The role of animal experimentation in the development of medicine

Dr Bernhard Rambeck

The traditional art of healing

Since time immemorial mankind has attempted to heal diseases and injuries and to delay death. Its main sources of information were the observation of healthy and sick people and animals, supplemented by intuitive awareness and experience of the healing effects of plants and minerals. Anatomical examination of corpses played an important role during some periods, but at times this was forbidden on religious grounds. In all cultures, the doctors and healers placed the main emphasis on preventing and avoiding illness by means of sensible eating, avoiding poisonous substances and keeping human beings' physical and mental powers in balance. They tried to heal any illnesses that occurred with preparations of the most varied medicaments, mostly derived from plants. Surgical operations were carried out by the doctors of all ages; the patient was already made unconscious with hallucogenic or anaesthetic herbs back in ancient times.

The most important aim of the medical schools and academies was to gather and pass on knowledge acquired when dealing with diseases. During many periods, however, there were also outsiders who attempted to wrest Nature's secrets from it by experimenting on animals, criminals or prisoners of war. The role that such forcibly gained knowledge played in the development of medicine remained very small. Up till the late 19th century the majority of doctors and healers, acting in accordance with the basic medical principle 'Nil nocere'- 'above all, do no harm,' hardly preoccupied themselves with the question whether knowledge useful for human therapy could be obtained from animals that had been made artificially sick or deliberately injured.

The introduction of animal experimentation

It was only in the mid-19th century that the French physiologist Claude Bernard, with his book 'Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale' (An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 1865), made animal experimentation the cornerstone for all medical discovery and set medicine off in a hitherto inconceivable materialistic direction. Under gruesome conditions, and without any anaesthesia, he began systematically to perform operations and physiological experiments on dogs and cats that were nailed down or tied up.
We know from many documents that the doctors of his day were mostly disgusted at the cruelty of his methods and preferred to do without the findings from his laboratory. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the supporters of experimental medicine had their way at the universities. The vivisectors attempted to immediately apply the results obtained in their experiments to human beings. In many cases this meant a pitiful fate for the patient concerned, because then, just as today, it was absolutely impossible to assess whether the results of animal experiments were valid for human beings. It was always clinical experience that determined whether a method or a medicine could be used successfully on humans.

The real meaning of animal experimentation in medicine

As many medical scientists have done both animal and clinical research simultaneously since the days of Claude Bernard, from today's standpoint it seems almost impossible to prove which discoveries are actually attributable to animal experiments and which to clinical studies. It is certain that, since Claude Bernard, the experimenters and their supporters have tried to claim every success or breakthrough in the treatment of diseases to be the result of animal research. Modern medical historians have, however, long since shown that the decisive advances in medicine were not achieved through animal experiments (see T. McKeown, The Role of Medicine, O.U.P., 1976). Until the early 20th century, for example, the infectious diseases counted among the major causes of death in the industrialised nations.
 
The massive decline they recorded after the turn of the century, which led to a significant increase in average life expectancy, is attributable first and foremost to measures in the fields of social medicine and hygiene, along with improvements in nutrition and the standard of living, but not to the relatively late development of antibiotics and vaccinations.

The idea of healing

The introduction of animal experimentation and the scientific procedures associated with it shifted the main emphasis of medicine away from the idea of healing to mechanistic ideas of repairing defect organs. In its original sense, healing was associated with holistic aspects covering both body and mind. The systematic introduction of animal experiments as from the mid-19th century resulted in vitalistic ideas of healing being increasingly replaced by models that seemed to be scientifically verifiable. Naturally we can only speculate as to how medicine would have developed had the animal experimentation form of research not been introduced. Possibly preventive measures, which had already led to the massive decline in infectious diseases, would have been implemented to a greater extent. Possibly homoeopathic medicine and similar approaches to healing would have developed in a scientifically acceptable direction. We simply do not know.

Animal experimentation - a product of its time

It is clear, on the other hand, that the medicine of the 20th century, with its orientation towards animal experimentation, is a product of its time, a time in which everything seems to be achievable from the technical viewpoint - from landing on the Moon to the cloning of mammals. Medicine's use of animal experiments fits in with the total materialism of the 20th century - anything that cannot be measured simply doesn't exist. Healing must either be explicable and provable materialistically or it will be dismissed as charlatanism and fantasy.

