The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection

by Deborah Rudacille

Overview

An engrossing and eloquent study of the history and ethics of animal experimentation

The heart of a pig may soon beat in a human chest. Sheep, cattle, and mice have been cloned. Slowly but inexorably scientists are learning how to transfer tissues, organs, and DNA between species. Some think this research is moving too far, too fast, without adequate discussion of possible consequences: Is it ethical to breed animals for spare parts? When does the cost in animal life and suffering outweigh the potential benefit to humans?

In precise and elegant prose, The Scalpel and the Butterfly explores the ongoing struggle between the promise offered by new research and the anxiety about safety and ethical implications in the context of the conflict between experimental medicine and animal protection that dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. Deborah Rudacille offers a compelling and cogent look at the history of this divisive topic, from the days of Louis Pasteur and the founding of organized anti-vivisection in England to the Nazi embrace of eugenics, from animal rights to the continuing war between PETA and biomedical researchers, and the latest developments in replacing, reducing, and refining animal use for research and testing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466895287
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/15/2015
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	563 KB

About the Author

Deborah Rudacille worked as a research writer and editor at The Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing from 1992 to 1998. She lives in Baltimore.

Deborah Rudacille worked as a research writer and editor at The Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing from 1992 to 1998. She lives in Baltimore.

Read an Excerpt

The Scalpel and the Butterfly

The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection

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By Deborah Rudacille

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2000 Deborah Rudacille
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9528-7

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CHAPTER 1

VIRUSES, VACCINES, AND VIVISECTION

To learn how men and animals live, we cannot avoid seeing great numbers of them die, because the mechanism of life can be unveiled and proved only by knowledge of the mechanisms of death.

— Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

Paris, 1876

Slowly and painfully, professor of physiology Claude Bernard finishes his weekly lecture at the Collège de France. "The experimental medicine which it is my duty to teach you has not yet been born," he concludes, quoting from his much praised textbook, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. "But I promise you that our work will bring forth new hope for the sick and the dying."

The students applaud politely and rise as Paul Bert, Bernard's former pupil, enters the room. Some of them smile and shake their heads. The old man is crazy, of course. How can experiments on dogs and sheep and rabbits help their patients, the children who die by the hundreds when diphtheria strikes, the old people taken by influenza every winter, the unfortunate women who give birth in perfect health but die thrashing in fever a few days later. Sheer lunacy to think that cutting apart animals will help these people. Bernard himself admits that often when he begins an experiment, he has no clear idea of what he is looking for. "The experiment itself supplies me with the key questions," he says.

"Witchcraft," one of the medical students mutters to himself as he hurries off to the hospital where the poor lie crowded together, sometimes two and three to a bed. "What a waste of time when people are sick and dying," he says to a colleague, who nods.

But other students, curious and intense, crowd around Bernard at the lectern and ply him with questions as Paul Bert approaches.

"Professor, pardon, but Pasteur says that you must come to him."

Bernard looks up in surprise.

"It is a very great discovery," Bert says. "Koch has shown that anthrax is caused by a microorganism. He has grown the pathogen in culture and used it to infect an animal. A student has just arrived from Breslau, where Koch demonstrated the procedure to Cohnheim and Weigert."

Without a word, Bernard picks up his satchel and marches ahead of Bert out of the room, while an excited buzz begins to emerge from the crowd of students.

* * *

Claude Bernard was not the first scientist to experiment on an animal, but he was one of the first to provide a cogent account of the scientific rationale for vivisection in his book Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, published in France in 1865. Bernard described his work to fellow researchers as well as a general audience, and he contributed a number of articles to the popular press. A lucid and engaging writer, Bernard in his youth had planned to be a playwright until he was dissuaded by a famous French critic who advised him to study medicine instead. His early career change, from dramatist to scientist, presaged the great cultural shift that was to take shape in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Artists, philosophers, and theologians had once stood at the pinnacle of cultural power, forming an elite cadre of "opinion leaders." But by the start of the new century, scientists were to assume this mantle of power. Within the space of a generation, a new priesthood was being founded, the priesthood of science — explicitly articulated as such by the leading proponents of the new gospel and by its critics.

