Eye on Research: The Ethics of Research Using Animals

Research using animals has taught us many things about the development and biology of vision that have ultimately improved the lives of humans. However, there are obvious ethical implications regarding this. Let’s explore the research that has been conducted using animals, what we have learned from this research, as well as the ethics of this research.

David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1981 for their research on the visual system. They collaborated for more than twenty years and made significant discoveries about the neurology of visual perception (Hubel & Wiesel, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1970; Wiesel & Hubel, 1963). They studied animals, mostly cats and monkeys. Although they used several techniques, they did considerable single-unit recordings, during which tiny electrodes were inserted in the animal’s brain to determine when a single cell was activated. Among their many discoveries, they found that specific brain cells respond to lines with specific orientations (called ocular dominance), and they mapped the way those cells are arranged in areas of the visual cortex known as columns and hypercolumns.

In some of their research, they sutured one eye of newborn kittens closed and followed the development of the kittens’ vision. They discovered there was a critical period of development for vision. If kittens were deprived of input from one eye, other areas of their visual cortex filled in the area that was normally used by the eye that was sewn closed. In other words, neural connections that exist at birth can be lost if they are deprived of sensory input.

What do you think about sewing a kitten’s eye closed for research? To many animal advocates, this would seem brutal, abusive, and unethical. What if conducting this research would help ensure babies and children born with certain conditions could develop normal vision instead of becoming blind? Would you conduct that research, even if it meant causing some harm to cats? Would you think the same way if you were the parent of such a child? What if you worked at the animal shelter?

Like virtually every other industrialized nation, the United States permits medical experimentation on animals, with few limitations (assuming sufficient scientific justification). The goal of any laws that exist is not to ban such tests but rather to limit unnecessary animal suffering by establishing standards for the humane treatment and housing of animals in laboratories.

As explained by Stephen Latham, the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale (2012), possible legal and regulatory approaches to animal testing vary on a continuum from strong government regulation and monitoring of all experimentation at one end, to a self-regulated approach that depends on the ethics of the researchers at the other end. The United Kingdom has the most significant regulatory scheme, whereas Japan uses the self-regulation approach. The U.S. approach is somewhere in the middle, the result of a gradual blending of the two approaches.

There is no question that medical research is a valuable and important practice. The question is whether the use of animals is a necessary or even best practice for producing the most reliable results. Alternatives include the use of patient-drug databases, virtual drug trials, computer models and simulations, and noninvasive imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scans (“Animals in Science/Alternatives,” n.d.). Other techniques, such as microdosing, use humans not as test animals but as a means to improve the accuracy and reliability of test results. In vitro methods based on human cell and tissue cultures, stem cells, and genetic testing methods are also increasingly available.

Today, at the local level, any facility that uses animals and receives federal funding must have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) that ensures that the NIH guidelines are being followed. The IACUC must include researchers, administrators, a veterinarian, and at least one person with no ties to the institution: that is, a concerned citizen. This committee also performs inspections of laboratories and protocols.