It was not by chance that the animal research method was only introduced systematically into medicine in the 19th century. Technically speaking, science would have already been in the position to perform comparable experiments and investigations centuries earlier. Animal experimentation only managed to catch on once the concept that man was only a rather more highly developed mammal had gained sufficient acceptance. So long as it was generally accepted that human beings stood out from other animals mainly due to their mental and spiritual gifts, no basis existed for performing experimental research on animals. Animal experimentation only became 'meaningful' when science declared human beings to be monkeys at a somewhat further advanced stage of development. However, animal experimentation then established the mechanistic manner of scientific thinking ever more deeply in the field of medicine.

The pinnacle of animal research

Departing from the time of Claude Bernard, the number of animal experiments continually rose up till the middle of the 20th century. The pinnacle was probably reached at the time of the first heart transplant and following the thalidomide disaster. The transplantation of a human heart by Barnard made it seem possible that the final hurdles could be overcome to achieve a technomedicine that would ultimately resolve all the problems of medicine. The descent from the pinnacle began with the thalidomide disaster, which had occurred despite several toxicological studies. This drama was naturally used as a reason to carry out still more animal experiments, but the belief in technomedicine had for the first time been shaken.

Modern medicine's tradition of animal experimentation has led to industry and the universities making gigantic investments in animal research in the hope of being able to solve today's medical problems. Above all, the questions of cancer, heart and circulation ailments, AIDS, diabetes, rheumatism and allergies, and of late additionally Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD), Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, represent an immense challenge to modern medicine. It attempts to trace the origins of these physiological glitches of the human body, and to develop chemotherapeutic or surgical methods of treatment for them, by resorting to countless animal experiment models.

Experimentation in the field of science

In the process, one important aspect of the natural sciences is applied to medicine and carried to the extreme: experimentation, with the element of chance excluded as far as at all possible. This principle no doubt helped the natural sciences to achieve their pioneering breakthroughs since the times of Galilei and Newton. Many important natural constants and laws were established through experimentation. Experiments were carried out in the fields of physics and chemistry in an attempt to dig out the basic connection between cause and effect, and to rule out any influence of chance on the result.

The 'medical excperiment'

When applied to medicine, this principle means that the effect of chemical substances, physical influences or surgical procedures is investigated on animal models. The aim is, by either repeating the experiment or performing it simultaneously on a large number of animals, to avoid chance influencing the result of the experiment.

Similarly, when testing new substances on a patient the influence of the experimenter - or, to put it more euphemistically, of the 'clinical director of the study' - and of chance is usually eliminated by carrying out a placebo controlled double-blind crossover study. In concrete terms, this means that when a medicine is being studied neither the patient nor the doctor administering the medicine is told whether it is the test substance or whether a placebo with no active ingredient/a conventional form of treatment, is being used, or in what sequence they are being used. The results are checked as to their significance - i.e. their meaningfulness and importance - by means of mathematical and statistical methods. In the process the patient is - like the laboratory animal before him - reduced in the experimenters' minds simply to a physical object of cause and effect.

Under this procedure, problems of principle are put to one side. An experiment is only meaningful to the extent that it actually records the crucial degrees of influence. When the first modern physicists, such as Galilei, dropped objects from the Tower of Pisa and used the dropping time to determine the Earth's gravitational pull, that was meaningful because the minute air resistance could be ignored and the gravitational pull really did represent the critical quantity. But when a human disease is investigated on the basis of an animal model, this is methodologically questionable because there are great physiological, biochemical and metabolic differences between a human being and an animal and, most important of all, one crucial factor - the psychological, mental, intellectual or emotional influences on the origin, development and progress of an illness - can certainly not be replicated in an animal model.