Claude Bernard is significant as well in that his personal life mirrors to a startling degree the vast chasm between those who insisted on the scientist's need and right to experiment on animals and those who objected strongly to the practice of vivisection. Marie-Françoise Bernard abhorred her husband's work and could not understand why he experimented on animals when he could instead have devoted himself to sick people and built a flourishing medical practice. For that reason, Madame Bernard has not been treated kindly by her husband's biographers, who tend to dismiss her as an uneducated woman who made Bernard's home life a hell and deprived him of the company of his daughters. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, Madame Bernard is a rather sad figure whose life reflects the frustrations and limitations endured by women of that era. Deeply sympathetic to animal suffering, Marie-Françoise Bernard not only found herself married to a man who readily engaged in animal experimentation, but also provided unwitting financial support for those activities, via her dowry and comfortable annual income. Most of his biographers agree that Bernard married Marie-Françoise to gain access to her income to support his research activities. The marriage, arranged by a colleague of Bernard's, was ended by formal separation in 1870 — a startlingly modern outcome for this nineteenth-century French Catholic couple and a testimony to their mutual unhappiness and fundamental incompatibility.

Marie-Françoise Bernard objected to her husband's work on moral grounds, but he had enemies in the medical profession as well. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, disease remained a great mystery, believed by many to be caused by "miasmas," or foul odors. The men who locked themselves in basement and attic laboratories to vivisect animals in order to understand the workings of the body in health and sickness were viewed as oddities by the physicians of the time, who considered their work irrelevant at best. Although no one really knew the causes of afflictions such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhus, and plague, most of Bernard's medical peers were certain that they were not to be found in the bodies of mutilated animals.

This was true despite the fact that curious human beings had been vivisecting animals since antiquity. Galen of Pergamon, the second-century Roman physician whose work formed the basis of medical practice in the West for more than one thousand years, experimented on pigs, dogs, and other animals. Galen experimented on animals to study anatomy, and this remained the reason for most animal experimentation well into the modern era. For many centuries, the Church forbade the dissection of human bodies, and even after the bishops relented, the public still expressed strong reservations about the practice. Animals provided a handy substitute, and since they were not believed by most people to possess a soul, an experimenter did not endanger his own soul by experimenting on them.

Many early experimenters shared the views expressed by the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, who believed that animals were a kind of machine. Lacking the ability to reason, expressed in language, and unable to reflect on its own nature and existence, an animal was an automaton, a machine that contains its own principles of motion. The modern word robot perhaps best expresses the flavor of the Cartesian view of animals. Unlike Aristotle, who maintained that animals did have a soul, Descartes argued that only man had been granted a soul by the Creator. Lacking consciousness, language, and a soul, animals might react to experimental stimulus, but their reactions were mere reflex and did not necessarily indicate suffering.

"The capacity of animals for sensation, according to Descartes, was strictly corporeal and mechanical, and hence they were unable to feel real pain," National Library of Medicine historian John Parascandola told an audience of researchers and animal protectionists at the first World Congress on Animals and Alternatives in the Life Sciences in 1993. "They just went through the external motions which in man were symptomatic of pain, but did not experience the mental sensation. Some of his followers denied that animals possessed even the inferior kind of feeling that Descartes attributed to beasts, and they interpreted the cries of an animal during vivisection as the mere creaking of the animal 'clockwork.'"

With Bernard's book as founding text, the practice of animal experimentation spread rapidly in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Young physicians and students from England and the United States visited laboratories in Paris, Breslau, Vienna, Strasbourg, and Berlin to further their medical educations. Most of these students were forever changed by the experience, converted to the new ideal of a scientific medicine. Many years later, William Henry Welch, a pivotal figure in the development of scientific medicine in the United States who had studied in Germany during those years, urged his own students then setting out on their European studies to "get in contact with the great teachers. Then you will have an impression of the men and their work which you will never forget, and every time you read their writings you will remember. Everything will be much more vivid to you."

