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Speaking for the AnimalsA VETERINARIAN ANALYZES THE TURF BATTLES THAT HAVE TRANSFORMED THE ANIMAL LABORATORY BY MADHUSREE MUKERJEE

The one time I saw the inside of an ani-mal laboratory, at a prestigious univer-sity, the veterinarian who showed mearound was subsequently fired for thattransgression. So it is little surprise thatLarry Carbone, a laboratory animal vet-erinarian, gives us few peeks behind thedoor: the book has virtually no anecdotes.Instead he takes off the lab’s roof to offera bird’s-eye view—distant, measured andworded with sometimes excruciatingcare—of the battles raging within.

A veterinarian’s oath binds her to “thebenefit of society through the protectionof animal health, the relief of animal suf-fering, the conservation of animal re-sources, the promotion of public health,and the advancement of medical knowl-edge.” It imposes contradictory tasks onthe laboratory animal veterinarian. “Soyou keep them healthy until the scientistscan make them sick,” Carbone quotes askeptic as saying. A lab animal vet canplease no one, it seems—certainly not theanimal lover, who suspects her split loy-alties, nor the animal researcher, who re-sents her attempts to oversee not just an-imal care but also experimental practice.

Carbone, who holds doctorates in

veterinary medicine and in the historyand philosophy of science, is a vet in theanimal facility at the University of Cali-fornia at San Francisco. In early chaptersof What Animals Want, he describes theunending philosophical debates over an-imal care and use, while in the more in-teresting later chapters he documents thejostling that determined the rather limit-ed turf of the lab animal vet.

Laboratories first hired veterinariansin the 1930s, he explains, to assuage pub-lic concern over animal care and indeedrestricted their duties to keeping animalshealthy until needed. With the passage ofthe Animal Welfare Act in 1966, and itsseveral amendments, veterinarians cameto play a more central role. Today theyrun animal facilities, answer to federal in-spectors (most of whom are themselvesveterinarians), and advise on anesthesiaand other aspects of research. Even so,Carbone notes that supervising veteri-narians often cannot keep track of ani-mals once they leave an institution’s cen-tral animal facility for research. Andwhereas only veterinarians are autho-rized to perform surgery on pets, surgeryin the lab may be entrusted to an inade-quately trained student or technician.And no one is charged with weighing thepotential benefits of a research projectagainst the cost, in pain, suffering anddeath, to the animals.

Often the tug-of-war involves thequestion of what an animal feels. Thechapter on mouse decapitation is fasci-nating, although I cannot recommend itas beachside (and certainly not bedside)reading. Many researchers prefer killing

by decapitation, which contaminates tis-sues less than other methods do. Carbonedetails how a finding that brain waves inrats persist for up to half a minute afterdecapitation caused initial concern thatthe process entails intense pain. That in-terpretation was instantly smothered by apile of papers pointing out that such brainwaves could mean anything. Indeed, ani-mals are assumed to feel pain in situationswhere a human would, and in this casewe have no way of knowing. Revealing-ly, though, one paper argued that decap-itation was “far too important a tool” tobe rescinded on such a flimsy basis.

In truth, animal welfare legislation andpublic concern are both more focused onpain than on death itself. Philosophically,the “cost” of death hinges on the worth ofan animal’s life. Anyone who has tried tostomp on a cockroach will have gained theimpression that even such a lowly creaturecherishes life. But how does one measurethis value? The question has become crit-ical with a recent explosion in the numbersof transgenic mice—close to 100 millionare consumed a year in American labs

WHAT ANIMALS WANT:EXPERTISE ANDADVOCACY INLABORATORY ANIMALWELFARE POLICYby Larry CarboneOxford UniversityPress, New York,2004 ($35)

NUMBER OF MICE consumed in U.S. laboratoriesevery year has shot up to almost 100 million, ofwhich three quarters are disposed of unused.

COPYRIGHT 2004 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.