The nonsensical logic of animal experimentation

A physical experiment can only answer physical questions. A chemical experiment will only provide answers to problems of a chemical nature. But is there such a thing as a medical experiment? Is it even possible, within the field of healing, to experiment in the truly scientific sense? Certainly one can investigate biochemical effects or physiological questions on an animal or a human being. How does an animal, for example a rat, react if ethanol (ethyl alcohol) or methanol (methyl alcohol) is administered to it? In both cases it will show more or less disturbed behaviour, extending to serious side-effects. But what relevance does this experiment have for human beings? A human being reacts similarly to the animal under ethanol, but under methanol he will - unlike a rat - rapidly go blind. The reason for this difference in the reactions of a human being and a rat lies in the different way in which methanol is processed in the liver.

One can also investigate on animals the problem of physiological dependence on ethanol. Rats are given alcohol over a lengthy period and afterwards their withdrawal symptoms are observed. But quite apart from the unpredictable differences according to species, human beings' dependence is known to be not only of a biochemical, but also of a psychological and physical nature, and precisely that can in no way be investigated in an animal. Accordingly, despite various animal models there is no medicine against dependence on alcohol.

The charge that the system of medicine based on animal experiments only combats or hides symptoms is therefore connected with the fact that it is simply impossible to experiment for healing purposes in the holistic sense, and that animal experimentation only permits investigation into partial aspects if ill-health, without any concrete predictability of the relevance to human beings.

Advances in medicine despite animal experiments

The question naturally arises as to why, despite the questionable transferability of the results of animal experimentation, a large number of evidently effective medicines have nevertheless been developed over the past 100 years. The answer has to be: it is not due to, but despite animal experiments that therapeutically effective substances have been developed and their effectiveness been tested by means of clinical studies. The very fact that ever fewer new active substances are being found of late, in spite of an astronomical growth in the number of animal experiments, is an indication of the reality that, in the final analysis, they can only play a minor role in the development of medicines.

The harm caused to medicine by animal experimentation

The immeasurable harm that medicine has suffered from animal experimentation lies in the excessive overemphasis placed on the scientific aspect, accompanied by the suppression and neglect of the mental and spiritual aspect of human health and illness. Nobody doubts that important mechanisms in the functioning of humans and animals can be clarified scientifically, but the false conclusion that has been drawn by the animal experimentation system is to believe that only those aspects of the human race that can be explained scientifically and measured materially are of relevance to its health and sickness. This false conclusion has meant that today's medical system is, despite gigantic investments and an expansion of detailed knowledge, pursuing a research path around the core of the disease problem and making no headway in the battle against the main diseases of the masses and of the modern world.

The holistic view of medicine

In many fields of science, e.g. in quantum physics, there is a growing movement towards a holistic view of things. The monocausal mechanistic model - one cause leads to one consequence - is an unacceptable over-simplification and cannot be applied to biological processes. Instead of just one cause, a whole range of causes and circumstances must be taken into consideration, and almost always also a whole spectrum of consequences. All the causes, circumstances and consequences are interlinked. In many fields of science, the traditional linear way of thinking has long since been abandoned - not, however, in the system of medicine practised today! In spite of all the failures in the various specialised areas, from allergology to oncology, which reminds one of a battle against windmills, medicine continues to work on serenely with its monocausal concepts of the sources of disease and treatment of it with medical drugs.

A holistic system of medicine, however, does not necessarily see disease as the enemy that must be fought with every possible means, but as an urgent warning signal from the body drawing attention to an underlying mental and physical disturbance which needs to be fathomed out. After all, many illnesses - such as simple childhood ailments - can be linked with a stage of development and be seen as a test at certain phases of a person's development, from which the patient will emerge strengthened and better armed against any further attacks.

A holistic approach to medicine will have to utilise and take account of many ancient and new means of healing that medicine as practised today has largely forgotten. It will, however, radically reject animal experimentation as a means of healing human beings, because human ailments are only very superficially, if at all, comparable with the artificial illness created in the animal laboratory. Only partial aspects can ever be researched in an animal experiment; in that regard animal experiments match our current medical system, which has largely lost the overall view of the body and divided it up into several individual areas for which technospecialists are responsible. But even the relevance to humans of these animal-tested partial aspects can always only be ascertained after clinical tests and clinical experience.

