1000 DOCTORS (AND MANY MORE) AGAINST VIVISECTION

 

Edited by Hans Ruesch

 

 

First published 1989 Ó Hans Ruesch Foundation

 

(PART 2 OF 4)

 

 

 

Extracts from a lecture by Dr. Arie Brecher, M.D., the Israeli physician, held on August 12, 1986 at Tel Aviv:

 

"From an animal one can get only a very approximate indication of how a human will react under similar circumstances. But this is not science - it's a lot­tery. However, we are not playing games. At stake are health and life. There is absolutely no connection between vivisection and human health. The day it was decided to develop medicaments using animal models, it was a sad day for man­kind. People began to get sick and to die due to medications. A new epoch in medicine started: the epoch of iatrogenic diseases, caused by doctors, by medi­cal therapies. In the D.S.A., at least one and a half million people are hospi­talized every year due to the intake of drugs, and many die. For the first time in history, medicine causes disasters instead of curing illness."

 

The cancer situation is actually even worse than generally acknowledged, which is bad enough. As John A. McDougall, M.D., explains in an article "The Misguided War on Cancer" in the Vegetarian Times. September 1986:

 

"The American Cancer Society also fails to tell us that the 'improved' sur­vival rate seen over the past 80 years for most cancers is largely the result of earlier detection - not more effective treatment. Finding the cancer earlier does allow more people to live five years after the time of diagnosis. Thus more people will fit the definition of 'cured'. However, in most cases, early detection does not increase a person's life span but only the length of time a person is aware that he or she has cancer."

 

"Researchers at the National Cancer Institute said today that the new treat­ment, which combines the cells with two drugs, resulted in dramatic cures in a majority of mice with colon, lung and liver cancers. Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, the chief researcher, cautioned that the treatment had only been tested in mice. 'Lots of things work in mice that don't work in humans', he said." (From an article, "Tumor-Fighting Cells Found", in the New York Times. September 12, 1986)

 

"I have been in medical practice for 38 years. I have never done any animal experiments, neither during my studies nor subsequently, and have also never been inside an animal laboratory . Animal experimentation represents a falla­cious practice. I cannot name one single case in which experiments on animals may have led to a useful result. I think vivisection is a crude, archaic method which must be completely reconsidered. I am convinced that we are approach­ing a quite differently conceived form of research method, based on cell cul­tures. " (Dr. med. Philippe Grin, general practitioner, Lausanne. Summary of a video interview with CIVIS, July 1, 1986. Translated from the French)

 

"I have been a surgeon for 51 years. I am still performing operations daily, and can state that in no way whatever do I owe my dexterity to animal ex­perimentation. Like every good surgeon, I first learned my trade as an assistant to other surgeons. If I had had to learn surgery through animal experiments I would have been an incompetent in this field, just as I consider those of my col­leagues to be incompetent who say that they have learned surgery through ani­mal experimentation. It's true that there are always advocates of vivisection who say that one must first practise on animals in order to become a surgeon. That is a dishonest statement, made by people who reap financial benefit from it." (Prof. Dr. Ferdinando de Leo, professor of Pathological and Clinical Surgery at the University of Naples, in an interview with Hans Ruesch for the television station "Teleroma 56" in Rome, May 6, 1986. Translated from Italian)

 

Excerpt from a 3-page article by Daniel Jack Chasnan in Science. April 1986, titled "The Polio Paradox", and subtitled, "One of the two polio vaccines has been largely abandoned in the U.S., the other is the leading cause of the dis­ease":

 

"...Presumably, when Kay McNeary changed her daughter's diapers, a re­activated virus was transmitted to her. She sued the manufacturer of the vaccine and the public agencies that administered it. In 1982, a Seattle jury awarded her $1.1 million. Neither McNeary nor her lawyer, Daniel Sullivan, claimed that the vaccine had been manufactured improperly. The live vaccine is currently the 'vaccine of choice' in the United States. It is also the nation's leading cause of polio. In 1982 and 1983, according to the federal Centers for Disease Con­trol's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, it was the only cause."

 

CIVIS notes:

 

1) So to manufacture a highly lucrative pseudo-vaccine like Sabin's, which has been recognized as being the 'sole' cause of polio in the U.S.A. today, an entire species of animals, the highly sensitive and intelligent rhesus, have been nearly wiped out. The same pseudo-researchers who were re­sponsible for that erstwhile fiasco are now trying to get hold of the last individ­uals of chimps left to manufacture an AIDS vaccine which is likely to be equally ineffective and dangerous, but even more lucrative for the profession and the industry than the Salk and Sabin products.

 

2) Polio has practically disappeared also in those countries where no vac­cination had taken place; and countries, which of course, were spared the huge damages that the vaccinations had caused wherever they were employed.

 

"At no time during my training was I compelled, or shall we say persuaded, to practice any operating technique on an animal. I acquired my experience and dexterity through many years of assisting various qualified surgeons on count­less occasions, as is customary and essential for the classical training of a sur­geon. I identify myself unreservedly with those surgeons who, like me, advo­cate the abolition of vivisection. The statement that the prohibition of animal experiments would result in a deterioration of medical care and knowledge is not tenable, and quite clearly a view with overtones of self-interest." (Dr. med. Werner Hartinger, Specialist in General and Accident Surgery, practitioner for the Industrial Injuries Insurance Institutes, with 25 years' ex­perience at the hospital and in private practice at Waldshut-Tiengen, West Ger­many, in a video interview with CIVIS, April 29, 1986.)

 

"The pressure on young doctors to publish, and the availability of labora­tory animals have made professional advancement the main reason for doing animal experiments." (E.J.H. Moore, the Lancet, April 26, 1986)

 

"After 41 year's experience as a surgeon I can say with certainty that in my case animal experiments have contributed nothing to extending my surgical knowledge or improving my practical skill. That is definite. What is more, I consider cruel animal experiments as not permissible. The cruelty aspect also relates to mental agony. Animals, too, have a soul, as we know." (Prof. Dr. Julius Hackethal, Germany's most famous surgeon, at his Eu­bios Cancer Clinic near Munich, in a video interview with CIVIS, April 16, 1986.)

 

"The facts continue multiplying that refute the barbaric practice of animal experimentation in the name of human health and longevity. Yet the efforts by the medical establishment to justify this practice continues unabated...The medical establishment threatens us with dire consequences if animal experimen­tation is stopped. This is a shame, a weapon being used to ensure continued funding to the tune of $6 billion a year by the National Institute of Health and Mental Health to the nation's universities." (From an article by Murray J. Cohen, M.D., in the Chicago Tribune. April 8, 1986.)

 

Moneim A. Fadali, M.D., F.A.C.S., Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgeon, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, in a video interview with CIVIS representative Kathy Ungar in March 1986 (abstract): "I agree that for the benefit of medical science, vivisection or animal ex­perimentation has to be stopped. There are lots of reasons for that. The most im­portant is that it's simply misleading, and both the past and the present testify to that.”

 

"I have seen surgeons who carried out experiments on some organs from dogs in the belief that these were identical with those of humans, and they did not know that they were cutting into a quite different organ, even into a lym­phatic gland instead of the thyroid gland. Nobody has become a surgeon be­cause of having operated on animals. He has only learnt wrongly through ani­mals. I have been able to see this over my many decades as a surgeon, also as a Director of hospitals. I have carried out tens of thousands of operations on people without ever performing them first on an animal. " (Prof. Dr. Salvatore Rocca Rossetti, surgeon and Professor of Urology at the University of Turin, Italy, in the science program "Delta" on Italian televi­sion, March 12, 1986.)

 

The Sunday Independent (February 2, 1986) carried an article by Dr. Ver­non Coleman, a television medical expert, author of over thirty books on health and medical practice. Dr. Coleman writes: "The researchers who conduct these experiments usually argue that their work will benefit mankind. They dismiss protestors as ignorant and unreason­able. They claim that it is necessary to maim, torture and kill animals in order to push back the frontiers of medical science. It's all absolute hogwash...I can­not think of a single major breakthrough that was produced as a result of an ani­mal experiment."

 

In the newsletter In Defense of Animals, Winter 1986, Corte Madera, Ca., Elliot Katz, D.V.M., wrote: "You and I are lied to by the animal 'research' establishment when they tell us all this cruelty is 'necessary' for scientific research. We are being fed this lie by people who make a living of their practices behind closed doors at univer­sities and scientific institutes...by people who are deeply interested in keeping things in this $8-billion-a-year-business just the way they are..."

 

Prof. Dr. Pietro Croce, M.D. (see biography), in an interview with CIVIS, January 11, 1986: "The question was, can we give up animal experiments without halting medical progress? My answer is that not only one can, but that one must give up animal experiments not to halt medical progress. Today's rebellion against vivisection is no longer based on animal welfare. We have to speak of a scien­tific rebellion, which has nothing to do with animal welfare, inasmuch as we would not campaign for abolition if animal experiments were of any use to me­dicine. But we have now become convinced that we should put an end to ani­mal experimentation not out of consideration for animals, but out of consider­ation for human beings. I won't speak now of the pharmacological disasters due to animal experiments, that would be too simple. I mean the constant, daily harm caused to medical science by the belief in the validity of animal tests."

 

"The abolition of vivisection would in no way halt medical progress, just the opposite is the case. All the sound medical knowledge of today stems from observations carried out on human beings. No surgeon can gain the least knowl­edge from experiments on animals, and all the great surgeons of the past and of the present day are in agreement on that. One cannot learn surgery through oper­ating on animals. Animals are completely different from Man from the anatomi­cal standpoint, their reactions are quite different, their structure is different and their resistance is different. Animals can only mislead the surgeon. If one has performed many operations on animals, one loses the sensitivity, the delicate touch necessary for operating on humans." (Prof. Dr. Bruno Fedi, Director of the Institute of Pathological Anatomy at the General Hospital in Temi, Italy, in a video interview with CIVIS in Rome, January 11, 1986)

 

Paul Carrao, M.D., former head injury researcher with the U .S. Navy, ana­lysing the head injury experiments on baboons conducted in the laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1988: "I just know what the literature shows, and I know what our results were, and I challenge anybody to show that any of that has advanced the cause of the treatment of human head injury one iota. The bulk of the knowledge that now exists and upon which the treatment of human head injuries is predicated is that which has been derived from head injuries in the past, whether in the civilian sector or in the military. In many ways the results which were obtained with ani­mals have been misleading, because in the case of quadrupeds the physiologi­cal mechanisms are different, so that the kinds of data obtained from different systems - circulatory, the blood pressure and so forth, respiratory, the cardiac - are different from those obtained from human head injuries."

 

"During 1986 Britain's Committee on Safety of Medicines obtained the co­operation of manufacturers of the anaesthetic halothane in strengthening the warnings of liver toxicity: the drug had caused 150 deaths between 1964 and 1980, but no evidence of liver toxicity had come from the initial animal tests." (SCRIP, 2, 2 October 1987)

 

In the Israel Zootechnical Association Quarterly, Dec. 1985, Dr. Andre Menache, said: "I would now like to go on to answer the questions which speakers in this session have been asked to consider. 'Is modem research possible without the use of live animals?' My answer is definitely "yes". I think that results from ani­mal experiments for use in human beings is one of the greatest tragedies, and one of the biggest mistakes in medical history, and we unfortunately have not yet learned from our mistakes."

 

"It is incomprehensible how parties with vested interests repeatedly assert the necessity and purposefulness of animal experiments, paying no regard to the views of many who think otherwise, and at the same time conceal the fact that the defence used against claims for damages resulting from side-effects caused by extensively used animal-tested medicaments and chemical substances is pre­cisely that the animal test results could not be applied to the human organism." (Dr. med. Werner Hartinger, Specialist in General and Accident Surgery, in a lecture entitled "Vivisection - False path of medicine? on October 4, 1985, at the Kunsthaus in Zurich.)