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alone. (In 1996 U.S. laboratories usedaround 20 million laboratory animals.)Three quarters of the mice are wasted, ac-cording to Andrew Rowan of the Hu-mane Society of the United States: nowthat many institutions have their ownbreeding facilities, far more mice thanneeded are being born.

The fact that mice are small and vir-tually indistinguishable compounds theproblem: they have become a “stan-dardized animal” to a medical re-searcher, in the same way that a moleculeis a fundamental unit to a chemist. Oneobserver describes scientists using anddiscarding mice with as much thought asif they were tissues, of the nose-blowingkind. Carbone pleads for treating eachmouse as an individual—for assuming itslife has some value or for tailoring thedose of an anesthetic to a specific crea-ture’s need rather than to the statistical-ly defined response of a “standardized”mouse. His task is made even harder bya 2002 amendment that took birds, ratsand mice out of the definition of “ani-mal” in the Animal Welfare Act: thesecreatures are not protected by federallaw. They are not even counted.

Most scientists take pride in being car-ing and sensitive, Carbone notes. Oddly,that can have its downside: “Protectingtheir self-identification as someone whowould not hurt animals could lead thesepeople, ironically, to refuse to see thattheir animals might indeed be in pain.”For such reasons, he argues, laboratoryanimals should have an in-house advo-cate—and who better than the veterinar-ian? One can only hope that such a meta-morphosis in her role will come sooner,rather than billions of mice later.

Madhusree Mukerjee has covered theuse of animals in laboratories for thismagazine, where she was an editor forseven years. She is author of The Landof Naked People: Encounters with StoneAge Islanders (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

ANCIENT GREEK ATHLETICSby Stephen G. Miller. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2004 ($35)

As the Olympic Games open in the land where it all began, it is bothfitting and delightful to sit down with this beautiful, informative book.Miller, an archaeologist and professor of classics at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, brings the ancient Greek athletic festivals tolife by reconstructing the scene at one of the Panhellenic games andexplores broader themes such as theintegral role they played in societyand politics. For almost 12 cen-

turies, beginning in 776 B.C. at Olympiain the Peloponnese (not at Mount Olympus, as oneoften hears), the games were so popular that nothingwas allowed to stand in the way; even battleswere temporarily halted in deference to theathletic competition. Olympia was the site ofonly one of four major contests; the otherswere at Delphi, Isthmia and Nemea.

The closest visual link to the classic athleticfestivals comes from paintings on amphoras,huge vessels that held as much as 39 liters ofolive oil. These were offered as prizes at thegames; one side depicted the event for which theprize was given. Modern fans would find other strikingdifferences between today’s contests and the originalgames: There were no second-place prizes—you won oryou lost. There were no team sports. Fouls were punishedby flogging. Athletes performed nude. By the fourthcentury A.D., with the spread of Christianity and the waningof belief in the Greek gods, the games “ceased completelyto play any meaningful role in society.” They were revivedin something resembling their modern form in 1896.

DIGITAL PEOPLE: FROM BIONIC HUMANS TO ANDROIDSby Sidney Perkowitz. Joseph Henry Press, Washington, D.C., 2004 ($24.95)Perkowitz, professor of physics at Emory University, takes the reader onan absorbing journey through the history of human efforts to duplicatehuman functions. Robots and artificial body parts represent the currentlevel of achievement; the ultimate achievement may be artificial beings.Although “no one has yet made a completely autonomous being, or onethat seems consistently and convincingly alive, or a bionic implant thatimproves human strength or wit . . . there is no doubt that existingtechnology will carry us further along these paths.” And eventually we must face someprofound questions. “What is our purpose in making artificial or hybrid beings? What are ourethical responsibilities toward them and theirs toward us? Do we have anything to fear fromintelligent and powerful nonhuman beings?”

The books reviewed are available for purchase through www.sciam.com

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RUNNERS on a fifth centuryB.C. amphora awarded tothe winner of the race.

COPYRIGHT 2004 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.