Animal welfare

Catheter and mouse

Sharing information on failed animal experiments would help both scientists and rats

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Readers' comments


Ian Sof


I think you would be hard pressed to find someone sadistic enough to enjoy testing on animals. As Damian Hacking mentions below, what viable animal-free alternative do you propose?

Surely you're not volunteering to become the guinea pig for some new cancer research, regardless of the past experience you detailed.


The idea of implanting carcinogenic cells into rats - thousands of rats - to validate the same negative result is indeed absolutely awful.



"Animal lovers might voluntarily declare not to benefit from drugs and chemicals tested on animals. Anyway, if you object to killing animals for meat you don't eat meat. If you object to slavery you don't want to benefit from it, right?"

Yes, I completely agree. Which is why I don't get doctors' "moral" objections to using data the Nazis obtained from experimenting on the Jews....

Michelle Thew

Dear Sir

Your editorial Catheter and mouse (7 May) contains important misconceptions.

You say that 12 million animals are used for medical research in the European Union. In fact, a big chunk of the 12 million have nothing to do with medical research, but relate to household products testing, food additives, shellfish safety, weapons research and a whole host of other inessential purposes. Under the European Parliament’s proposals, that will continue to be the case. Indeed, the Parliament has voted to allow experiments on primates for just about any purpose.

The proposal as it stands will do little to reduce animal suffering, as you claim. Researchers will be able to cause suffering which is both severe and prolonged (surely an obscenity in a civilised society) and to repeatedly use the same animal in painful experiments (bearing in mind that even a ‘single’ use can involve multiple surgical procedures and other tests).

The Parliament has even voted to allow researchers to avoid the need for permission from their government to use animals if they classify the suffering as ‘mild’, as of course they will have every incentive to do. A part-regulated, part self-regulated system is a conceptual nonsense. The effect is also seriously to emasculate the data-sharing provisions, which you rightly applaud – researchers will be able to continue to keep negative results secret, leading to unnecessary repetition of experiments, if no governmental licence is needed.

You repeat the mantra that animal experiments have saved countless human lives. The facts are rather less impressive. For example, not one of the 85 or more candidate AIDS vaccines tested successfully on primates has worked in patients; over 1,000 potential neuroprotective stroke treatments have been tested in animal models but none of the 150 which have progressed to human trials has proved successful. A former director of the US National Cancer Institute has remarked: ‘The history of cancer research has been the history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn’t work in human beings’.

None of this is a great advert for animal research. Where systematic retrospective analyses of the ability of animal models to predict effects in humans have been carried out, they are predictive less than half the time for reproductive toxicity, acute toxicity and drug efficacy. As you say, numerous studies show that the inevitable stress experienced by lab animals often fatally distort the results.

A recent YouGov poll in 6 representative EU countries – the UK, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Sweden and Italy – revealed overwhelming majorities against the use of primates, cats and dogs in any experiments causing suffering, and the infliction of severe suffering on any species. Where people tolerate animal experiments at all, it is only for life-threatening or serious human conditions. And they want much more transparency and therefore accountability.

Rather than producing a charter for the multibillion pound animal research industry to carry on business largely as usual, the EU should be listening to its citizens, begin to wean researchers off their unhealthy dependence on animals and encourage them into research methods which are humane and often far more scientifically reliable.


I think EAS makes some very good points.

Better sharing of experimental data would obviously help to reduce unnecessary duplication (though as your piece makes clear some duplication is absolutely necessary) of animal experiments, but why stop with animal experiments? Ask around just about any laboratory and you'll find a scientist who can tell of how they spent months trying to get an experiment to work before eventually giving up, only to later meet another scientist (a competitor) at a conference who also spent months trying to do the same thing.

The problems EAS mentions add to the problem of publication bias, whereby studies whose results support a given hypothesis are more likely to be published while studies that produce results that indicate that the hypothesis is incorrect are less likely to be published (and then generally in a less prestigious journal). Experiments which fail, in other words don't produce data that supports or undermines a hypothesis, very rarely get published. This is a shame since apart from the problem of other scientists making the same "mistake" in some cases the "failed" experiment can give clues that something else is going on with the biological system being studied. All to often the scientist who produces such potentially interesting data doesn't have the time or funding to follow it up, because they need to fulfil the requirement of a particular grant.

Perhaps rather than looking to new journals scientists should be able to deposit their experimental results in databases as it is produced, where it can be kept confidential until they publish it or decide that they're not going to publish it so it might as well go into the public domain. Something like this already exists for gene sequencing data that is submitted to GenBank, though obviously databases of "negative and failed experiments" would be much more complex than the straightforward nucleotide sequence databases. The technology to do this is being developed, all that's needed is the political will and funding!


I look at life on a sliding scale. The closer the relationship to me, the less willing I am to sacrifice it for my gain.

I realize this may sound cold, but honestly think of killing a chimp vs. killing a few million bacteria. Or the death of a random person in another part of the world as it compares to the death of your child. There is absolutley no contest in my mind.

We, as a society, are only (ocasionaly)willing send our children off to war for the sake of ideals that are billed as being "greater than ourselves" (God,"freedom", preservation of our society)

Yet, every product laced with triclosan is an indiscriminant mass exterminator, with no greater purpose that to provide a bit of extra insurance than does soap and water.