 

When the Swiss people were preparing to go to the urns to vote for or against the popular Initiative for the Abolition of Vivisection, the all-powerful Swiss chemical industry spent uncounted millions of hard-currency Swiss francs in the little country and abroad on a ruthless campaign of persuasion and misin­formation. Among the several new organizations financed by the industry was an Action-Committee based in Lausanne, POB 1069, which sent out stacks of propaganda pamphlets to every Swiss physician with the advice to display them in their waiting rooms. The pamphlets warned the waiting patients of the dire consequences for their health if the Initiative were accepted, and were signed "Your Doctor". But a surgeon in Zurich, Dr. med. Christoph Wolfensberger, wrote on November 27,1985, to that Action Committee:

 

"Gentlemen - Being a sustainer of the Initiative for the Abolition of Vivi­section, I do not intend to display your pamphlets in my waiting room. In fact they have already landed in the trash can. During my years of professional train­ing, I could convince myself again and again how horrible and senseless the ex­periments on animals are. You won't succeed in foisting on me and my patients, with the help of your literature, the notion that the safeguard of our health de­pends on vivisection."

 

"It is well-known that animal effects are often totally different from the ef­fects in people. This applies to substances in medical use as well as substances such as 245y and dioxin." (A.L. Cowan, MD, Acting Medical Officer of Health, New Plymouth, New Zealand, N.Z. Listener, August 31, 1985, p.l0)

 

From the medical Newsletter of Robert S. Mendelsohn, M. D., People's Doctor, No. 815, August 25, 1985:

 

WHEN IS POLIO NOT POLIO? Dear Reader: Some of you may remember my warning that whenever third party payers reward physicians for a certain diagnosis, you can be sure that there will be a remarkable increase in the incidence of people who have that dis­ease.

 

My favorite example stems from my early medical experience in the 1950's when the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis would pay for the diagnosis of polio. You can't imagine how many sprained ankles suddenly turned into "possible polio" cases! When the polio vaccine came on the mar­ket, the criteria for the diagnosis of polio became far more narrow.

 

Due to the previously inflated diagnosis, this in turn led to a sharp drop in "polio" and enabled vaccine enthusiasts to justify their product. Now, 30 years later, here is what the The New York Times Magazine (July 7, 1985) has to say about the "post-polio syndrome":

 

"During the epidemics of the 1950's, the National Foundation for Infan­tile Paralysis - the March of Dimes - assumed many medical expenses for pa­tients whose physicians reported diagnoses of polio. In order for patients to receive economic support, some doctors diagnosed other paralytic syndromes, such as Guillain-Barre syndrome, as polio. Thus, physicians are now discover­ing that some patients who are complaining about the late effects of polio never had polio in the first place."

 

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

 

A letter sent by Richmond C. Hubbard, M.D. (chairman, Medical Re­search Modernization Committee) to The New York Times, August 5,1985:

 

“Better to Study Humans Directly”

 

“To the Editor: "Cruelty to Research Animals" (editorial July 31) misses the point stressed by the Medical Research Modernization Committee. We are a committee of 650 health-care professionals - mainly M.D. 's and Ph.D.' s - and we feel that recent advances in technology, such as tissue-culture techniques and mathematical and computer modeling - have not yet been inte­grated into the research methodology. Moreover, CAT scans, nuclear magnetic imaging, PET scans and lab methods such as high-performance chromatography allow human beings to be studied non-invasively and safely.

 

“Doesn't it make more sense to fund research dealing directly with humans, and thus avoid the problem of extrapolating to humans the results obtained in animal testing?

 

“An example of an area in which human research is imperative is AIDS re­search. Non-human primates being used to study AIDS take years to develop a disease that has some similarities to human AIDS (we are not certain that it is the same); and once developed it is claimed that these monkey models can then be used to test new vaccines and therapeutics. But long delays mean more human deaths, and humans with AIDS are available who would be willing to volunteer in clinical studies that might help save their own lives or the lives of future AIDS victims.

 

“The first sentence of your editorial, "Medical research would be impossible without experiments on animals," is untrue. Our position is that the tradition of animal research needs modernization and that much of its funding should be switched to research studying human illness directly. For example, patients with intractable arthritis, multiple sclerosis and cancer (as well as those with AIDS) can be studied directly.

 

“It is well known that all vaccines derived from animal sources can cause severe damage to the nervous system of human beings, including paralysis, men­ingitis, and brain tumors, besides provoking in a healthy subject the very infec­tion the inoculation was intended to prevent.”

 

Article in the Guardian, July 16, 1985, by Andrew Welch, Medical Corre­spondent:

 

"Drug brain damage toll put at 25 million."

 

“Powerful tranquillizers such as Largactil which is used to deaden the emotions of psychotic patients in hospi­tals and prisons should be banned, the World Mental Health Congress in Brighton was told yesterday.

 

“More than 25 million patients have suffered irreversible brain damage as a result of the drugs, said Dr. David Hill, senior clinical psychologist at Walton Hospital, Chesterfield. Drug companies must be forced to take them off the market, he added. Until they did so, doctors should tell patients of the risks of brain damage, and pres­cribe them for a maximum of two months.

 

“British doctors issue some 10 million prescriptions a year for powerful tran­quillizers, a consultant psychiatrist, Dr. Farrukh Hussain, of St. Augustine's Hospital, Canterbury, warned: "It is criminal not to tell patients of the risks. In­formed consent is a must. We should give honest, clear advice. "

 

“Most psychiatrists accept that major tranquillizers cause tardive dyskinesia (T.D.) which make patients lose control of their muscles. It starts with involun­tary movements of the tongue and facial muscles. In more extreme cases the arms and legs jerk uncontrollably.

 

“Roche, the main manufacturers, calculate that 150 million people in the world are taking the drugs, and 3 to 6 per cent of those may have T .D. in three quarters of cases, the effects were irreversible.

 

“Independent studies had shown that one in four patients given the drugs suf­fered T.D. Dr. Hill told the congress. At a conservative estimate, 38 million people had T.D. and more than 25 million had been rendered permanently un­able to control the muscles in their tongues, or in many cases their entire bodies.

 

"Giving people chemicals that cause brain damage to this extent is silly," he said. Elderly people, particularly women, seemed more susceptible but that might be because they were the ones who had been given high doses for the lon­gest period.

 

“Damage could be caused within three to six months on average doses - 14 per cent of all people suffering T.D. developed it within the first year, he said. Giving patients drug free holidays - taking them off tranquillizers for a month to see how they progressed - often made the problem worse.

 

“The drugs block dopamine receptors in the nerves. They dampen emotions and slow reactions until patients are only just able to talk. When the drugs are withdrawn, the nerves become hyper sensitive. The argument that the side effects should be tolerated because of the risk of schizophrenic patients relapsing when the drugs were withdrawn was false, said Dr. Hill.

 

“The relapse rate among those taking the drug were around 20 per cent com­pared with 50 per cent of those not taking the drugs, which suggested they were protecting less than one third of patients from a relapse.

 

“The only way of stopping the symptoms was to increase the dosage, he added. That masked the side effects but might worsen the underlying brain dam­age. In many cases the symptoms only appeared when patients stopped taking the drugs, so some faced the agonising choice of living under sedation or risk­ing the effects of T.D.”

 

Article in the Guardian, March 18, 1986:

 

"Boy demands compensation from GP and health authority: Whooping cough vaccine 'linked to brain damage'. There is a casual link between a vaccine that gives immunization against whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus and brain damage, counsel for the 16­year-old brain-damaged boy told the High Court in London yesterday. The issue had divided the medical profession and caused considerable public dis­quiet, Mr. Justice Stuart-Smith was told...”

 

Article in Weekly World News (U.S.A.), May 28,1985: "98 million people doomed? Brain cancer virus found in polio vaccine." Experts say 98 million Americans who took polio shots in the 1950's and1960's may get a deadly brain cancer from the inoculations.

 

“Researchers at the University of Chicago medical center say that a virus contaminated the polio vaccine and they have now found genetic material from the virus in a number of brain cancer victims. The virus, called SV40, has never been found in normal brains or in brains where the cancer spread from elsewhere in the body, according to Dr. Jacob Rachlin, head of the research team.

 

"These results suggest that SV40 may be a good candidate as a possible cause for human brain tumors", he told a meeting of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. He cautioned that his results "are very preliminary". Dr. Rachlin and his colleagues identified genetic material from the virus in several brain tumor victims, including three children born to mothers who had had polio shots while they were pregnant.”

 

The following letter by J.D. Bradshaw, M.D. was printed in the Desert News, Salt Lake City, Utah, July 1985: “I am a retired surgeon and for several years w01xed in a Chicago laboratory experimenting on animals, mostly through vivisection, and I'm not proud of it The writer of "Benefits in animal experiments", Desert News, May 1, speaks about "a whole lot of misinformed people" and I think she is one of them.

 

“She speaks about the infinite benefits derived via animal experiments, but fails to provide any proof of a single one. In pure fact, there is not a single benefit obtained that could not have been obtained by alternative methods. Some coun­tries have abandoned experiments on animals, and in time so will the U.S.”

 

An article by Dr. Andrew Salm, M.D., from the monthly magazine Fur 'n’ Feathers, May 1985:

 

“'Dog labs' taught him about animal abuse. Although I am a physician, and very much a minority on this subject, a recent letter on animal abuse has led me to review the reasons why I became opposed to vivisection and abuse of ani­mals by the research establishment.

 

“My opposition to repetitious and stupid "experiments" and "research" upon helpless animals stems from my student days in medical school. In those days, our planet was not yet overpopulated, and animal life was very cheap. In fresh­man physiology "dog lab", held twice weekly for one semester, a live dog was assigned to each two students. Thus, our class of 135 students massacred 135 dogs a week.

 

“Twice weekly, three hours each session, we were assigned to repeat elemen­tary physiological experiments that had been done a million times over during the past 100 years. Nothing was learned that was not already known from all that bloodletting. This freshman class alone probably massacred 2,500 dogs dur­ing that semester.

 

“In theory, the dogs were anesthetized with ether. After the "experiment" was finished, the dog was supposedly "sacrified" either by an ether overdose, of by the cutting of its carotid arteries. But the students were green, and always in a hurry. They were freshmen, and this was the first experience with cutting up living creatures. The bell which signaled the end of the session would ring so soon, and very often the students rushed off, not making certain that the un­fortunate animal was really dead. The "used" animals were simply tossed into a trash bin behind the laboratory.

 

“I considered it a blot upon the teaching and medical professions that we freshmen students were merely supervised in this "dog lab" by other freshmen or sophomore students who acted as "monitors". The teaching staff was absent and did not concern itself with this butchery. This was no research. Ever since freshman "dog lab" I have been an anti-vivisectionist.

 

“Unfortunately, most research today is just repetitious protocol, done to write papers, to complete educational requirements, and to obtain federal grant money. Ninety percent of animal experiments are done carelessly, callously, in filthy surroundings, upon starved and mistreated animals (these things the pub­lic will never be allowed to see), for the sake of research is an end in itself, and done when the outcome is already well known.”

 

Moneim A. Fadali, M.D., F.A.C.S., Diplomate American Board of Surgery and American Board of Thoracic Surgery wrote in May 1985 a Fore­word to Brandon Reine's book Heart Research on Animals from which we ex­cerpt: "The study of humans is the only sure way to unveil the mystery of human­kind, to find cures for human ailments, and to prevent suffering".

 

"Contrary to the customary present-day opinion, I am of the view that no animal experiments whatever are ethically, morally or scientifically justifiable according to the present practices for carrying out animal experiments. As Di­rector of the Research Institute for Orthopaedics, I am able to report from many years' experience that all the developments of this kind in medical technique can be tested on humans themselves without animal experiments, without any injury to them." - Executive Medical Officer Dr. Leopold Zemann, Specialist in Ortho­paedics and Orthopaedic Surgery, Chief Physician at the Sanitarium St Andrae, Director of the Research Institute for Orthopaedics, Vienna. In a letter addressed to Prof. Dr. Konrad Lorenz, March 20, 1985.

 

American heart surgeon William De Vries, who surged to fame when he tried to by-pass the catastrophic implants of natural hearts by using artificial, mechanical hearts instead: "You can't know the answer to strokes by looking at animals." Quoted by V.S. News & World Report. Dec. 2, 1985.

 

In February 1985, France's biggest publishing house, Hachette, brought out Les Mensonges de la Medecine (The Lies of Medicine), by Roger Dalet, M.D., who filled 228 pages with what he defines as "lies", propagated as truths by the medical establishment. We shall cite here just one single item; on page 40, Dr. Dalet recalls the Interferon bluff, which we remember made the title page of Time, Newsweek etc., and consequently also of most European publications. Dr. Dalet writes:

 

"The word gets around. Some experiments seem hopeful. Rats, to which In­terferon had been administered, healed of their cancer. The media spread the news that the miracle was imminent, that cancer would soon be defeated. There was a rush on this new substance...Numerous drug manufacturers pitched into the production of Interferon to fill the orders from the USA, Switzerland, Japan, etc...”

