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For a science without guinea pigs

Some years ago, as an activist, I had my first approach to the problem of animal experimentation in scientific research while attending a lecture given by a chemistry specialist supporting animal rights.

His aim was to explain to the activists the absolute unreliability of animal tests, as a final argument to stop vivisection. In his opinion, since no species is comparable to another species from a bio-chemical and physiological point of view, and since even individuals of the same species are different from each other and react in different ways to the same stimuli in the same conditions (following the sex, age, health, etc. of the subject), non-human animal tests in medical research turn out to be completely unreliable, as the evidence they produce cannot be applied to human diseases. He told us that this unreliability proves that animal tests are not scientifically founded and are totally useless. Therefore, he said, since most people don't agree with animal rights and would never wish to stop vivisection for the sake of the animals concerned, the scientific argument was a formidable argument to make public opinion change and stand against vivisection – even if not for the animals but for the advantage of human health.

I agreed with this opinion, at first. I found that it was really reasonable. And I asked myself why I had never thought a thing so obvious before. I read some books, written by some Italian physicians against vivisection (I found out afterwards that the first book to collect evidence of the fallacy of animal tests and to denounce vivisection as a scientific fraud had been Hans Ruesch's Slaughter of Innocent, 1976) and I convinced myself that vivisection was in all cases a huge deception by deceitful physicians and that fighting in defense of laboratory animals was also fighting in defense of true science.

However, as years went by, I started to doubt. I began to suspect the scientific argument against vivisection of working for the “régime de la vérité” described by Michel Foucault in Surveiller et punir (1975). In this well known essay, Foucault analyzes specifically the birth, meaning and functioning of the modern penal system, touching also on medical and school systems, as they have all been built since the 18th century; the aim of his inquiry is to describe the way power works in our societies. According to Foucault, power is a strategy which rules people through discipline. Discipline is a “technology” of the body which works in this way:

- constant observation and recording of the bodies placed in the disciplinary spaces (such as prisons, schools, hospitals, military barracks);

- production of knowledge (medical, psychological, anthropological, etc.) concerning every single controlled body, which results in the construction of a “disciplinary individuality”;

- internalization by every subject of his or her disciplinary individuality;

- maximized use of subjected bodies in modern societies (in factories, armies, etc.).

Discipline shows the link between scientific knowledge about individuals and the necessity to control and employ the individuals themselves. Therefore, in Foucault's opinion, most of modern human sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology) and medicine, as it changed from modern age, are parts of a wide disciplinary network, are gears of the modern mechanism of power. In other words, the dark side of knowledge is power.

If we accept Foucault's analysis, we can look at experimental medicine (and thus, at animal tests) as a part of all this. Experimental medicine produces knowledge about living bodies:

- it manipulates living bodies, intentionally chosen, in laboratory tests;

- it collects information about anatomy and physiology of all living beings, about their normal and pathological functioning in health and in disease;

- it provides the disciplinary network with all this collected knowledge, which is aimed at ruling people in everyday life (affecting people's decisions about managing their own bodies, for example suggesting the right diet, the right way of living, the appropriate drugs and treatments, etc.).

To return to the so-called scientific approach to vivisection, my opinion now is that it completely misses the point. It simply ignores that animal experiments are part of a dramatic bio political problem. It doesn't address the technology of power which the production of scientific statements of truth implies. It simply questions the degree of truth of these statements. It accepts the power of medical science to affect us, to guide us and measure in our stead what is reasonable and what is not reasonable to do. It accepts and confirms medicine's authority.

This fault is perfectly visible when the so-called scientific arguments against vivisection are proposed to the public's opinion. They claim to disclose that animal experiments are a fraud, they pretend to reveal their complete uselessness. But whom are they directed to? To the researchers? The researchers already know this since a long time! This is precisely the reason why experiments on humans have been widely carried out already long before Nazism and by the Nazi themselves1. In this light, one could wonder why animal experiments are still carried on. There are three plausible hypotheses (apart from the specific research concerning the very physiology of animals): 1. because in some cases it is possible, with greatest caution, to generalize inter species the results relative to one particular species; 2. because most researchers take advantage of the opportunity of publishing essays or of selling new drugs after a brief, simple and cheap study; 3. because animal tests are used to conceal the brutal evidence of the necessity of experimenting on humans.

My aim now is not to choose between these hypotheses (I think that all three are likely). Whatever the explanation, it remains that in the scientific milieu, there is no one to be convinced that animal tests alone get no real advancement in medical research. So, why repeat an already well known truth? Who is to be convinced?

There is only one possible answer: as a matter of fact, scientific arguments against animal tests are addressed to the public, to make it change its mind and stand against vivisection not for ethical reasons (which are regarded as ineffective) but for “egoistic” reasons, that is to say, in order to get a more reliable and effective medicine. But several negative consequences are entailed.

