Barbelith Underground > Laboratory > Science & the Mass Media: A conversation

Got an email from PETA (a.k.a. the lords of scientific guilt trips) this morning which made me think of this thread. I'll post the relevant bits below (both italics mine).

Tulip (a monkey) was rescued by a PETA undercover investigator from a university laboratory, where she and thousands of other animals were crammed in tiny cages and often denied even the most basic veterinary care when they were suffering from illness. While Tulip was lucky enough to spend the rest of her days in a kind and loving home, millions of rats, dogs, primates, and other animals hidden behind laboratory walls know only suffering in painful experiments....

...You must understand how crucial our work on behalf of animals in laboratories is, as do the university experimenters, corporate researchers, and government officials that PETA confronts.

Now leaving aside the ethical side of animal experimentation - something I dislike, but feel is currently much better than the alternatives (at least in my field, immunology), and how "higher" species' inherent rights may or may not differ from "lower" ones, this gave me pause for thought. Firstly, the lack of veterinary care is probably due to the controlled nature of the experiments (which may have included inducing conditions which under normal circumstances would require veterinary attention). Obviously that is not the only possibility. Some labs deem animals which have been ill as of little experimental value (depending on the illness) and also as a potential disease reservoir which may pose a danger to the rest of the animals within the lab (what happens to the animal following this usually depends largely on the lab, animal and disease in question, and is in of itself something of an ethical minefield). But it made me consider how the principles of scientific protocols (proper controls, minimal variation between samples etc.) are it often seems, largely unknown by the majority of the public, and almost never mentioned in mainstream media, and how, to an extent, this lack of proper information may drive misunderstandings about how animal experiments work, and can even possibly be exploited when it comes to emotive issues such as this one (not to say that PETA are neccessarily doing so).

The second paragraph puzzled me more. There is an obvious reading (PETA standing up bravely against the eeevil people performing/sanctioning the research), but I can’t believe that’s a belief they actually hold (certainly not one they’d be willing to bandy about at a marketing level)? Could the general public ever believe it?

Lastly it seems there’s quite a partisan viewpoint going on within this issue. Journalistic coverage of scientific discoveries/developments tends to (when applicable) downplay the huge cost in animal lives that frequently went into the work*, whilst organisations such as PETA tend to ignore any advances that have resulted from the work, focussing purely on the suffering of the animals in question (something which obviously cannot be denied). I’m sure a lot of this is obvious to those who have more of a sociological head than I, but it got me thinking.

* Scientific publications tend to state reasonably clearly which animals had been involved in the experiments themselves obviously, but rarely mention the experiments that failed, the groundwork reproducing other labs’ work, or the animal cost for things like FCS, polyclonals, enzymes etc.