 

"But suddenly, the crash! Interferon doesn't keep its promises...And then, the tops, the bubble bursts. France's medical journal, Quotidien du medecin (No.3671, April 21, 1982, p. 11) reports: An American doctor, Shelby Berger, of the NCI, announces that Interferon, rather than retarding the development of cancer, favors its growth..."

 

Dr. med. Karlheinz Blank, West Germany, in Der Tierschutz, Nr. 62, 1985, Journal of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Tierschutz: "A drug that is tested on animals will have a completely different effect in man. There are uncounted examples that could be cited."

 

From an article in Bunte, No. 50, one of Germany's major weeklies, by its Medical Correspondent, Dr. Peter Schmidsberger:

 

 "... For the listeners it was a shock. The expert who joined in the discussion already attracted attention through his eloquence and his heavy stature. But what he said was of even more weight. Although it was only one sentence, the information it conveyed was highly ex­plosive.

 

“'Painkillers,' he stated, 'must be held responsible for about 50 per cent of kidney transplants. '

 

“Organ transplants are extolled as one of the greatest advances in medicine. Almost everything is held to be justified by their use - even the heavy costs. All the more serious is it when one comes to learn that this irreplaceable master­piece of modem medicine is to a large extent serving the purpose of warding off the worst effects of misuse.

 

“Are 50 per cent of kidney transplants a result of the irrational use of pain­killers? Since this information came from a specialist in medicines and poisons, it is of particular significance. When used over a long period, painkillers cause serious kidney damage, extending to cancer of the bladder. Due to this, the expression "painkiller kid­ney" became established a long while ago.

 

“Painkillers are among those drugs about which we have such a mass of in­formation and experience that it is hardly possible to keep track of it all. They have been tried out over decades on millions of people. One can speak without exaggeration of wholesale experiments on human beings.

 

“Nevertheless, experiments on animals continue to be made, even though these drugs have already gone through all the stages of animal experimentation - otherwise they would never have come onto the market in the first place. But despite this, the injuries to health, which are known today, had not been fore­seen.

 

“The animal experiments are now continuing, so as to investigate how the serious damage from painkillers came about. It is more than doubtful whether this will be successful. The experimenters complain that there are no suitable animal models for kidney damage. Not only because animals do not take pain­killers, but above all because the injuries brought about in the experiments can­not be transferred to human beings."

 

The opponents of vivisection received quite unexpected help in 1985 from the notorious Dr. Hans-Joachim Cramer, who directs the Press and Informa­tion Department of the German Federal Association of the Pharmaceutical In­dustry ("Bundersverband der Pharmazeutischen Industrie e.V.") - an office which demands great inventive talent and strong nerves. In the magazine Medi­kament und Meinung (February 15, 1985) he fell into a trap of his own making when he promised to expose the alleged "faking and falsifications" in the quo­tations of the antivivisectionists, and then unconsciously proceeded to prove precisely the opposite. Dr. Cramer complains that the name of Nobel Prize win­ner Ernst Boris Chain crops up frequently in the writings of the antivivisection­ists, and that he is on each occasion deliberately quoted falsely. Cramer writes:

 

"At the Contergan (Thalidomide) trial Chain is said to have stated that the results of animal experiments cannot be extrapolated to human beings. Now, what did he really say? On February 2, 1970 he stated before the District Court in Alsdorf: 'No animal experiment on a medicament, even if it is carried out on several animal species including primates under all conceivable conditions, can give an absolute guarantee that the medicament tested in this way will act the same on human beings, for in many respects man is not the same as animals...' (quotation from the records, published in Der Contergan Prozess, Verlag Wis­senschaft und Forschung GmbH, Berlin, pages 17-19)."

 

Thanks to Dr. Cramer, the reader now knows precisely what Nobel Prize winner Chain, summoned by the accused manufacturers Chemie Grunenthal as a defence witness and appearing after traveling from afar, actually said under oath at the Thalidomide trial - and it is precisely what the opponents of vivisec­tion have always stated. The fact that Chain, a vivisector over many years, con­tradicted himself shortly afterwards by adding that animal experiments repre­sent "a minimising of the risk for humans" (and this, of all things, just when the Thalidomide tragedy was under discussion, the international scale of which is known to be attributable solely to the "safety tests" which had previously been carried out and repeated over many years!), once again shows the confused state of mind of the advocates of vivisection, who would like to pretend that animal torture is not carried out simply for reasons of personal gain or childish curios­ity, but in order to protect humans from being harmed by medicaments, or even to heal them of illnesses..

 

In 1972, a book was published about the manner in which the drug manu­facturers, who are facing prosecution, obtain defence witnesses from among their scientist allies in the pseudo-medical industry. Entitled Thalidomide and the Power of the Drug Companies, it was published by Penguin Books and writ­ten by Henning Sjoestroem, a Swedish lawyer, and Robert Nilsson, a researcher in the chemical industry. But care was taken to have this documentation, very incriminating for the entire pharmaceutical industry, quickly swept under the carpet exactly the same fate as that suffered by similar exposes of earlier and later date.

 

Extract from an article written by a member of the Swiss National Council, Dr. med. Paul Gunther, Senior Anaesthetician at the Regional Hospital of In­terlaken, which appeared in the Solothurner Zeitung on November 15, 1985: "It is precisely the most modem research methods, such as cell cultures with human cells, that are producing new discoveries...In spite of all the animal ex­periments, all medicaments ultimately have to be tested on the human being...As a physician I, therefore, support the campaign for the abolition of vivisec­tion.”

 

"I carried out animal experiments over many years, following an unsound logic which had been drummed into me during my studies at the university and a long time afterwards. Until one day I said to myself: something must be wrong in the thinking and practice of medicine; something basic, meaning the method is totally wrong...It would be very difficult to find anything that could be more misleading for biomedical research than animal experimentation." (Prof. Pietro Croce, M.D., internationally trained researcher and physi­cian, visiting lecturer at the University of Milan, in his book Vivisezione 0 Scien­za (Vivisection or Science - a Choice), 2nd edition, 1985)

 

"As a researcher I am involved with mutagenesis and cancerogenesis, two areas in which experimentation is fundamentally indispensable. I therefore know what I am talking about. And I say "No" to vivisection. Not only on ethical, but above all on scientific grounds. It has been proved that the results of research with animals are in no case valid for man. There is a law of Nature in relation to metabolism, according to which a biochemical reaction that one has estab­lished in one species only applies to that species, and not to any other. Two closely related species, like the mouse and the rat, often react entirely different­ly..."(The Italian parliamentarian Gianni Tamino, researcher at the University of Padua, the most important medical university in Italy, in an interview with Domenica del Corriere. No. 48, December 1, 1984)

 

From a speech by the same Gianni Tamino, in the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, Italy, on November 16, 1984:

 

“I talk not just as a Congressman, but as a person who works on the prob­lems which are being discussed in this order of the day: I mean as a researcher who works on experimenting chemical products, studying mutagenesis and cancerogenesis, actually using - as had been requested in the document about which we are discussing - those other forms of studies that do without the use of animals.

 

“It isn't merely a matter of humane concern in regards to other living beings, but much rather a more correct choice, from the scientific point of view, than animal experimentation, which can rarely be significant, because of the animals' different metabolism and other characteristics that man has. Animal experimen­tation is very often just senseless speculation and cruelty, which don't guaran­tee in any way that the sought-after result will be obtained, while, at the same time, involving enormous expenditures.

 

“Other methods, based on the usage of cells cultured in vitro. based on biol­ogical systems in vitro. provide much greater economy, quicker answers, and, thanks to technological refmement, more reliable results, more likely to be extrapolated to human beings. Thus we are asked to make a choice which is coherent with the progress of biology and to refuse a method that evokes me­dieval barbarity and certainly not any experimentation done for the sake of prevention and an increase of the quality of human life."

 

LA Times. October 10, 1984:

 

“Cancer-causing genes and the processes that can make them dangerous ap­pear so important in normal life that the disease probably never will be eradi­cated. researchers said. Cancer seems to stem from mutations in special genes that appear otherwise important in normal life, and "there's no way we're going to completely abolish mutations," said William Hayward of Memorial Sloan­ Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "I don't think it likely on the basis of our present trajectory (of research) to eliminate the process' of cancer develop­ment," said Dr. Paul Marks, president of Sloan-Kettering.’

 

“Tests on rats and guinea-pigs are controversial because animals and human beings do not always have the same response to chemicals. In addition, huge doses administered to test animals raise questions about the application of the test-tube environment to real life. Tests are also costly. Animal tests for a single chemical may reach $11 million. Says John Dull, professor of pharmacology at the University of Kansas Medical Center: "You can never prove safety for these substances."’ (Abstract from an article by Clemens P. Work and Ronald A. Taylor in U.S. News and World Report. May 21, 1984)

 

CIVIS comment: Spending 11 million dollars on animal tests for a single chemical while knowing they will never prove safety seems a pretty high price to pay for stu­pidity, unless the whole scheme has been cooked up by the Laboratory Animal Breeders Associations.

 

A letter from Lenore Brewer, quoting Donald E. Doyle, M.D., a science adviser to the Animal Protection Institute, in The Milwaukee Journal. March 4, 1984:

 

"Arguments which attempt to persuade us that pound animals are necess­ary for the further advancement of medical science and the education of our fu­ture doctors and surgeons, I feel, are totally without merits...Not only is it un­necessary for physicians in training to practice surgery upon animals, but it may also be a waste of time. One is either born with manual dexterity in surgical skill, or is not...practice can be learned best by assisting in a hospital surgery unit. "

 

The Thalidomide tragedy largely spawned routine teratogen (physical defects in off-spring) testing in rabbits and rats or mice but because of extreme species variability these do not safeguard humans and it is only a matter of time before the next major drug disaster occurs. As Dr. Mann points out in Modern Drug Use (1984):

 

"The difficulty of predicting human risk from animal teratogenicity tests is illusttated by the fact that, although aspirin is a proven teratogen in the rat, mouse, guinea-pig, cat, dog and monkey, it is also one of the substances which has been widely used by pregnant women and yet not been shown to produce any kind of characteristic malformation."

 

Even the Office of Health Economics, an organisation funded by the Asso­ciation of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, admits in regard to Thalidomide: "In this particular case, therefore, it is unlikely that specific tests in preg­nant animals would have given the necessary warning: the right species would probably never have been used."

 

What the Thalidomide affair should demonstrate is the short-sightedness of placing misguided faith in animal tests instead of attempting to develop humane alternative research techniques and devoting massive efforts towards preventing women from taking drugs during pregnancy.

 

“The infamous anti-inflammatory drugs phenylbutazone and oxyphenbuta­zone are responsible for an estimated 10,000 deaths worldwide. The chances of harmful effects occurring in people compared with laboratory animals are considerably increased because it takes much longer for patients to metabolize the drugs. In people it takes 72 hours to break down a dose of phenylbutazone but the corresponding times in rhesus monkeys, dogs, rats and rabbits are eight, six, six, and three hours, respectively. For oxyphenylbutazone it takes 72 hours for people and only half an hour for dogs to metabolize the drug. The time taken for Opren to be eliminated from the blood stream was much longer in elderly patients than in laboratory animals.”  (Estimate by Dr Sidney Wolfe, director of the Ralph Nader Health Research Group - in Lancet, 11 February 1984.)

 

A View, by Richard Moskowitz, M.D., reprinted from the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, March 7, 1983:

 

"Since routine vaccines introduce live viruses and other highly antigenic material into the blood of virtually every living person, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that a significant harvest of auto-immune diseases will automati­cally result.

 

“It is dangerously misleading and the exact opposite of the truth to claim that a vaccine makes us "immune" or PROTECTS us against an acute disease. In fact, it only drives the disease deeper into the interior and causes us to harbour it chronically with the result that our responses to it become progressively weaker and show less and less tendency to heal and resolve themselves sponta­neously. Far from producing a genuine immunity the vaccines may act by actually interfering with or SUPPRESSING the immune response as a whole."