After all, due to the different make-up of human beings and animals no experiment can ever reflect the influence of the mental and spiritual level on the origin, development and healing of an illness. Animal experiments are absolutely incompatible with a holistic view of life, disease and healing. They are a barbaric product of primitive thinking which wants us to believe that the human race can, to benefit itself, gather more and more knowledge about itself and its illnesses at the expense of other living creatures. They are a relic left over from times when rulers hoped to protect themselves from poisoners by employing food tasters, and to pacify the gods by offering up animal sacrifices. Animal experiments have as little to do with the art of healing as capital punishment has to do with educational theory.

The primitive materialistic viewpoint of animal experimentation

Only a primitive materialistic view of the world can reduce life and its wonders to the chemical and physical interactions of atoms and molecules. In order to achieve a holistic understanding of life and its phenomena, it is clearly necessary to take account of further levels which are not as yet accessible rationally and experimentally. Anyone who researches life by dissecting and analysing ends up finding not life, but death. Only naive supporters of reductionist thinking can expect animal experimentation to deliver really practical knowledge that can lead anywhere. Innumerable experiments have been and are still being performed on the most varied animals, whose organs have been maimed or destroyed, with the aim of finding the basic mechanisms of life. But the methods employed are inappropriate for studying anything more than merely chemical, biochemical and physiological aspects. The answers that finally decide over life and death, over health and disease, over the healing and recovery of human beings, cannot be found by experimenting on animals.

Medicine as practised today has degenerated into a repair and spare parts medicine. Whereas great importance was attached to prophylaxis - the prevention of illness - throughout the ages, it is to a large extent neglected by the doctors of today. Yet many modern scientific studies show that simply giving up the people's drugs tobacco and alcohol, together with a balanced meatless diet, results in an enormous decrease in almost all illnesses including cancer and heart and circulation ailments. No animal has to be tortured and killed for epidemiological studies. But studies with defenceless and helpless animals are easier to carry out than investigations which reveal powerful branches of the tobacco, alcohol and food industry to be implicated in causing our illnesses.

True healing instead of the treatment of symptoms

The terms 'heal' and 'healing' are not used by modern medicine at all in its scientific terminology, and are used falsely in everyday language. Modern medicine does not heal in the original sense of 'making whole', it treats symptoms - which may often be quite useful, but the cause mostly remains untouched. A patient whose lifestyle has damaged his heart so badly that a heart transplant or a bypass operation is indicated does not leave the hospital really healthy, but only generally overhauled until the next organ fails. A patient with migraine is not healed with medicines, because the cause of her migraine is not even looked into. A sufferer from epileptic fits is not made healthy by anti-epileptic drugs, his fits are simply suppressed - often at the cost of considerable side-effects. A mentally ill patient may, thanks to psychiatric drugs, delay his next suicide attempt for a while in a calmer state of mind, but he is not healed, especially if he stops taking the drugs. The treatment of symptoms may be superficially advantageous, but the causes are often veiled as a result - and true healing possibly even prevented.

The medicine of the future

A truly successful system of medicine will work with other methods, with so-called gentle healing procedures, if it is to solve our health problems as well as the difficulties that still lie before us. Many gentle methods of healing, such as ayurveda, acupuncture or homoeopathy, are possibly still in a pre-scientific phase. Their effectiveness is already proven anecdotally or empirically, but has not yet been corroborated in a scientific sense. Just as alchemy developed into chemistry, many systems of healing that are already being successfully put into practice could, in conjunction with findings of current-day healing, become the basis for a future system of medicine.

Medicine must, if it wants to become a holistic form of therapy for the future, adopt a form that is humane. Its development must not be decided by biotechnicians closely linked with industrial interests; it must be guided by doctors and healers who show humility towards man and nature. Animal experiments will have no place in a future system of medicine, for they are one of the most hideous concoctions of the human brain.

The author

Dr. rer. nat. Bernhard Rambeck
Born 1946, degree and doctoral thesis in chemistry/biochemistry. Working since 1975 as Director of the Research Department of a northern German epilepsy centre, specialising in the clinical pharmacology of medicines against epilepsy. Active since 1987 for the German Association of Doctors against Animal Experiments, author of the books »Mythos Tierversuch« (»The Vivisection Myth«) and »Tierversuche müssen abgeschafft werden« (»Animal Experiments must be abolished«).