Scientists need the courage to take a look at inhumane experiments on animals

Eleven years ago, I flew more than 20 hours from Taiwan to the U.S. to pursue my Ph.D. degree in physiology. As an immigrant, a person of color, and a woman in science, I face adversity here on a daily basis. I eventually got used to the racism and sexism thrown my way. But there is one thing I still struggle with: I was pressured into torturing and killing animals to obtain my degree.

This obscene practice continues to this day and must end if we are to find effective treatments for human diseases.

Let me explain how I was coerced into killing. I dissected and experimented on animals and advocated for their use for more than a decade before I learned, through my own doctoral research, that animal "models" do not reflect human physiology. That is partly why more than 95 percent of drugs tested successfully on animals end up failing in humans.

I consulted with my thesis committee about my findings, and to my surprise, some of their responses included the following:

"I'm not interested in political debate."

"Your job as a student is to graduate."

"Just don't go liberating lab animals and destroying other people's work." And then there was this: "If you don't want to continue [using animals], you should drop out."

After much deliberation, I made the difficult (although unjustifiable) decision to finish my degree because I thought that a Ph.D. title would give me a louder voice for animals in laboratories. However, I could no longer see them as mere tools. In the mornings, I watched mouse siblings snuggle and sleep peacefully in a pile in their cages. In the afternoons, I injected them with drugs that freaked out their tiny hearts; watched them tremble in the corner, unable to move; and recorded their eventual flatlines on the heart-rate monitor.

It was too much. No decent human being can inflict unnecessary suffering and be comfortable with it. Yet I was marginalized as overly sensitive. In my publications, I wanted to include the limitations of the results obtained from animal studies, but I was told that I couldn't because it would decrease the chances that my papers would be accepted. Even the dedication section of my dissertation was censored. I had to take out the line "For all the animals that were used in the studies, I am sorry, and this is wrong," because it would "jeopardize my chance of graduating."

Why is this the case? The scientific community has long claimed that animal experimentation is the gold standard of basic disease research, and experimenters in academia push back, Luddite-like, at the slightest challenge to this increasingly discredited practice.

Critics of animal use are painted as unscientific, as extreme, or as bullies for objecting to even the most abhorrent of experiments. But experimenters' most despicable act is to pretend to be victims when their work is criticized. Such is the case with one post-doctoral student who has experimented on songbirds for eight years, first at Tufts University and now at Yale.

For wild birds, captivity and confinement alone are harrowing experiences. Their torment begins when they are trapped by mist nets, which entangle them and can cause injuries such as wing strain, cuts, and fractures, as well as leaving them vulnerable to predation or even death by strangulation. After luring sparrows into these traps, this experimenter systematically induced stress and fear in them by confining them to cloth bags for 30 minutes at a time, rolling them around on a cart so violently that they couldn't perch — a terrifying experience — and repeatedly restraining them. Some birds were fed crude oil, and others' legs were wounded without pain relief. They were subjected to painful injections and multiple episodes of anesthesi a— which not only are frightening but also have wideranging physiological effects, such as immune system suppression. After enduring this abuse, sometimes for months, they were killed and their bodies dissected.

This experimenter claims that her results are applicable to humans and to threatened and endangered bird species dealing with "habitat destruction, climate change, and species invasions." But important physiological differences between species make her results inapplicable even to other bird species, let alone human. In her most recent experiment, she artificially lowered corticosterone (a hormone produced by the body when it's under stress) in one group of captive birds then compared them to another group with normal corticosterone levels. Both groups lost 8 percent of their bodyweight, experienced decreased heart and muscle mass, and exhibited an increase in stressrelated behavior. One type of behavior, beak wiping, increased slightly less in the birds with lowered corticosterone. The conclusion from this was that lowering corticosterone in wild-caught birds may mitigate some of the effects of captivity — a conclusion that not only is impractical because it requires frequent injections but also is based on paltry evidence. And equating being stuffed into a bag and yelled at to an environmental challenge such as climate change stretches credulity.

It is possible that this experimenter has been pressured into testing on animals, as I once was. If that's the case, she is a victim, not of those working to end animal experimentation but of the oppressive, truth-be-damned system that seeks to perpetuate it.

Scientists need to find the courage to challenge this system and take an honest, critical look at inhumane and wasteful experiments on animals. That is the only way for us to move forward into an era in which scientific investigation is accompanied by practical and relevant solutions.

I dissected and experimented on animals and advocated for their use for more than a decade before I learned, through my own doctoral research, that animal "models" do not reflect human physiology. That is partly why more than 95 percent of drugs tested successfully on animals end up failing in humans.