 

In a letter dated the 2nd of March 1983, Prof. Dr. Giulio Tarro, Head of the Dept. of Virology and Oncology at the Medical Faculty of Naples Univer­sity and partner of Albert Sabin (see Slaughter of the Innocent, page 262) ex­pressed himself as follows: "I have finally come to the conclusion that no serious importance can be at­tached to any laboratory experiment on animals in the study of analgesics, for the results cannot in any circumstances be extrapolated to human beings."

 

"My efforts to head off the poisoning of hundreds of women with breast cancer with a dangerous drug that could destroy their host defense systems failed. The National Cancer Institute went right ahead. Now a few women with breast cancer have paid with their lives for this stupidity. The moral is that ani­mal model systems not only kill animals, they also kill humans." (Dr. Irwin D. Bross, Director of Biostatics Roswell Park Memorial In­stitute, in Experimental and Applied Toxicology, Jan./Feb. 1983)

 

Steven Tiger, a Physician-Assistant-Certified, registered to practice in New York State, formerly in clinical practice, editor of two medical journals and full-time medical instructor, in a pamphlet published by the ISAR, 421 South State Street, Clarks Summit, PA 18411: "If every experiment now underway were successfully concluded tomor­row, it would have far less benefit than adoption of a wellness oriented lifestyle. No research is needed for that, and the time and money now devoted to medi­cal research would be better spent on fostering wellness, which would do much more good for far more people. The supposed "benefits" from animal experi­ments are a myth."

 

"As regards animal experiments in medicine, I answer as a doctor with a clear NO. Not only do animal experiments not have to be carried out, they are totally useless and contribute nothing whatever to so-called progress in me­dicine. For a result obtained in a series of experiments on a sick cat (or are la­boratory animals or cats with electrodes implanted in their brains supposed to be healthy?) cannot for one minute be applied to the corresponding healthy ani­mal, and much less so to man." (Dr. med. Jurg Kym, general practitioner, Zurich, special publication, 1983)

 

"In 25 years I have never yet seen an animal experiment in pure research which could not have been carried out with other methods." (Prof. Dr. Bruno Fedi, Director of the Institute of Pathological Anatomy at the City Hospital of Temi, Italy, during the public hearings of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on 8th, 9th December 1982. NB - The word "not" in the above sentence of Prof. Fedi was omitted from the French text of the statements, which were subsequently photocopied in summarised form and sent to all par­ticipants. The gap left by the removed word was clearly visible, and Prof. Fedi protested sharply against the clearly intentional falsification of his statement. The hearings, which were conducted and dominated by the British chemical lobby interests, had the purpose of giving animal experiments a legal anchor in all the countries of the Common Market for the future.)

 

"It is the outrageous lie of the supporters of vivisection, a lie serious in its consequences, that animal experiments take place for the good of mankind. The opposite is the case: animal experiments only have an alibi function for the pur­pose of obtaining money, power and titles. Not one single animal experiment has ever succeeded in prolonging or improving, let alone saving, the life of one single person." (From a paper published by Dr. med. Heide Evers, D-7800 Freiburg, 1982)

 

Experts often assert that it is senseless to compare a tumor which has arti­ficially been provoked in an animal with a tumor that has spontaneously de­veloped in a human being. - Dr. Peter Schmidsberger, Medical Correspondant of the German weekly, Bunte, No. 21, 1982.

 

John Fabre of Oxord's Nuffield Department of Surgery, describes how positive results from animal experiments in the 1960s suggested that there might be important advances in transplantation and thereby prompted a large amount of further research into heart and kidney transplants in rats. But tissue differen­ces between humans and rats meant that animal experiments once again proved misleading:

 

"The many encouraging results raised hopes that a major advance in clini­cal immuno-suppression for transplantation was in the offing, but these hopes have now faded and nothing of the great mass of work has been translated into clinical practice." (J.W. Fabre, transplantation, 223-234, vol. 34,1982.)

 

ANIMALS IN CANCER RESEARCH: A MULTI - BILLION DOLLAR FRAUD.

 

An article in Fundamental and Applied Toxicology, November 1982, by D. Bross, Ph.D., former Director of the largest cancer research institute in the world, the Sloan-Kettering Institute, then Director of Biostatics, Roswell Memorial Institute, Buffalo, New York 14263. Excerpts:

 

"... From a scientific standpoint, what is pertinent is what are called "ani­mal model systems" in cancer research have been a total failure.

 

“For instance, not a single essential new drug for the treatment of human cancer was first picked up by an animal model system. All of the drugs in wide current clinical use were only put into animal model systems after finding clini­cal clues to their chemo therapeutic possibilities. A few relatively ineffective drugs were developed in animal systems. However, more effective drugs found in the clinic can be substituted for any of these. Thus; the tens of millions of ani­mals killed in the mass screening for new cancer drugs died in vain. The hun­dreds of millions spent by the National Cancer Institute on this futile effort were diverted from genuine cancer research that might have provided useful drugs.

 

“When NCI enthusiastically supported the mass screening using animals, there was plenty of good evidence that the mass screening program would fail. There was almost no factual evidence to suggest that it was going to succeed. The money was spent and the animals were killed for two main reasons. First, it was a highly profitable undertaking for certain medical schools and research institutes that were incapable of doing any genuine cancer research. Second, it was sustained by a superstitious belief in a grossly unscientific notion: Mice are miniature men...

 

“Since there is no way to defend the use of animal model systems in plain English or with scientific facts, they resort to double talk in technical jargons...         In sum, from the standpoint of current scientific theory of cancer, the whole mystique of animal model systems is hardly more than superstitious nonsense...

 

“The virtue of animal model systems to those in hot pursuit of the federal dollars is that they can be used to prove anything - no matter how foolish, or false, or dangerous this might be. There is such a wide variation in the results of animal model systems that there is always some system which will "prove" a point Fraudulent methods of argument never die and rarely fade away. They are too useful to promoters...

 

“The moral is that animal model systems not only kill animals, they also kill humans. There is no good factual evidence to show that the use of animals in cancer research has led to the prevention or cure of a single human cancer."

 

"Over a 25-year period, the United States National Cancer Institute screened 40,000 species of plants for anti-tumour activity and, as a result, sev­eral proved sufficiently safe and effective on the basis of animal tests to be in­cluded in human trials. Unfortunately all of these were either ineffective in treat­ing human cancer or too toxic to consider for general use. Thus, in 25 years of this extensive programme, not a single anti-tumour agent safe and effective enough for use by patients has yet emerged." (N.R. Farnsworth and J.M. Pezzuto, paper presented at the University of Panama workshop sponsored by the International Foundation for Science, 1982. Reproduced in The Cruel Deception by Dr Robert Sharpe, 1988.)

 

A. D. Dayan of Wellcome Research had admitted in Risk-Benefit Analysis in Drug Research. Ed. J. F. Cavalla, 1981 (MTP): (In A'- Def. Jan./Feb. 86):

 

"The weakness and intellectual poverty of a naive trust in animal tests may be shown in several ways; e.g. the humiliating large number of medicines dis­covered only by serendipitous observation in man (ranging from diuretics to antidepressants), or by astute analysis of deliberate or accidental (human) poi­soning, the notorious examples of valuable medicines which have seemingly 'unacceptable' toxicity in animals, e.g. hepatic necrosis in mice, the stimulant action of morphine in cats, and such instances of unpredicted toxicity in man as the production of pulmonary hypertension which appeared during animal tests. Because of the often misleading nature of animal experiments this could divert attention from other possible side-effects which may arise. In any case, human trials should involve careful clinical observation whatever animal or alternative tests have indicated. "

 

But just one year later, this same A. D. Dayan, as one of the two main lec­turers at the Hearings of the European Council at Strasbourg in December 1982, asserted just the opposite. Why? Because his truthful admission cited above was meant for his colleagues who knew the score, and he would have made himself look ridiculous if he had claimed otherwise. But he had no such qualms in ad­dressing the European Parliamentarians, who were no medical experts, but merely uninformed politicians sent to Strasbourg to receive instructions from the “experts".

 

As the Hearings were organized by the British Chemical Industry, this in­dustry had provided both the spurious "opposition" (see CIVIS Bulletin No.1, 1983) in the persons of Richard Ryder and Judith Hampson, and the two main "experts", who practically monopolized the Hearings - vivisector Prof. W.D.M. Paton, representing the most important sounding European Science Foundation stabled at Oxford University, and A. D. Dayan, heading the European Feder­ation of Pharmaceutical Industries Associations.

 

And in this capacity, speaking for the Pharmaceutics, it was Dayan's task to foist off the false notion of the necessity of animal experimentation on the Parliamentarians, in order to provide legal alibis for any past and future health damages caused by drugs developed through a false methodology. Said he: "Society has demanded that governments throughout the world should re­quire manufacturers of potentially hazardous products to test them first on ani­mals. Scientists and manufacturers have no alternative but to conform to the laws of the land in which they operate."

 

(The truth is that "society" had never made such a demand. It was the pseu­do-scientists, presenting themselves as self-styled "experts", as an insurance against product liability damage suits. A smart alibi.)

 

"Between 1962 and 1982, the numbers of people who contracted or died of cancer both increased. Cancer deaths rose 8.7 percent "The bottom line is that despite all the billions of dollars, and the promises and the claims of success, more people are dying of cancer than before..." - Dr. John C. Bailer III, bio statistician, Harvard University School of Pub­lic Health, Co-author of report on cancer in the New England Journal of Me­dicine, May 1986.

 

"Human disease occurs as a result of a combination of factors including genetics, growth and development, positive or negative lifestyle activities, and social and environmental influences: These factors are profoundly dissimilar in humans and animals. Experimental research on animals to find the causes and cures for human ailments is pure folly - at best an appalling waste and diver­sion of resources and at worst the cause of much human suffering and disease." - Les Stewart, D.D.S., Feb., 1987. Last Chance for Animals, Tarzana, Cali­fornia.

 

From an article tided ‘Why Cancer Research Has Failed’, in The Star, Johannesburg, April 10, 1981: ‘The use of animals, which tend to develop different cancers from those in people, could be the reason why cancer research has been so unsuccessful. This is the view of Dr. Robert Sharpe, guest speaker at the symposium on animal experimentation. Dr. Sharpe said alternative methods for testing in cancer research existed, but were not being widely used.

 

An authoritative study has shown an alarming increase in the incidence of cancer in Britain. This concentration on animal experimentation for research could be a reason why this research has been so unsuccessful. '

 

"Indeed, while conflicting animal tests have often delayed and hampered advances in the war on cancer, they have never produced a single substantial advance either in the prevention or treatment of human cancer." (Dr Irwin D. Bross, Director of Biostatics, Roswell Park Memorial Institute for Cancer Research, 1981.)

 

"Heart transplants 'dead end' "read a headline in the Lethbridge Herald on February 11, 1981. This article, from Calgary, ran:

 

"The hope of giving heart victims spare parts has run up against some harsh biological facts, says heart surgeon Dr. John Callaghan, chief of chest and heart surgery at Edmonton's University Hospital. The operation is impractical, he said, because it can easily cost $300,000 a patient and produce no more than one or two years of extra life. The huge cost is due to the need to continually monitor the patient for signs of rejection and treat him with preparations that keep the body from rejecting the donated organ.

 

“Mechanical hearts, Callaghan said, generate too much heat. This is true of even the most efficient pumps made today...People must accept the fact that they bear the biggest responsibility for preventing heart disease, he said. Changes in lifestyle would save more lives than all the scientists, surgeons and hospitals in the country".

 

‘A “Miracle Drug” That Backfired’ was the title of an International Her­ald Tribune article on January 14, 1981. It began by recalling that American physicians had started prescribing Clofibrate massively 13 years before, be­cause:

 

"The drug seemed to offer modem man the luxury of having his cake and eating it too - that is, of continuing to devour steak and butter without fear of heart attack just by taking a little capsule four times a day... Far from saving lives, it now appears Clofibrate actually increases the death rate among its users. A decade long study run by the World Health Organization (WHO) recently re­ported that men regularly taking the drug were 25 percent more likely to die of a broad range of disorders, including cancer, stroke, respiratory disease and, ironically, heart attack, than those who got a placebo capsule".

