Med. 30:470-485, 1987.
13. Liepert, J., H. Bauder, W. H. R. Miltner, E. Taub, and C. Weiller. Treatment-induced cortical reorganization after stroke in humans. Stroke 31:1210-1216, 2000.
14. Lutherer, L. O. and M. S. Simon. Targeted: The Anatomy of an Animal Rights Attack. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma, 1992. 
15. Miller, N. E. Commentary on Ulrich: need to check truthfulness by opponents of animal research. Psychol. Sci. 2:422-424, 1991. 
16. Morrison, A. R. Understanding (and misunderstanding) the animal rights movement in the United States. In: The Ethics of Animal and Human Experimentation, edited by J.P. DeDeyn. London: Libbey, 1994.
17. Morrison, A. R. Making choices in the laboratory. In: Why Animal Experimentation Matters: the Use of Animals in Medical Research, edited by E. F. Paul and J. Paul. New York: Transaction Press, 2001.
18. Morrison, A. R. and P. J. Hand. Animal welfare. Science 215:745-746, 1982.
19. National Association for Biomedical Research. NABR Update. Washington DC: Nat. Assoc. for Biomed. Res., 2000 21/7. 
20. Nicoll, C. S. and S. M. Russell. Animal rights, animal research, and human obligations. Mol. Cell. Neurosci. 3:271-277, 1992. 
21. O’Hara, M. My Friend Flicka. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1943. 
22. Ott, R. S. The natural wrongs of animal rights and animal liberation. J. Am. Vet. Med. Assoc. 207:1025-1030, 1995. 
23. PETA. PETA talks with the Animal Liberation Front. PETA News pp.10-11. 
24. Pons, T. P., P. E. Garraghty, A. K. Ommaya, J. H. Kaas, E. Taub, and M. Mishkin. Massive cortical reorganization after sensory deafferentation in adult macaques. Science 252:1857-1860, 1991. 
25. Regan, T. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1983. 
26. Rosenberg, J. Animal rites. The Village Voice March 6:30-39, 1990. 
27. Russell, S. M. and C. S. Nicoll. A dissection of the chapter, ‘Tools for Research’ in Peter Singer’s, Animal Liberation. Proc. Soc. Exp. Biol. Med. 211:109-154, 1996. 
28. Russell, W.M.S., and R.L. Burch. The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique. Metheun: London, 1959.
29. Salsburg, D. Animal experimentation debate, round two. Scientific American June 10, 1997.
30. Schmahmann, D. R. and L. J. Polacheck. The case against animal rights. Boston Coll. Environ. Aff. Law Rev. 22:747-781, 1995. 
31. Shapiro, K. J. Animal Models of Human Psychology: Critique of Science, Ethics and Policy. Seattle, WA: Hogrefe and Huber, 1998. 
32. Singer, P. Animal Liberation (1st ed). New York: New York Review, 1975.
33. Singer, P. Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. 
34. Smith, G. 1989. Animal models of human eating disorders. In: The Psychobiology of Human Eating Disorders, edited by L.H. Schneider, S.J. Cooper, and K.A. Halmi. New York: NY Acad. Sci., 1989.
35. Stell, L. K. The blessings of injustice: animals and the right to accept medical treatment. Between the Species 11:42-53, 1995. 
36. Stephens, M. The significance of alternative techniques in biomedical research: an analysis of Nobel prize awards In: Advances in Animal Welfare Science, edited by M.W. Fox and L.D. Michley. Boston, MA: NIJHOFF, 1987.
37. Tannenbaum, J. The paradigm shift toward animal happiness: what it is, why it is happening, and what it means for medical research In: Why Animal Experimentation Matters: the Use of Animals in Medical Research, edited by E. F. Paul and J. Paul. New York: Transaction Press, 2001.
38. Taub, E., J. E. Crago, and G. Uswatte. Constraint-induced movement therapy: a new approach to treatment in physical rehabilitation. Rehab. Psychol. 43:152-170, 1998. 
39. Vance, R. P. An introduction to the philosophical presuppositions of the animal liberation/rights movement. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 268:1715-1719, 1992. 
40. Verhetsel, E. They Threaten Your Health: A Critique of the Antivivisection/Animal Rights Movement. Tucson, AZ: Nutrition Information Centre, 1986.

[Table of Contents] [Personal Reflections] [APS News] [Membership] [Education] [ACDP News] [Experimental Biology] [Public Affairs] [Positions Available] [Book Reviews] [Books Received] [Obituary: Donald J. Reis] [People & Places] [Scientific Meetings and Congresses] [APS Membership Application]