Paris, 1879

In a small room in Paris, a man returns from a holiday in the country. He is relaxed and well rested, having left the city in July and returned as the October light cast a soft, nostalgic glow over the city. The man, a chemist named Pasteur who is already famous in France for his work on fermentation, walks over to the shelves pushed up against the wall, shelves that hold three covered flasks filled with a cloudy liquid. Pasteur shakes his head. He had instructed one of his assistants to dispose of the flasks three months ago, before he left for Arbois. The glass vials contain cholera, a killer responsible for the deaths of millions of farm animals. "Idiot," Pasteur grumbles under his breath.

As he busies himself in the laboratory, reading through some notes, he decides to renew the experiment he had been conducting when he left for his holiday in the country. Calling one of his assistants, Pasteur casually lifts a vial of chicken broth culture, which he had infected with the cholera microbe three months before. Poor chickens, he thinks, as he makes his way to the yard behind the building.

A few days later, he sits in the yard, perplexed by the appearance of his hens. They peck and strut in the weak October sun happily, as if he had not just a few days earlier injected them with the cholera-laden broth. Here was a puzzle. What was it about these particular chickens that rendered them immune to cholera? While he ponders this conundrum, Pasteur instructs one of his assistants to prepare a fresh culture of chicken broth teeming with cholera microbes. Later that afternoon they inject the miracle chickens once again. Over the next few days they carefully monitor the birds for signs of sickness. Although the chickens seem a bit less energetic than usual, they show no signs of cholera. Staring at the healthy chickens, Pasteur is baffled. Then an idea dawns, a crazy, wonderful idea. Pasteur rushes into the laboratory, calling all of his students and assistants together.

"We need more chickens," he says.

* * *

By the time he discovered that an injection of weakened cholera microbes will protect animals from developing the full-blown disease, Louis Pasteur was already one of the most famous scientists of the age. During the 1860s, he had performed an invaluable service for the French government by discovering that heat kills the microbes that cause fermenting wine to turn bitter and undrinkable. A few years later, he found the microbe that attacks silkworm eggs, causing a disease that kills large numbers of the animals. These discoveries naturally saved the government, and French silk farmers and winegrowers, hundreds of thousands of francs and made Pasteur a national hero. Unlike his recently deceased rival Claude Bernard, Pasteur was also happily married and enjoyed the unconditional support of his wife. Though Bernard had been recognized as a great man by his fellow scientists and had received many honors and awards before his death in 1878, he had never benefited from the public acclaim that was showered on Pasteur. Many speculated that Bernard's death, putatively caused by a mysterious abdominal affliction that neither he nor his fellow physicians could diagnose, was the result of years spent laboring in damp and poorly ventilated basement laboratories. Pasteur, it was rumored, was soon to be granted an entire research institute devoted to microbiological studies, a new building built by the government and equipped with the most modern and efficient laboratory facilities. Despite all this success, Pasteur was as maligned by antivivisectionists as Bernard had been, although it was said that he was far more sensitive to animal suffering and could not bear to be present during certain procedures. His next round of experiments were to make him even more unpopular with those who objected to experiments on animals.

In May 1881, Pasteur vaccinated twenty-five sheep, six cows, and one goat with a series of inoculations. The first vaccine, administered on May 5, contained a very weak anthrax culture. On May 17, Pasteur inoculated the animals with a more potent, although still attenuated (weak), virus. Another twenty-five sheep, four cows, and one goat were used as controls; they received no vaccinations. On May 31, Pasteur injected all sixty-two animals with an extremely virulent culture of anthrax. Two days later, all of the vaccinated animals but one sheep were well, and all of the control animals dead or dying.