 

A. D. Dayan, who represented the European Federation of Pharmaceuti­cals industries at the European Parliament of Strasbourg in 1982 and also works for the Wellcome Research Laboratories, revealed: "Practocol was prescribed for over 4 years before doctors realised it caused corneal damage including blindness - a side-effect not predicted by animal ex­periments. " (C. T. Dollery in Risk-Benefit Analysis in Drug Research, Ed. J. F. Caval­la, 1981, MIP) (Mr. Dayan overlooked many tens of thousands of other drugs that had all been withdrawn from the market by the health authorities of various nations who had first approved them on the basis of animal "safety" tests on animals. Those "health authorities" included Mr. Dayan himself. CIVIS note.)

 

For instance, The Cancer Conspiracy, by Dr. Robert E. Netterberg and Robert T. Taylor, Pinnacle Books, New York, 1981, said: “The directed research practices and other activities of the National Cancer Institute and of the American Cancer Society have been scandalously counter­productive in the conquest of cancer, in spite of the billions of dollars expended. The cancer establishment is closed to new approaches and ideas, thus creating a self-perpetuating system with no clear objective even remotely in sight.”

 

Dr. J.D. Whittall, M.D., in his book People and Animals, London, 1981:

“If there had been no vivisection and reliance had been placed on clinical re­search and observation for finding out about the human body; and if there had been a real study of the human being as a person rather than as a machine, we would doubtless not now be threatened by science with such monstrous scien­tific goals as head transplants, deep freezing of human beings and indefinite pro­longation of life, radical alteration of the human mind by drugs and other means, remote control of humans by means of electrodes implanted in the brain, the creation of man-animal chimeras, etc...The world would not be saddened and threatened by the increasing number of scientists and technologists who are being conditioned by their laboratory employment to callous disregard of ani­mal suffering, leading inevitably to callous disregard of human suffering. There would not now be a growing number of people greatly distressed by the appall­ing cruelties which they know go on in laboratories. There would not now be a world-wide epidemic of torture where techniques are used similar to those that have been used on animals for many years.

 

“There would not now be a predominantly experimental medicine in the western world instead of a clinical medicine. There would be less disease and greater happiness. And perhaps this planet would not now be in greater danger of destruction due to cruel and greedy exploitation of its treasures by its human inhabitants than at any time since the world began.”

 

CIVIS adds: And there would probably not be AIDS, and the inevitable fol­lowing of "better" and more profitable maladies to come.

 

"There are no alternatives to animal experimentation, for one can only talk of alternatives if these replace something of the same worth; and there is noth­ing quite as useless, misleading and harmful as animal experimentation. In its stead, however, there is a "medical science", and the latter has absolutely noth­ing to do with animal experimentation." (Prof. Pietro Croce, M.D.)

 

"... the sad reflection must be that countless animals that have died in psy­chological experiments have died not only cruelly, but in vain." (Don Banister, Medical Research Council External Scientific Staff, High Royds Hospital, in Animals in Research, 1981)

 

"Drug induced illness has become a public health menace of major and alarming proportions, producing more deaths annually than are caused by breast cancer and ranking among the top ten causes of hospital admission." (Medicine in Society, Vol. 7,1981)

 

It has been nine years since SMON victims first undertook legal action in court against the State, Ciba-Geigy (Japan) Limited, Takeda Chemical Indus­tries Ltd., and Tanabe Seiyaku Co., Ltd. The number of plaintiffs since that law­suit on May 28, 1971 has now reached 5,500. The Tokyo District Court ruled on the SMON case on August 3, 1978. At that time, the Court noted:

 

"The Ciba-Geigy head office in Basel investigated reports that dogs given Entero-Vioform or Mexaform often developed epileptiform seizures and died, and the company circulated a warning among veterinarians not to use these drugs in veterinary treatment. However, although these drugs were produced for human use, the company not only took no measures to warn against the dan­gers of use by humans, but also, as previously mentioned, they continued to stress thereafter the safety of Entero-Vioform and Mexaform in Japan..."

 

They still continue selling Clioquinol in many countries without adequate warning...

 

Mrs. Heidi Anderson, a Swedish woman who participated in this press con­ference, had been diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis, but today it is clear that she is a victim of Clioquinol-induced SMON. So we presume that there are still many other SMON victims in Europe.

 

It is a criminal act that Ciba-Geigy and other multi-national pharmaceuti­cal companies continue to sell drugs in the Third World, which are prohibited in the developed countries (Emphasis supplied). (Geneva Press Conference on SMON, Proceedings, Copyright 1980 by the Organizing Committee of Geneva Press Conference on SMON, 5th Ft., Yamai­chi Bldg., Tokyo 160)

 

In the Human Life Review, New York (Winter issue 1980, Vol. VI, No. 1) Muggeridge published an in-depth analysis of the Christian Barnard transplant experiments and of the mental make-up of the man behind them.

 

Speaking of Washkansky, Barnard's first heart-transplant patient, Mugge­ridge tells us: "The heart worked, and the patient, in a manner of speaking, lived. At the end of 18 days, he thankfully expired. 'They're killing me', he managed to get out before he died. 'I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't do anything. They are at me all the time with pins and needles...All day and all night. It's driving me crazy".

 

Washkansky's successor, Dr. Philip Blaiberg, a dentist, managed to sur­vive for two years, though his private account of how he fared roughly coin­cided with his predecessor's. As Blaiberg' s own daughter, Jill, told it in an UPI dispatch from Cape Town, the 19 months her father lived with a transplanted heart were "hell".

 

"I don't know if it was the drugs or the transplant, but he was a different man," Miss Blaiberg, 22, said in an interview. "Physically, my father's life was hell after the transplant. He was suffering terribly all the time, but he did not want the world to know this..."

 

"Our entire medicine is today dominated, practically terrorised, by analyti­cal science, which is unfeeling and heartless. Its medical research has nothing to do with health. The stifling of symptoms is erroneously considered as the res­toration of health, but has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, it harms and impedes true healing. A child whose fever is hastily eliminated by administer­ing antibiotics is more ill than before, becomes more prone to diseases and chronically ill. Analytical science has formed doctors whose mental abilities do not extend beyond the equation 2+2=4. They are blind to the most elementary observations, which they despise as "subjective". This ignorant attitude is also responsible for the disgusting animal experiments, which are only a sign of spiri­tual deafness." (Prof. Dr. med. Helmut Mommsen, pediatrician in Frankfurt am Main, in CIVIS-SCHWEIZ Aktuell, Zurich, December 1980)

 

Prof. R. J. Belcher, at the Congress of Thoracic Surgery, held in Florence, Italy, Feb. 14-16,1980, stated that the thoracic surgeon must be introduced grad­ually into his speciality, but directly on humans, to the exclusion of any pre­vious exercises on animals, which are not only useless but can be dangerous for the preparation of the thoracic surgeon."

 

"Biomedical research does not need animals any more, but should use com­puters. It is pointless and even dangerous to continue following the traditional paths, for the difference between man and animal is so great that it mostly leads us into error. We are increasingly recognising that artificial organs can be ap­plied directly to humans without testing them first on animals. Artificial heart valves, for example, and also the pacemaker for the heart, were first tested on humans, and only later was it established that they also function if they are im­planted in animals." (Professor Luigi Sprovieri, one of the originators of extra corporeal circu­lation of the blood, a long -time collaborator of the famous French experimenter Charles Dubost, at a medical congress in Sorrento, Italy, reported by La Nazione Florence, October 5, 1980)

 

"Normally, animal experiments not only fail to contribute to the safety of medications, but they even have the opposite effect" (Prof. Dr. Kurt Fickentscher of the Pharmacological Institute of the University of Bonn, Germany, in Diagnosen, March 1980).

 

Dr. Carl E. Pochedly, identified by Science Digest in its January issue as an oncologist (cancer expert) specializing in infantile cancer, made the follow­ing confession: "The large number of chemotherapeutic drugs now available increase the oncologist's ability to cope with the child with cancer whose disease is becom­ing refractory to therapy. Always having a new drug to try increases the physi­cian 's composure in this situation. Having a large repertoire of drugs means fewer situations in which the frustration of nothing one can do predominates".

 

"If one damages a healthy animal (in order to simulate in him a human dis­ease), the animal will overcome the inflicted damage by its own powers, and re­cover naturally. But our animal researchers attribute the animal's recovery to the chemical substance they have administered - and then they are vastly sur­prised (presuming the matter interests them in the first place) - that this chemi­cal substance won't heal the human patient But the human disease was due to the fact that the immunological system has failed to act properly, and now the sick organism is being further damaged by the administered drugs. Evidently, all this is too difficult to understand for the experimental researchers, that's why they remain stuck in the stereotyped thinking and continue experimenting on animals". (Herbert Stiller, M.D., founder of the West-German league "MDs against Vivisection", 1979)

 

"TB Vaccine Fails Indian Trial" was the title of an article reported by the New Scientist, November 15, 1979, by K.S. Jayaraman, New Delhi, and it began thus: "The world's biggest trial (conducted in south India) to assess the value of BCG tuberculosis vaccine has made the startling revelation that the vaccine "does not give any protection against bacillary forms of tuberculosis". The study, said to be "most exhaustive and meticulous", was launched in 1968 by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) with assistance from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the V.S. Center for Disease Control in Atlan­ta, Georgia.

 

The incidence of new cases among the BCG vaccinated group was slight­ly (but statistically insignificant) higher than in the control group, a finding that led to the conclusion that BCG's protective effect "was zero".

 

Scientists' Comments, Archives of Toxicity, 1979, Vol. 43: "The prime difficulty is the misplaced confidence that many place on ani­mal testing. It is a pathetic illusion that simply doing enough animal testing will predict all human toxicity...Two year's studies on rats and twenty month feeding experiments in mice will, it has been calculated, lead to false results 50 percent of the time when con­ducting studies on agents to look at their cancer causing potential. Tests for the chronic toxicity of contraceptives on dogs yield totally differ­ent results than those found in rodents or monkeys".

 

One of the latest "heretics" was Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., a Chicago pediatrician who is being called an eccentric by the medical powers that be, in spite of his impeccable credentials: He's been practicing and teaching me­dicine for more than 25 years, has been the V.S. National Director of Project Head Start's medical consultation service, Chairman of the Medical Licens­ing Committee for the State of lllinois and the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in medicine and medical instruction. What has caused the ire of his superiors was a book he published in 1978, Confessions of a Medical Heretic (Cosmopolitan Books, Chicago):

 

"I confess that I believed in the irradiation of tonsils, lymph nodes and the thymus gland. I believed my professors when they said that the doses we were using were absolutely harmless. Years later the "absolutely harmless" radiation sown a decade or two before was reaping a harvest of thyroid tu­mors. I no longer believe in modem medicine. I believe that the greatest danger to your health is the doctor who practises modem medicine...

 

“Don't trust your doctor. Assume that if they prescribed a drug, it's dan­gerous. There is no safe drug...Modem Medicine has succeeded in teaching us to equate medical care with health. It is that equation which has the potential to destroy our bodies, our families, our communities, and our world...Hundreds of thousands of women are still lining up every year for breast X -rays, despite the well-publicised statistical evidence that the mammography itself can cause more breast cancer than it will detect…I believe that more than 90 percent of modem medicine could disappear from the face of the earth - doctors, hospitals, drugs and equipment - and the effect on our health would be immediate and beneficial.”

 

Richard F. Perkins, Tonawanda, optometrist, in Buffalo News, June 9, 1979: "Your editorial "Threat to Health Research" is a prime example of misin­formed and brainwashed thinking shoved on the public by the drug-medical clique. It has been proved by enlightened doctors that no actual progress in surgery or treatment of disease has been made by experiments on animals. In fact, progress has been held back by false results".

 

From an article in Time. April 23, 1979, titled "Surgery in the Asylum": "The allegations sounded like excerpts from the script of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Lawyer Patrick Murphy, who filed suit in Chicago last week, charged that between 25 and 100 patients in Illinois Manteno Mental Health Center underwent "unauthorized and secret" experimental surgery in the 1950' s and 60's at the University of Chicago Billings Hospital. The surgery removed their adrenal glands, which produce cortisone and other hormones. The super­vising surgeon: Dr. Charles B. Higgings, 77, winner of a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on hormonal treatment of cancer".

