Scientists experiment on some 120 million lab mice and rats per year. But, as the global animal-testing industry continues to grow, problematic results continue to emerge.
The experiment that became known as the Elephant Man trial began one spring morning, in 2006, when clinicians at London’s Northwick Park Hospital infused six healthy young men with an experimental drug. Developers hoped to market TGN-1412, a genetically engineered monoclonal antibody, as a treatment for lymphocytic leukemia and rheumatoid arthritis, but they found that in just over an hour, the men grew restless.
. The problems with animal experimentation, however, go deeper than that: some studies of standardized lab animals can’t even be replicated on identically standardized lab animals. In 2012, apaper revealed that scientists at Amgen, a multibillion-dollar biotech company, had spent a decade trying to repeat landmark animal studies and had succeeded only eleven per cent of the time. The following year, at an N.I.H.
Animal experiments rested on the notion that humans and other mammals are kindred creatures, but for many scientists that kinship was solely physical, not mental. They tended to dismiss the idea that animals have minds and emotions that are comparable to our own, which Charles Darwin argued in the nineteenth century, or that “each and every living thing is a subject that lives in its own world,” as the Estonian biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll wrote, in 1934.
Jeffrey Mogil is a neuroscientist at McGill University who studies pain perception. In 2010, he and his collaborators filmed mice before and after they received shots of pain-inducing acetic acid. They used the footage to develop a “Mouse Grimace Scale,” which uses mouse facial expressions to measure their level of pain. Then, in 2014, one of his postdocs told him about a strange occurrence in the lab.
Still, some critics of animal experimentation have difficulty imagining a future without any lab-animal experiments. When scientists try to understand complex biological systems by simplifying them—an approach known as reductionism—an experiment on standardized lab animals can sometimes work “beautifully,” Mason told me. Mice share a large majority of their genes with humans and suffer many of the same illnesses, and they can be bred cheaply and have a conveniently compressed lifespan.
Neither Rosshart nor Potts is calling for an end to traditional experiments on caged lab animals, which they still consider useful for reductionist research. Still, their vision of the uncaged lab animal acknowledges that lab animals have many of the same needs as humans—which could undermine the usual justifications for standardizing their bodies and their lives in the first place.
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