My point is, the suggestion of vegetarianism as a step before the prohibition of animal testing does not seem unreasonable. nor does the special protected status for primate research vs. lab rats.

This issue is one of shades of gray for anyone save a Jainist or a sociopath.

Random Scientist



This, naturally, would mean that wannabe animal lover shuts himself from most of the medical aid, like more extreme version of some religious groups. And likely dies quickly of common ailments.

For the rest of us, this proposal reminds each and every one of us values personal safety more than big-eyed mice and moralizing talks.

Random Scientist

The law can push pharma and chemical companies out of European Union. To the detriment of both EU economy and animals, which are less protected elsewhere.

Safety tests, most of which are failed safety tests, consume most of the time and cost in developing new compound. If EU forces companies to disclose business secrets, how to avoid putting your competitors away from failed tracks right into the succesful track?


If humans prefer to improve the welfare of animals, it would seem a practical first step to abstain from eating them. Though it is easy to grasp the great utility in animal experimentation--both realized and potential--it is much more tenuous to believe that a mere taste can justify unnecessary suffering and death. Vegetarianism--or at least improved treatment of animal husbandry practices--would be a worthy topic for governments (and newspapers) to explore.

Thus, perhaps the Economist would do well to review the commodification of animals via factory farming? As is, there are certainly numerous widespread practices that go unregulated where trivial and fleeting benefits to humanity are at stake. If not supporting a vegetarian lifestyle, perhaps reform of the institution of factory farming would be the result, to the betterment of animal welfare. Education is the great panacea.


"Animal experimentation has taught humanity a great deal and saved countless lives. It needs to continue, even if that means animals sometimes suffer."

May be it's true. But may be it's the modern equivalent of:

"Slavery has helped humanity a great deal. It needs to continue, even if that means slaves sometimes suffer."


Standardization of international norms will indeed have a large impact, but the commission’s proposal that scientists who use animals should share data needs to be carefully worded to improve the situations instead of making it worse.
Scientists, who use animals or not, are often more than willing to share data as long as they can get credit for their efforts. Without some type of reward or an increase in staff to accomplish the additional task, the new European law will just add an extra burden to animal experimentation and will result in some kind of routine form filling of no value to others.
Even in the best of cases, with active cooperation from the researchers, raw data can be difficult to interpret, even for the experimenters that are aware of all the details of the experimental setup and the likely sources of error. Others will find it even harder to understand if the failure was due to poor experimental design or due to an incorrect assumption.
At present, scientists cannot publish the results even of successful experiments, unless they are of outstanding interest, conclusive and highly innovative. Even if their findings fit the hypothesis tested, the work may still never see the light of day if the results may be considered inconclusive. The hurdles to publications increase constantly. And even in the case of successful publications, journals are always less keen to let scientist expand the details of the experimental setup except in “additional data”. With few details, even duplication of the same results is not trivial. Many pitfalls that could be mentioned do not appear in the articles to keep the length as short as possible. This practice condemns others that would like to advance on the same line of research to waste time, money and animals’ lives by falling in the same traps as those that came before them. As you mention in your article, duplication of putatively successful and negative experiments by others is necessary to confirm the original claims and failures.
Unfortunately, Europe is adopting the American system of competition for grant money. Europeans will start to follow the example of their American peers in blatantly omitting details to entice competitors to rerun failed experiments. This will help those that have overcome the obstacles to maintain their funding advantage and maintain a monopoly on a particular line of research. Animals will suffer from a lack of insight by politicians that have an incorrect idea of the world of science research.
How can we then save animal lives? By encouraging cooperation and sharing rather than competition. By allowing for better experimentation methods by experienced technicians.
Unfortunately, the political environment moves in the opposite direction. Laboratories have little access to long term research funding and resort to an increased use of short term positions. This means that young experimenters, are forced to try their hand at a large variety of different task for which they have at first limited ability. Europe’s new law added in the wrong context will add another layer of bureaucracy that will require extra time by experienced personnel leaving the young with less supervision.
Regulators elsewhere should not copy it until it has proved its effectiveness.


I am pretty sure they tried one of those journal a while ago; I forget what happened to it. The problem is that until/unless such publications are counted towards tenure, promotion, assist in getting funding, etc.; why bother. Publishing a journal article takes time and effort, it has to be worth it and for most faculty members saving a few rats isn't worth it (as compared to other things).

Damian Hacking

One of the main alternatives that is always proposed to animal experimentation is cell culture, yet most cell cultures require Fetal Bovine Serum, and hence are not truly animal free alternatives. Whilst I have read many arguments against animal experimentation, I have yet to read of a single suggestion for a VIABLE, ANIMAL-FREE alternative.

I would agree with the author that many 'negative' results do go unpublished, and this is probably because they would likely be rejeceted by any journal with a decent impact factor. Perhaps the establishment of an alternative database of unpublished 'negative' results would be successful?


Human animals ought to remember how much we mammals have in common. There is no alternative to using our fellow creatures - yet. But we ought never take it lightly.



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