 

"Most cancers still on rise, expert tells U.S. pane." This was the headline in the International Herald Tribune of March 7, 1979 for a story that said in part: “Most types of cancer are still on the increase, some drastically, a National Cancer Institute official told a Senate Health subcommittee yesterday. Among men - eight out of 10 major types - including bladder, prostate, lung, and intes­tinal cancers - are increasing. Among women, eight of 13 types - including lung, uterine, breast, bladder and kidney cancers - are increasing.”

 

"As a cancer specialist engaged in clinical practice, I can't agree with the researchers who believe that results obtained with laboratory animals are ap­plicable to human beings." (Prof. Dr. Heinz Oeser, in one of the leading German weeklies, Quick, March 15, 1979)

 

"Animal experiments should be forbidden everywhere." (Dr. Julius Hackethal, the best known German surgeon and author of medical books, in an interview with Die Zeit, October 13, 1978)

 

"The animal and human organs show striking differences in their sensitiv­ity to chemical combinations. Allergic reactions, as typical human injuries re­sulting from medicaments, can hardly be foreseen by means of animal ex­perimentation...The question is a justified one as to what medical discoveries of any significance have ever come about through animal experiments." (Dr. Balz Widmer, Schweizerische Aerztezeitung, August 16,1978)

 

"Drug Firms Trick Patients Into Becoming Human Guinea Pigs", was the title of an article by Chris Pritchard in National Enquirer, August 1978, which said in part: “One of the cases involved a researcher who lied to a group of expectant mothers, revealed Dr. Michael Hensley, medical officer in the FDA' s division of scientific investigations. Dr. Hensley said the researcher got the women to try an analgesic without telling them that the drug could cause respiratory prob­lems in their newborn babies. In fact, Dr. Hensley said, the specific purpose of this study was 'to induce a mild respiratory depression in the infants', and then see whether another drug was effective in treating that... ‘”

 

Prof. Ferdinando de Leo, M.D., professor of Surgery, Special Surgical Pathology, and General Clinical Surgery and Therapy at the University of Na­ples, and head surgeon at the Pellegrini Hospital. Excerpts from a televised one ­hour interview in Rome, Channel 5, in 1978:

 

“I am thankful for your invitation to appear on your program, because I think that the word of a man who has practiced surgery for half a century, in every branch of general surgery, can help dispel some of the prejudices and miscon­ceptions that are prevalent today even in the minds of highly educated and cul­tured individuals in regards to vivisection. Having had first-hand experience of what goes on in the laboratories, and having in the company of Mr Ruesch pub­licly debated vivisectors, I can testify both to the utter uselessness of the hor­rors that are routine in those institutions, and to the infinitesimally low moral stature of the vivisectors...

 

“Reading their papers, the expert must really ask himself whether those gentlemen have any brains at all…Not only are they not contributing in any way to the preservation of human health, but they create the premises for future er­rors and horrors, which suggest madness, delirium, as when they propose head or brain transplants. At this point, I feel, not the surgeon but the psychiatrist should step in...

 

“Vivisectionists claim that vivisection helps the beginner to acquire manual dexterity. But how can anyone imagine that one can acquire such dexterity by operating on a cat, on a dog, on a rat, whose intestines are much smaller, whose various organs have an entirely different anatomical relationship to each other than in man, in no way comparable to the human. The same goes for the con­sistency of the innards, their colour, their resistance to the scalpel and so on. It's a joke.

 

“For centuries, the proper surgical training has consisted, first of all, in ob­serving the master surgeon in the operating room, and then starting on a road that is very long, tortuous, and exceedingly hard, but brings results: assisting the chief surgeon and collaborating with him, helping him while he operates. And then you see the human lungs, you see the human liver, the gall conduits, you learn their size and consistency, you see the human heart and how it func­tions...

 

“Now why is vivisection still being done? There are two reasons: First, mental laziness, inherited from those famous researchers of the last century, of the Claude Bernard school. And then there is something else: do our televiewers really believe that in a vivisection laboratory the rules of sepsis, of antisepsis, of analgesia, or any other rule is being respected? Nothing is being respected, because vivisection generates sadism, I've seen the sadists, I know them, I could name them, I won't name them here, I only hope they are listen­ing, I know they are deriving pleasure from vivisection, they are deriving great pleasure... "

 

From a conference held in Naples, Italy, June 1978, by Dr. Albert Sabin: "Laboratory cancers have nothing in common with natural human cancers. Tumorous cells are not unrelated to the organism that produced them. Human cancers are greatly different from the artificial tumors caused by the experimen­ters in the laboratories." (Cited by Prof. P. Croce in Vivisezione 0 Scienza, 2nd ed., p. 35)

 

Morarji Desai, who had imposed the first export ban on rhesus monkeys in spite of his country's dire need of foreign currency when he was Prime Min­ister of India, imparted a fine lesson in humanity, ethics and medicine to baf­fled U.S. news people at the National Press Club in New York on June 21, 1978.

 

Question: "Mister Prime Minister, considering your deep concern for human needs, can you explain your stand against exporting rhesus monkeys for research? "

 

Answer: "If we're real human beings, we ought not to inflict cruelty on any living being. That is the philosophy which India has always had. It is therefore that we do not want to subject any animals to cruelty and that is why we refuse to export them. Research is not the only answer to human welfare. Human wel­fare or human health can be achieved more by following natural laws: for this no medicines are required. I have not taken them for years and I don't now."

 

From the Bantam book The Ion Effect published March 1978: "Professor Felix Gad Sulman, M.D., University of Jerusalem, Israel...Sulman is a German-educated doctor and veterinarian who emigrated to Israel in 1932...'Scientific caution is necessary, but no one can really prove that the bad winds really are bad because you cannot duplicate nature in a laboratory,' he said. 'Similarly, you cannot always rely on laboratory tests to find out what works for people, because people are not like mice or rabbits. '"

 

Newsweek Magazine carried on March 27,1978 a long article titled "Animals in the Lab", signed Peter Gwynne with Sharon Begely, who took pains to find new defenses for an indefensible and unscientific practice. Excerpts: The use of laboratory animals is part of the natural order of things to most scientists. 'It goes back to the Judeo-Christian tradition, that God gave man dominion over animals”, says Dr Tburman Grafton of the National Society for Medical Research.

 

Medical students are taught that Pasteur solved the "problem" of rabies in the last century - thanks to experiments on dogs. They - and the public - are not told that neither he nor his successors have ever been able to identify the virus which is supposed to cause rabies; that in spite of - and probably due to ­the efforts of Pasteur, rabies has since then not decreased, but increased, throughout Europe. That it has still never been scientifically proved that Pas­teur's vaccine has saved even one single human life, whereas several deaths have, in fact, been scientifically shown to have resulted from Pasteur's vacci­nations, which for this reason were long since given up in favor or "new and better" vaccinations. Here is just one more example:

 

In 1977 the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva announced the discovery of another new vaccine which the WHO officials described as a "fan­tastic breakthrough".

 

On December 4, 1977 two German psychiatrists, Dr. Herbert Stiller and Dr. Margot Stiller, wrote a letter to the Hamburger Abendblatt saying: "Too much consideration has been paid up to now to Dr. Barnard's sensi­tive, applause-hungry soul. It is well-known that he is seized by asthma attacks whenever he gets criticized...We would suggest that one should be somewhat less concerned about Prof. Barnard' s tender sensibility, and a bit more about all his potential, unsuspecting patients."

 

"Conclusions derived from experimental systems under laboratory condi­tions and using animal tumours are almost totally irrelevant to our understanding of human" breast cancer." (Dr. Paul Strickland, World Medicine. September 21,1977)

 

On June 22, 1977 a news item from Cape Town reported that a 25-year-old Italian woman had died at Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital two and a half hours after Barnard had implanted a baboon's heart into her chest, hitching it to her own heart. Quote from Italy's leading daily, Corriere della Sera, commenting on the young woman's swift demise:

 

Barnard's latest operation is rather disconcerting, especially in view of the fact that the Italian patient was entrusted to his care for the implantation of a heart valve, which is a routine operation even in this poor Italy of ours..."Clinical nonsense", were the words with which France's authoritative Le Monde dismissed Barnard's wild experiment.

 

From "Our Ailing Health System", an article in The Progressive, January 1977:

 

“...The performance of America's health delivery system in the past year suggests there are good reasons to be apprehensive - and not just about the swine flu program. As that program got under way in September, a report prepared by a special panel of the V.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pointed out that while no medication exists that will cure or prevent the common cold, American pharmaceutical manufacturers manage to market some 35,000 differ­ent cold remedies, for which consumers shell out $350 million a year...Priorities are dictated by the drive for private profits. The major drug firms held up production of swine flu vaccine until they were guaranteed that the tax­payers would insure them against possible liability claims.”

 

To believe that tests on monkeys will bring us closer to medical truths is just one more delusion of the animal experimenting maniacs.

 

"We find only a very few comparative studies on this subject in the world­wide literature, and the result is rather discouraging. No help is given, either, by the reference to the general biological affinity of animal and man, or to the the­ory of evolution. It has been shown, for example, that the monkey is a much worse model than the dog with regard to many harmful side - effects on man, indeed that monkey experiments can actually lead to a negative intrapolation with regard to the human being; in other words, the substances that are harm­less to monkeys are precisely the ones that injure man. It would therefore be an illusion to believe that one can prevent future pharmaceutical catastrophes by means of animal experiments, however carefully these are carried out." (From Biologische Medizin, Grundlagen ihrer Wirksamkeit, by G. Huttner and H. Hensel and others, Verlag fur Medizin Dr. Ewald Fischer, Heidel­berg, 1977)

 

"There are, of course, vast differences between animals and humans. In ad­dition it is impossible to test psychological and neurological effects properly when dealing with animals. So testing a new drug on human beings must be an integral part of the testing procedure for any new drug... All humans are differ­ent and a drug which might be perfectly safe for a hundred people may, because of some genetic abnormality, kill the one hundred and first patient. There is also the possibility that the drug may cause delayed effects. None of these things can be found out immediately. Phenacetin, for example, was thought to be an ex­tremely safe drug and it was only after it had been in use for forty years that the dangers became apparent". (Dr. Vemon Coleman, Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, in The Medicine Men, Arrow 1977, p. 60)

 

No laboratory animal gets to live forty years or the time to help ascertain such delayed adverse effects.

 

"According to our present knowledge, the animal experiment can provide no more than a starting-point for forming hypotheses, the acceptance or rejec­tion of which can only be decided by the observation of the human being. These hypotheses have the character of irrational forecasts, which means that the un­certainty is not only of a statistical kind; rather, the animal experiment basically permits no calculations of probability to be made with regard to the human being.

 

“To stick to the example of the pharmaceutical drugs: there is so far no the­ory which would permit one to forecast systematically the therapeutical effec­tiveness or injurious side-effects of a drug on human beings on the basis of ani­mal experiments". (G. Kienle: Drug Safety and Society, Stuttgart, New York 1974, Schat­tauker, H. Hensel, Arzneimittelsicherheit und Tierversuch, Z. Rechtspolitik 8, pages 286-288, 1975)

 

"A new U.S. study challenges claims made for the last 35 years that women can prevent breast cancer by regularly taking estrogen pills...The report seems to indicate the drug actually may cause the disease...Physicians have been pres­cribing estrogen for an estimated 5 million to 6 million middle-aged women in the United States alone". (International Herald Tribune, August 17, 1976)

 

The number of doctors who are realizing at last the nature of antibiotics is evidently growing, but they do not know what to do, for they have been follow­ing the wrong path all too long and can now find neither the strength nor the courage to change course. According to the conservative Rome newspaper Il Tempo (July 31, 1976), Nobel Prize winner James Banielli has stated: "Anti­biotics have caused damage which far exceeds their positive effects". Among other things, he lists chronic disease conditions, specific infections, allergic re­actions, cell tissue poisoning and vitamin deficiency.

 

"Various species of animals react differently to the same drug. Not only do the variations in the metabolism of a drug make it difficult to extrapolate results of animal experiments to man but they create a serious obstacle to the develop­ment of new therapeutic drugs". (Dr. Barnard B. Brodie in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics)

 

“So why can't we cut out some of the required animal tests, which have been devised by theorists and purists without much regard for practical politics and the urgent need for therapeutic progress.” (Dr. Laubach at 8th Assembly of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, 1976)

 

"With only a few notable exceptions, such as some senior official of the American Medical Association, almost everyone agrees that modern medicine is as sick as the patient it treats." (Opening sentence of the book review of Medical Nemesis in Time Maga­zine, June 28, 1976)

 

"A plant should not be considered safe simply because a pet animal nibbles on it without ill effects; it could still be harmful to humans." (From an article in Time Magazine of March 1, 1976, quoting Dr. Guy Bar­man, veteran pediatrician and caretaker of a garden of popular but poisonous plants at the pediatrics clinic of the Kaiser-Permanente Medical Center in Fon­tana, Calif.)