1. First of all, the actual effect of using scientific arguments is not, as they claim, to make people's judgments change by explanations and demonstrations. People with no solid scientific knowledge would need a great deal of technical preparation before they could reach a deep, rational conviction. Therefore, arguments of this kind are able to convince only people who are already convinced: people who are already against animal tests for personal reasons, for example because they are animal rights activists or because they profess a non-violent religion. In other words, activists take up this belief not through rational assent (since they don't possess the necessary technical background) but through an act of faith towards the persons who propound it, that is to say, in exactly the same way common people are constantly being persuaded that animal experiments are necessary and useful to the advancement of medicine: through authority.

2. The scientific arguments against animal tests claim to replace people's opinion that animals have in any case a right to life, welfare and freedom, with a pseudo-scientific belief; therefore, another unpleasant consequence of using them is that the animal rights activists' ethical opinions are belittled as subjective, relative, vain in the struggle for animal liberation.

3. Science is often indifferent to individual values and opinions; it simply ignores their deepness and their right to be respected, both when people agree with science and when they don't. In the name of “freedom of research”, every attempt to restrict laboratory manipulation over living beings (for example, human embryos) is rejected and branded as “obscurantist”, “medieval”, fascist. The practice of only using scientific arguments against vivisection reinforces that. It confirms the mistaken idea that scientific research can do without external intervention about ethical questions and that it can control itself by itself. This is not true. All the restrictions on the use of living beings in medical research have been adopted as a result of social sensibility. And so it must be.

4. Using scientific arguments against animal tests as a strategy to change people's mind strengthens the common opinion that people act only following egoistic reasons. This strategy entails implicitly that acting following altruistic reasons is not reasonable. But since medicine's object is the healing of human beings, it is (or should be) most concerned with people's values, beliefs and hopes. Therefore, every medical practice must be connected, if not submitted, to the patient's moral convictions; the patient's right to be healed while respecting his/her requests must be recognized. Thus, altruistic instances must be accepted and treated with respect: why should the patient's demand of having his/her life saved and his/her health restored without other lives being cut off be denied or hidden?

For all these reasons, I think that the movement against vivisection should not use scientific arguments any more and that it should stop asking people to agree to a judgment about the degree of truth of scientific propositions. The researchers are the only ones who can manage such kind of epistemological discussion.

Common people can only give their opinions on the advancement of science relative to the good and bad results that this advancement produces on society. And that is what they should do. They have to consider scientific procedures not from an epistemological point of view, but as a social practice, so as to value their successes and failures and, most of all, the ethical cost they involve.

Therefore, we have to address public opinion in a different way. We have to ask people if they accept that our society advance by using living beings in laboratory tests. We have to raise the question of ethics in experiments.

This is a most troubling question.

After the Second World War, people's opinions have been manipulated in order to let them think that the Nazis' experiments on humans were just an accident, a horrible accident caused by deviated medicine, by insane physicians. The so-called scientific movement against vivisection appeals to the same arguments, pretending that each and every scientist who ever used animals in laboratory tests, from the 17^th century to nowadays, was a sadist who was not really interested in the advance of scientific knowledge, who practiced animal tests only to further his career or to satisfy his personal sadism.

The problem with this strategy is that it doesn't question experimental medicine itself; it pretends that the existence of laboratory “guinea pigs” is a contingent, accidental, non essential feature. And this is not true. Modern experimental medicine is founded on the manipulation of living beings in laboratory. There is no evidence of the existence of an “alternative science”, one which would have advanced without practicing animal tests and is supposed to be “good science”, “reliable science”. (An example of this misunderstanding can be found in an Italian website against vivisection, where it is said that William Harvey, a most important English physician of the 17^th century contemporary with Descartes, discovered the functioning of the circulation of the blood without using animals; this is simply false: he actually used several living animals in his experiments and criticized the other physicians who practiced just autopsies on human corpses).

There is no actual conflict between “good science”, not using animals, and “false science”, using animals. Those who claim to be against vivisection for scientific reasons hide the disagreeable truth that medicine as an experimental science is a device aimed at producing knowledge about living beings through the manipulation of living bodies in laboratory experiments. They relieve experimental medicine of all its responsibilities for sacrificing living beings - human and non-human – for the advancement of knowledge and for other individuals' benefit. They leave out the dramatic bio political problem of ethics in experiments, they don't point out that the choice of experimental subjects is never neutral from an ethical point of view, since it follows social categories of exclusion (non-human animals, prisoners, death convicts, mentally diseased, poor people) to the dominating classes' advantage, that is to say, the rulers' health.

The first aim of the struggle against animal and human experimentation must be to expose the dark side of science. It is up to us to raise social consciousness about those who are sacrificed in laboratory experiments, to promote public discussion about the ethical costs of medical research, and to wish for a “good science”, yes, but not from an epistemological point of view.

There's no need to prove that experiments on humans are not scientifically founded to regard at them as a horrible disgrace/shame. In the same way, there's no need to prove that animal tests are unreliable to condemn them.

We have the right to ask for the abolition of experiments on living beings, whatever the species, in medical research. We have the right to wish that the progress of our society is not grounded on the sacrifice of laboratory victims.