KILLING FOR KNOWLEDGE - Ethics and the Beast - page 60

sulin or Pasteur's discovery of vaccination. 25 Yet it is far from obvious that these
dazzling highlights of medical advance at its best are indicative of routine experi-
mental practice. More important, scientists have to accept the implication of the re-
duction of basic into applied research, that is, experiments that cannot affect any kind
of illness, those that merely advance scientific knowledge (say, understanding minute
aspects of a neurological process that is unrelated to any known human illness), will
lose their justification. Claiming that one never knows how these advances will pos-
sibly be harnessed to applied medical advances seems evasive. Morally, such a claim
is on the same footing as recommending routine torture to all convicted felons to
gain information regarding future possible crimes: that such a practice may bear posit-
ive fruits does not vindicate it.
The first problem with this argument then, is that for anyone who accepts the justi-
fication from medical necessity, there is also the severe limitation of nonmedically
oriented research. Second, R. G. Frey argues that if benefits “outweigh” harms, it is
difficult to see why experimentation is to be limited only to animals. 26 Secular at-
tempts to unpack the “sanctity” of human life, a notion that could set a morally
meaningful difference between human and nonhuman animals, appeal to the rich con-
tent human life has. But such characterization entails that a human life of very poor
quality qualifies as a legitimate object for research. Third, if benefiting humans is
what we are after, if relieving sickness and human suffering is our genuine moral
motivation, we should allocate funds to third-world sufferers rather than to animal-
based research, which is targeted at such a narrow group of humans. 27 Fourth, there
are problems with deriving humanly applicable, medically solid results from experi-
ments conducted on animals. It has been urged that scientists have greatly exagger-
ated the importance of such experiments for human welfare. 28 The charge is
threefold: first, detailed perusal of specific therapeutic breakthroughs in the scientific
literature suggests that clinical investigation and insight rather than animal experiments
played the decisive role (and when experiments did play a causal role, these could
have been replaced with non-animal-based models yielding the same re-sults). Second,
advocates of experiments have been charged with conflating the correlation of all
successful medication with experimenting on animals (which is a legal requirement)
and the causal claim that such experiments were a necessary stage for such develop-
ment. Third, there is the methodological problem of relevance: aspirin kills cats, peni-
cillin kills guinea pigs—both help humans. On the other hand, thalidomide is terato-
genic for humans but harmless to many animals. Establishing that a drug benefits hu-
mans requires clinical studies on humans. Experiments on animals lead us both to
miss beneficial drugs and to use harmful ones. And saying that pretesting on animals
prevents disasters on humans is true only if one also admits that the existence of