 

Dr. Bernard Barber, chairman of Columbia's Department of Sociology, recently made a thorough survey of the ethical stand of American research doc­tors. His results were reported by Scientific American, and the Sunday News of Feb. 1, 1976.

 

"What little ethics training there is, is apparently not very effective", Bar­ber said. "Research is their business. Research is their mission and predominant interest, not applied ethics or active advocacy of patients' rights."

 

An essay in Newsweek (January 26, 1976) titled "What Causes Cancer?" reported what that magazine apparently believed to be big news: "Cancer may be a man-made disease." The article went on to say: "Already the World Health Organization estimates that up to 85 percent of all cancer cases are a direct re­sult of exposure to environmental factors of one kind or another - in many in­stances almost fatalistically self-inflicted by such habits as overeating, smok­ing, overdrinking and excessive exposure to sunlight and dangerous chemicals in the factories...Despite all the warnings, the majority of Americans continue to indulge themselves in the potentially harmful pleasures that their opulent so­ciety provides, and so far they are apparently content to take the perils along with the pleasures. 'Right now we've decided that this is the way we want to live and die', says Dr. David Baltimore, who won a 1975 Nobel Prize for basic cancer research."

 

James Schardein summarised the Thalidomide situation in Drugs as Ter­atogens (1976) as: "To date, in approximately 10 strains of rats, 15 strains of mice, 11 breeds of rabbits, two breeds of dogs, three strains of hamsters, eight species of pri­mates, and in such other varied species as cats, armadillos, guinea-pigs, swine and ferrets in which Thalidomide has been tested, teratogenic effects have been induced only occasionally."

 

"Practically all animal experiments are untenable on a statistical scientific basis, for they possess no scientific validity or reliability. They merely perform an alibi function for pharmaceutical companies, who hope to protect themselves thereby." (From Tierversuch und Tierexperimentator (Vivisection and Vivisector) by Herbert Stiller, M.D. and Margot Stiller, M.D., Hanover, 1976)

 

For 1976, the new French Minister for Health, Madame Simone Veil, de­cided to reduce her government's subsidies to scientists, with a special view to cancer research. There were loud outcries of despair and dismay from the science corner, but Simone Veil remained unflustered: "You can well mention the hundreds of millions of dollars given to the American National Cancer In­stitute, but they have brought no results. The deaths by cancer have not dim­inished - on the contrary. We are not willing to spend any more money on fu­tile research, but only on prevention: We campaign against alcohol, for early diagnoses, for improvement of housing. This is the kind of support the nation's health can expect from this Ministry."

 

According to Ivan IIlich's researched Medical Nemesis (pantheon, New York, 1976) at least 60,000 people died in 1974 in the U.S. because of medic­aments. That new drugs are particularly hazardous for no other reason than that they are preventively tested on animals, was inadvertently confirmed by Dr. William Bean of Iowa State University in his testimony to the Kefauver Com­mittee as far back as 1957:

 

"The richest earnings occur when a new variety of a drug is marketed be­fore competing drugs can be discovered. Under this system it is impracticable to do tests extending over a long period to establish the range of usefulness and potential dangers from toxicity... Thus after extensive laboratory tests on tox­icity and pharmacological properties, but sometimes with a minimum of clini­cal trial, a drug may be marketed."

 

Ivan IIlich, in Limits to Medicine, 1976: "The medical establishment has become the major threat to health."

 

Dr. Alice Heim, Fellow of the British Psychological Society: "How, I ask you, can the results from animals be applied to humans, if the animals are so different from us that experiments are performed on them which nobody but a Nazi would dream of inflicting upon another person?"

 

Hippocratic good sense and wisdom are irreconcilable with the technologi­cal arsenal on which today's official medical science feeds. When some cou­rageous and intelligent voice is heard, it is studiously ignored by the health auth­orities and the public at large, as when Prof. Roger Mucchielli of Paris Univer­sity wrote, "Official medicine keeps disregarding the signs heralding its own ruin, but it is already imbued by a current that finds again the profound Hippo­cratic inspiration." (Caracteriologie a l' Age Scientifique, ed. Griffon, Neuchatel, 1960)

 

In the supplement to the Neue juristische Wochenschrift (New Legal Weekly), in the Zeitschriftfur Rechtspolitik (issue 12, 1975), Prof. Dr. Herbert Hensel, Director of the Institute of Physiology at Marburg University, writes:

 

"Nobody denies that no effect on a human being is predictable with cer­tainty from an animal experiment. But if any scientifically-based prediction is to be at all possible, one must at least be able to indicate a definable probability. Only then is the prediction rational, and only then can a norm be applied to it by means of appropriate guidelines. If this is not the case, then the prediction is irrational. It is only based on personal experience, intuition and chance. It can­not be rationally applied. In the opinion of leading bio statisticians, it is not possible to transfer probability predictions from animals to humans, because neither the tested parameters nor the animal species nor the tested substances can have any validity as random samples in terms of the theory of probability.

 

“At present, therefore, (CIVIS: almost 150 years after Claude Bernard!) there exists no possibility at all of a scientifically-based prediction. In this respect, the situation is even less favorable than in a game of chance, for in the latter the chances of success are known...In our present state of knowledge, one cannot scientifically determine the probable effect, effectiveness or safety of medic­aments when administered to human beings by means of animal experiments... The example of the Thalidomide disaster, often cited as an argument for stric­ter testing and also mentioned several times in the justification for the Govern­ment's draft proposals to reform the law relating to medicines, illustrates this problem particularly clearly. Such a medicine-caused disaster could no more be prevented with adequate certainty through animal experimentation today than it could at that time."

 

On December 13,1975, under the title "The Medicine Bluff', an interview was published in the French weekly Paris-Match with Dr. Henri Pradal, a spe­cialist in pharmaceutical toxicology, concerning whom Paris-Match stated: "Henri Pradal spent twelve years in the camp of the industrial laboratories, before leaving it in order to say what he could no longer keep silent about."

 

Dr. Pradal forgot to explain that the fraudulent "safety tests" on animals were what lay behind the whole swindle. What he did say applies to all the in­dustrialised nations. Such as: "The medical profession is not informed, or, rather, it is instructed almost exclusively by the journals and brochures from the laboratories, and thus by ad­vertising.

 

“A certain messianic belief in progress has persuaded us that a eased use of them represent man's victory over disease, a proof of his power, a sign of pro­gress. Whence comes this blind trust, when intelligence should in fact lead us rather towards mistrust? It stems from an illusion which has been imposed on us by the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry, by a giant brewing house that makes billions out of it. The guilt for all this lies with the powers-that-be in the Public Health Department, the Government Ministry and the health insurance associations, whose apathy and negligence have resulted in the sanctioning of no less than 11,000 medicaments, although only a couple out of 100 are of pro­vable worth, as has been confirmed by the World Health Organisation.

 

“The doctors can't see further than their own noses. They have become con­vinced by the laboratory-financed medical literature that medicines have turned them into demi-gods, and that attacks on the pharmaceutical industry mean at­tacks on medicine. When the people finally discover the cause of the illnesses, the sale of medicaments will abruptly drop. But we must first get them to understand it"

 

"In spite of extensive research carried out over many years there are still no completely satisfactory methods for carcinogenicity testing of drugs and other chemicals. The extrapolation of the results of animal experiments to man pres­ents particular problems." (From the Report No. 563 of the World Health Organization Technical Re­port Series: Guidelines for Evaluation of Drugs for Use in Man, Geneva, 1975, p.29)

 

Owen B. Hunt of the American Anti-Vivisection Society in his speech at the Hotel Mediterranee in Geneva, Switzerland on July 26,1975:

 

"Lederle Laboratories found a non-violent vaccine in a duck embryo six years ago - vast improvement on the Pasteur treatment where painful and dan­gerous shots are administered to the patient for weeks. But the Pasteur violent method is still being used in the United States. Why? Easy government money. Salk and Sabin vaccine taken from monkeys - over a million monkeys used so far. Dr. Hayflick's human cell culture can produce enough vaccine to last the world forever, the vaccine cells reproduce themselves and can be permanently frozen until used, and every laboratory in the world has access to these cells. Yet monkeys are still used by the tens of thousands. Why? Easy government money. The D.S. Army and Air Force got $3.5 million in July 1973 to test gases -on 600 beagle puppies, who would eventually all die. But a quick method of identifying pollutant gases in the air has been devised by Bell Laboratories scientist LIoyd B. Kreuzer. Using a laser and a computer, his system is capable of identifying concentrations of gases as low as one part in 10 million, a ten times greater sensitivity than most present regulatory standards require. The Army and Air Force were fully aware of this and many similar, previous infor­mation when they requested the $3.5 million appropriation, insisting on using beagles for experiments that would last as long as two years."

 

On March 26, 1975, an article by the NEA-London Economist News Ser­vice, titled "Is Cancer Research Worth Cost?" appeared on the editorial page of The Galveston Daily News. It said in part:

 

"The sums that are being spent (on cancer research) are enormous - $600 million in the present financial year - and the fear of getting the disease univer­sal.. One million Americans have it. Recently Dr. James Watson, who is list­ened to because he helped to discover the molecular structure of life's genetic material, derided the national cancer program as a fraud. Dr. Watson said that the government's newly created cancer research centers around the country are institutions that are ' starting out lousy and will stay lousy'."

 

The WHO Technical Report Series No. 563 (1975): “Carcinogenicity - In spite of extensive research carried out over many years there are still no completely satisfactory methods for carcinogenicity testing of drugs and other chemicals. The methods in use, therefore, represent the best that are currently available, but there is a great need for further research to improve them. The exploration of the results of animal experiments to man presents particular problems.”

 

“...The maximum life-span has not changed at all. Old people become in­creasingly prone to illness. No matter how much medicine they take, no matter what care is given to them, life expectancy of 65 years has remained practically unchanged over the last century. Medicine cannot do much for illness associ­ated with aging, and even less about the process of aging itself. It cannot cure cardiovascular diseases, most cancers, arthritis, advanced cirrhosis, or the com­mon cold. It is true that some of the pain which the aged suffer can sometimes be lessened. Unfortunately though, most treatment of the old requiring profes­sional intervention not only tends to heighten their pain, but, if successful, also protracts it.”  (Ivan IIlich in Medical Nemesis, Calder & Boyars, London, 1975, p. 45)

 

"Modem medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve hu­mans' health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals." (Famed Yugoslav-born Ivan IIlich, sociologist, philosopher and theologi­an, author of Medical Nemesis, in an interview at the Italian-Swiss TV station of Lugano, in 1975)

 

In Die Weissen Magier, Bertelsmann Verlag, 1974, Kurt Bluechel gives the following figures for West Germany: "Only 25 years ago, among every 100,000 children born in the Federal Re­public there were 3 cases of malformation. Today, 5 children are malformed for only 1,000 births. Within a quarter of a century, therefore, the malformations have increased more than a hundredfold." (page 259)

 

Bluechel's book further informs us: "The animal organism frequently reacts quite differently from that of man...Many preparations which damage the fetus in animals cannot do any harm to human babies. Others, on the other hand - and therein lies the great danger ­act in precisely the opposite way. It can therefore not be ruled out that many medicines will turn out to be 'time bombs' for the next generation." (page 357)

 

And on page 257 Bluechel states: "The average German citizen today consumes about five times as many medicines as in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. Is he also five times healthier? Of course not. On average, the West German population is far more frequently ill today than it was in those days...Unexpectedly, an in­dustry which was created to heal diseases has become the starting point for new ailments."

 

The Journal of the American Medical Association finally revealed (October 20, 1975) that it had been established that man is 60 times more sensitive to Thalidomide than the mouse, 100 times more sensitive than the rat, 200 times more sensitive than the dog and 700 times more sensitive than the hamster - all of them favorite laboratory animals. Why all these tests, then? The eternal question elicits the eternal answer: because there's money in it. A mass of money.

