It is not often that one issue of the New York Times contains two separate items attesting to the critical importance of animal medical research to the good and welfare of humans, but the day after Christmas was such a day. The national news section contained a dispatch from Milwaukee, WI reporting that "a fire that killed 700 pigs at a University of Wisconsin laboratory has brought to an abrupt halt years of research with implications for human ailments like heart disease and arthritis."
Nor were these two ailments the only ones affected by the deaths of "three herds of carefully bred research animals." The animals had also been used "in studies of organ transplants, nutrition and bone development." In short, there is hardly a person alive whose well-being is not, in some degree, affected by this tragic loss. And while the financial loss of this "state-of-the-art research laboratory," built in 1984, is estimated at $5.3 million, Bob Steele, associate dean of research at the University of Wisconsin's College of Agriculture and Life Science, says that "you can't really put a price on those animals." And Dean Roger Wyse says that increasingly medical advances originate with animal science, and that "there's really not much difference between agricultural research and medical research anymore."
Among the important discoveries made possible by research at the swine center, the article states, are "the development of several anti-cholesterol drugs and new techniques in angioplasty, a method of repairing a blocked blood vessel by using tiny inflatable balloons at the end of a catheter inserted into the vessel. Similarities in physiology between the hearts of humans and pigs make swine ideal models for studying the human vascular system."
Of course, PETA's Dan Mathews would have a ready answer for all these concerns: "Don't let your heart vessels get blocked in the first place, schmo!" -- which is a paraphrase of a response he gave when confronted with a list of diseases targeted by animal medical researchers.
We can only surmise what Mathews and his colleagues who look down their noses at those humans inconsiderate enough to fall victim to any of a host of incapacities would say about the story in the Science Section of the same issue of the Times by Gina Kolata about a research project that seeks to determine "whether genes that make mice drink alcohol until they fall over dead will also lead to alcoholism in humans."
Lest you think that only alcoholics have a stake in the success of these experiments, Ms. Kolata goes on to point out that the same strategy "is also being employed to look for collections of genes that predispose mice and humans to cancer, diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure." Even though this research as been pooh-poohed in some circles, behavior geneticists say that "it has become clear that mice have essentially the same genes as humans, but rearranged." And Dr. Lee Silver, a molecular geneticist at Penn State University, says, "I can look at any strain (of mouse) and tell you exactly how much an animal will drink -- some drink in moderation, some drink in excess, and some don't drink at all." And, Ms. Kolata reports, "alcoholism is just the beginning. The same technique is being used to determine what genes predispose mice to heroin addiction, nicotine addiction, aggression and mental illnesses."
Even though the research is not without its critics, the fact that "every human gene seems to have a mouse version" would seem to place that animal in a special category insofar as medical research is concerned. About 55 years ago, when I had just graduated from college, I was engaged in a project that consisted of sending teams of student puppeteers out to rural communities to put on shows for farm audiences. Our puppets were constructed by a young man named Pete Seeger who was still to make his name as a banjo-playing folk singer, researcher and composer. One of the people I went to see to raise money for the project was author John Steinbeck, who novel, The Grapes of Wrath had taken the country by storm. It now occurs to me that if I had known then what I know now, I would have asked Mr. Steinbeck whether his work on an earlier novel -- Of Mice and Men -- had given him an foreboding of the similarities that scientists are now discovering between the two species.
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