Professor and author Bernard Rollin spoke about the dangers of placing medical science outside an ethical realm during a lecture Tuesday, citing the long-time debate over animal research as an example.
Rollin, who teaches philosophy, physiology and biophysics at Colorado State University, spoke to a group of students and scientists as a part of the UNM Research Ethics Service Project speaker series. He helped write federal legislation in the mid-1980s that mandated humane treatment of laboratory animals, including using painkillers during experiments.
With a variety of stories about his experiences as a professor and veterinary science consultant, Rollin illustrated what he called a predominate ideology within the science community that puts science outside an ethical realm, especially with regard to the treatment of animals in research facilities and veterinary schools.
In the first anecdote, he quoted former National Institutes of Health president James Wyngaarden, speaking to a group of college students in 1991.
"The kids asked about the ethics of genetic engineering, and he said 'scientific advances are always controversial, but science should never be hindered by ethical consideration,'" he said. "When I ask students who said that now, they attribute it to Hitler."
Other stories related how animal pain and consciousness hadn't been discussed in biology textbooks until recently.
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Rollin added that early veterinary textbooks did discuss the use of anesthetic to control thrashing and ease the positioning of limbs for surgery.
"But never were you taught that it's because the animal is hurting," he said.
When research animal legislation went into effect in 1987 it was met with vocal complaint from the science community.
"They went to Congress kvetching, 'we can't know animals feel pain,'" Rollin said, referring to a Congressional panel he sat on soon after the bill's passage. "I said we do research on animals for pain and extrapolate the results for people - it's A reflects B, so B should reflect A."
A fellow member walked off the panel, calling his claim "mysticism," he added.
During the 1960s, Rollin was hired to teach ethics in the Colorado State University veterinary medicine program. After spending a year observing, he approached the dean with concerns about the school's practice of performing eight surgeries on an animal that included breaking its femur before killing it.
He said that the animals were also referred to with names such as "sub-dogs," which, though actually referring to the animal's substitution for a real client, suggests that the dog is less than a dog.
"I thought, 'This is an outrage,'" he said. "They're teaching them to be vets, and from the get-go they're encouraged to divest any compassion they might have."
Rollin added that what he has seen in the science fields reveals an ideology that such work is devoid of values.
"When you become a scientist, every time you use an animal in a way that hurts or kills it, you make a value judgment that life is less important than research," he said.
He defined ideology as a set of facts presented and believed without any questioning.
"When they're insulated against criticism, they become ideologies," he said.
Rollin said current ideological barriers in the science community have prevented discussion and only polarize two opposing viewpoints - the scientists claiming that ethics shouldn't play a role and opponents charging that animal experiments have no value.
He added that the legislation he worked on saved money allocated to animal experimentation.
"An alternative piece of legislation wanted to put that funding toward building animal models," Rollin said.
He said that the failure to embrace ethics has hurt two important science fields - human research and biotechnology. The United States, Rollin added, has lagged behind the rest of the world in signing on to so-called "informed consent" decrees, leading to medical abuses and experimentation on unknowing subjects.
"It's still 'trust me, I'm a doctor,'" he said.
And in the biotechnology field - in which scientists manipulate genes to produce desired results - no intellectual discussion of ethics has taken place, Rollin said.