Four years later, Pasteur and his colleagues were working on rabies. They couldn't grow the virus in culture, so they injected rabies-infected cow brain into the heads of rabbits. They grew the rabies in one rabbit and then killed the animal, injecting tissue from its rabies-infected brain into another rabbit's brain. After fifty passages (rabbit-to-rabbit injections) to fix the incubation period of the virus at seven days, the investigators killed the animals and removed their spinal cords, hanging the cords out to dry in the laboratory. Then they injected dogs with the weakened virus of the spinal cord, waited a few days, and then challenged the dogs with a "hot" rabies virus. The dogs resisted the virus and remained well.

Suddenly, Pasteur was presented with an electrifying opportunity. On July 6, a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister who had been bitten by a rabid dog arrived in Paris. The boy's parents, knowing that his death was inevitable, agreed to a series of thirteen injections of Pasteur's vaccine over a ten-day period. This was a terrifying gamble. Pasteur had never inoculated an animal against rabies after it had already been exposed to the virus, and he had never inoculated a human being. But the gamble paid off and the child lived. Laboratories began to buzz with the news of Pasteur's discoveries. Some physicians and scientists attacked both the man and his ideas. But many others followed his lead. A new idea was beginning to take hold, fed by Pasteur's work in Paris and that of his rival, Koch, in Germany — the conviction that disease was caused by invisible pathogens called germs. The experimentalists worked feverishly, searching for the invaders and for vaccines to counter their effects.

In England, a different sort of fever had taken hold. As news of the research spread and the methods used to obtain vaccines became more widely known, angry voices were heard denouncing the unnatural experiments with animals and demanding that they cease. The anger built on old fears and grievances. Nearly one hundred years before, in 1796, an English country doctor, Edward Jenner, had confirmed that cowpox, a mild infection transmitted from cows to diary workers, conferred protection from smallpox, the ghastly disease that had killed and disfigured millions of human beings in regular epidemics. Smallpox was known and feared in the ancient world and Europe long before it traveled to the Americas and nearly wiped out the indigenous peoples of the New World.

Jenner's vaccine of cowpox, or vaccinia virus, appeared to provide protection against smallpox. But editorials denouncing the practice appeared in British newspapers, and cartoons depicting men with cow's heads mocked Jenner and his discovery. A few decades later, near riots had broken out in London in 1824 when Claude Bernard's teacher, François Magendie, had held public demonstrations of animal experimentation in the days before ether was discovered to anesthetize man and beast. The man tortured animals in public, slicing into living flesh as if it were a piece of mutton, as the bound beasts screamed in agony. Men became sick to their stomachs and women fainted. British citizens were revolted by Magendie and his experiments. The French professor and his filthy "investigations" were driven back across the Channel, where less than fifty years before, French citizens had watched their friends and neighbors beheaded, lunching en famille on Sunday afternoons as though at a picnic. A barbarous race, the British agreed.

Yet the continental disease of vivisection had infected British laboratories as well. The work had always been carried out, albeit on a small scale and quietly. It was well known in England that William Harvey would not have made his famous discovery of blood circulation in 1628 had it not been for his experiments on live deer. As early as 1831, the British physiologist Marshall Hall proposed five principles that he thought ought to guide research on animals. These principles, formulated by a scientist who had publicly admitted that "every experiment, every new or unusual situation of such being, is necessarily attended by pain or suffering of a bodily or mental kind," did not endear him to his fellow physiologists, who ignored Hall's proposal.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Scalpel and the Butterfly by Deborah Rudacille. Copyright © 2000 Deborah Rudacille. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

1. Viruses, Vaccines, and Vivisection
2. The Kingdom of the Spirit
3. The Dogs of War
4. Nazi Healing
5. Polio Politics
6. The New Crusaders
7. Stalking the Shadow
8. Saints and Sinners
9. Engineering Life
10. Animals, Science, and the Body
11. Partial Transformations