 

Dr. Harry F. Harlow, head of the University of Wisconsin primate labor­atory, has at least one great quality: candor. In contrast to his Swiss colleagues, who all claim to be great animal lovers and to suffer more than the victims them­selves from the pains they are obliged to inflict on them. Dr. Harlow didn't con­ceal his real feelings when he declared to the Pittsburg Press (October 27, 1974): "The only thing I care about is whether the monkeys will turn out a property that I can publish. I don't have any love for them. Never have. I really don't like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How can you like monkeys?"

 

"Unfortunately, we shall learn the effect on our health of the thousands of chemical compounds at some unforeseeable future date only, for they act very slowly, in the course of time, and by accumulation." (Dr. John Higginson, head of the International Agency for Cancer Re­search, as reported by Milan's Corriere della Sera, October 22,1974)

 

A medical commission nominated by Chile's President Salvador Allende, himself, a medical man, shortly before his assassination in 1973, had come to the conclusion that in the whole world there are only about two-score medicines that have a demonstrable therapeutic effectiveness, and that the world's phar­macopeia could be reduced accordingly." (Nouvel Observateur, October 20, 1974)

 

"At the time when millions are starving in the world, and our economy is in great trouble, Congress is allocating billions of dollars annually in grants for "basic" no-goal research on living animals. Careers in torture are as financially rewarding as they are morally bankrupt. Reports in the medical journals recorded by the experimenters themselves are indisputable indictments of their gross in­humanity." (Barbara Schultz, a member of the Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz's advisory committee on the treatment of animals in New York State, writing in Newsday, July 12, 1974)

 

"Can we justify cruel experiments on animals on the grounds that psycho­logists can learn more about behaviour? I do not believe any of the suffering I have caused to laboratory animals - and, alas, there has been some - has helped humanity in the slightest." (Dr. Richard Ryder, senior clinical psychologist at Warneford Hospital, Oxford, Sunday Mirror, London, February 24, 1974)

 

Columnist Bob Cromie wrote in the Chicago Tribune of January 19, 1974, as a result of his extensive studies done on American experimentation habits: "My personal opinion is that many of the experiments being conducted are supervised by sadists, idiots, or those greedy for the federal grants involved... It seems obvious that some scientists no longer are content with the use of lower animals, in view of recent experiments conducted on inmates of prisons and other institutions, and the quicker this Nazi mentality is curbed the better."

 

The 1970 Nobel laureate for Medicine, UIf S. Euler of the Karolinska In­stitute in Stockholm, declared at the International Medical Conference in Man­chester in 1973 that: "If drugs were tested on people and less on animals they might be better and safer. Proper caution would have to be taken with human testing, but in the long run it could give increased security on the side- effects of drugs and increase the prospect of new and better drugs. " (Yorkshire Evening Press. York, September 20,1973)

 

From an item in the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin of August 26, 1973. It quoted Julie Mayo, a registered nurse of Brigantine, New Jersey: "I would rather a butcher slaughter my dog than have him fall into the hands of research scientists. Researchers are disguised as civilized people, but have the heart and hands of barbarians. No matter what the meaning, no matter how grisly the experiment, they will claim the end result is justification. Their lives revolve around pithed frogs, scalded rabbits, decerebrated cats and dismem­bered dogs. But don't just shrug and turn your back - you could be next!"

 

"It is almost a cliche among research workers that findings in animal studies cannot be extrapolated to man. Nevertheless, the temptation is ever present...Dutch investigator H.G.S. van Raalte blended recent laboratory findings with data from human epidemiology and experience from clinical medicine, to con­clude that any inference from animal experiments that dieldrin causes hepato­mas in man is unwarranted." (From an article in Medical World News. August 24, 1973 - the medical magazine published by McGraw-Hill, New York)

 

In the weekly magazine Welt am Sonntag (July 29, 1973), Dr. Werner Lehmpfuhl, general practitioner in Hanover, wrote as follows: "Every month, millions are in fact being damaged by treatment which is supposed to be helping them."

 

"Human experimentation has become a major industry in America." Mil­lions of baffled Americans heard this statement on the hour-long NBC Reports TV program that Robert Rogers wrote, produced and narrated on prime time of the evening of May 29, 1973.

 

As Professor J. Clausen of the Institute of Preventive Medicine at the University of Odense stated in March 1973: "Millions of people have been vaccinated with the polio vaccine, which contains the cancer-forming SV-40 virus originally found in monkeys. It is possible that it will take 20 years or still longer before the possible damaging effects of this virus come to light." CIVIS: They have in fact started to come to light with the insurgence of AIDS, due to the failure of the natural im­munity which every organism has if nobody interferes with it. Vaccinations are recognized as among the principal interferences.

 

On March 31, 1973, Rome's daily Messaggero quoted Prof. Arrigo Co­larizi, director of the Pediatric Clinic of the University of Rome and member of the International Society of Pediatry, as declaring: "The physical improvement that we notice is partly spontaneous and part­ly due to the improved social, economic and hygienic conditions. Drugs have nothing to do with it."

 

An editorial in The Economist. London, January 6, 1973, opened thus: "Thalidomide is not the first nor the last drug to have brought heartbreak where it was meant to bring help. There have been quite a number of other tragedies since Thalidomide went wrong 13 years ago."

 

According to the Deutsche Aezteblatt (No. 45,1973), U. Fiebig, member of the German Federal Parliament, stated: "I have received only evasive answers to my question as to how efficient and reliable animal experiments really are."

 

Alarming is the statement by pharmacologist Holtz: "A comparative test of Aspirin and Thalidomide on rats would give the go­ ahead signal for the use of Thalidomide on humans, but not of Aspirin, now in use for more than half a century. "

 

In Mental Hygiene. March 1973, wrote Peter Roger Breggin, M.D.: "Lobotomy and psychosurgery are upon us again! In Philadelphia a black man dies of an overdose of heroin, and a reporter notices peculiar scars on his head. A portion of his brain has been burned out in an experimental attempt to cure his addiction. The neurosurgeon is located by the reporter and admits that his monkey experiments were inconclusive before trying his operation on human addicts."

 

After DES had turned out to be the first drug that the medical confraternity itself had recognized as being responsible for creating a new type of cancer in human beings, animal tests with DES were started all over again, and again with no results: the test animals did not develop cancer.

 

Dr. Robert W. Miller of the National Cancer Institute of Bethesda, Md., who in 1973 wrote the official warning hastily published by Geneva's WHO, revealed in that paper: "Experimental animal studies: There was no correlation between the types of tumors obtained in experimental models (i.e. laboratory animals - H.R.) and types of childhood cancer."

 

In Science Digest (Nov. 1972), a scientist, W. H. Wheeler, has written: "Most of the work on brain research has been done on cats and monkeys. It is risky to extrapolate such data to the human brain... The electrodes may be sim­ply picking up signals in transit to some other part of the brain -like tapping a telephone line. Listening to a conversation doesn't necessarily indicate where the speakers are. The same holds true for electrodes implanted to control beha­viour... The control of behaviour by means of electrodes does not provide any certain data on how the brain's functional areas are organized. The very exist­ence of functional areas as such has been widely debated and solid evidence is still elusive."

 

Dr. Robert L. Brent of Jefferson Medical College made a by now monot­onous point when he wrote in Prevention (July 1972): "Some drugs that are ter­atogenic in the human in therapeutic doses are innocuous to many pregnant ani­mals," while "some drugs that are innocuous to a pregnant woman are tera­togenic to some animal species." (It's the case of aspirin and insulin, harmless to human fetuses, causing birth defects in mice.)

 

In the Sixties a mysterious epidemic killed so many thousands of asthma sufferers in various countries that Dr. Paul D. Stolley of Johns Hopkins Hos­pital - who in July 1972 finally found the killer in Isoproterenol, packaged in England as an aerosol - spoke of the "worst therapeutic drug disaster on record."

 

Prof. Dr. Med. Hardegg, Animal Experimenter, at the Conference on La­boratory Animals, in Hanover, 1972: "Animal tests conducted to establish the effect of medicaments for humans are nonsense."

 

The Lancet made one more monotonous admission (Apr. 22, 1972): "We know from drug toxicity studies that animal tests are very imperfect indicators of human toxicity; only clinical experience and careful control of the introduction of new drugs can tell us about their real dangers."

 

"No animal tumor is closely related to a cancer in human beings." (The Lancet, April 15, 1972)

 

The March 20, 1972 issue of Newsweek Magazine reported that a new vac­cine developed without resorting to animals by Dr. Leonard L. Hayflick, pro­fessor of medical microbiology at Stanford University, had satisfied the Divi­sion of Biologies Standards, a United States agency: "Dr. Hayflick set out to develop a strain of human cells using cells taken from the lungs of a fetus aborted in Sweden. This strain, known as WI-38, pro­duced a virtually limitless number of completely uniform cultures that could be stored in a frozen state for periods of years and thawed out when needed to pro­vide the growth medium for vaccines anywhere in the world. By contrast, cul­turing vaccine with monkey kidney cells requires a fresh set of cells for each new batch of vaccines."

 

In a Medical News article of March 10, 1972, Dr. John A. Oakes, profes­sor of medicine and pharmacology, at Vanderbilt University, stated: "We don't know how to extrapolate from results of animal tests to humans."

 

In his studies of the effects of protective vaccination against smallpox, the German senior medical officer Dr. G. Buchwald recently confirmed that it can lead to encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), and he thereby contributed to the fact that obligatory vaccination was abolished in Germany. In several writ­ings he expressed his suspicion that multiple sclerosis could also be an after-ef­fect of smallpox vaccination. (Der deutsche Arzt, 1971, Volume 19, page 100; id., 1972, Volume 3, page 58, and Medizinische Welt, 1972, page 758.)

 

In reference to the Thalidomide tragedy, 1968:

 

"The first expert to give testimony was Professor Otto Rudolf Klimmer from the Institute of Pharmacology of the University of Bonn. When questioned by Dr. Weber (the chairman of the court), Klimmer had to admit that it was not possible to produce polyneuritis in animal experiments, caused by such agents as barbiturates and phenuron, even though their nerve-damaging properties in man were a medically established, undisputed fact. If animal experiments fail to reveal polyneuritis for compounds which are known by medical science to produce polyneuritis in man, then clearly the experiments are not suited at all to a study of such toxic reactions. A negative finding in such an experiment can be used even less as proof that such and such a compound is not apt to cause neurological damage in man. As Professor Schmert of Munich had pointed out to Chemie Gruenenthal in the late spring of 1961, it is extremely difficult to simulate this disease in animal experiments because of the subjective nature of the symptoms." (Thalidomide and the Power of the Drug Companies, a Penguin Special, 1972, p. 218-219, by Henning Sjoestroem, a Swedish lawyer, and Robert Nil­son, a research chemist.)

 

Synthetic vitamins have caused serious damage to health, and are still doing so today, because the preceding "safety tests" on animals are unable to give proper warning. In fact, even the highly-praised vitamins belong to the "miracle cures" which have worked wonders only for the manufacturers. Prof. Guido Fanconi of the University of Zurich was in practice as a pediatrician and en­joyed the reputation of medical authority when he published his historical book Der Wandel der Medizin (Verlag Huber, Berlin 1970). In that work he denoun­ces synthesised Vitamin K, as well as sulphonamides, as having caused "acute haemolitic anemia" (which can be a forerunner to laukaemia), and holds over­doses of Vitamin D responsible for numerous disturbances of health, including kidney damage, hypertension and heart complaints.

 

He expresses the suspicion that idiopathic hypercalcaemia which impedes body growth in children, is attributable to an excessive supply of Vitamin D. It has been shown, incidentally, that hypercalcaemia - a metabolic anomaly with an increased level of calcium in the body - is often linked with heart defects and serious damage to the pulmonary arteries.

 

"In the conduct of the largest research laboratory in America for many years, I have not used an animal. It is my earnest belief that the use of animals has been...utterly barren of results in progressive medicine." E. M. Perdue, M.D., Director of 10hnson's Pathological Laboratory in Cancer Research (AAVS, Philadelphia, PA).

 

Even Prof. Widukind Lenz, the German scientist who through posthu­mous tests with primates had been able to obtain some malformed offspring, testified at the Thalidomide trial in West Germany in 1970 that "there is no ani­mal test capable of indicating beforehand that human beings, subjected to simi­lar experimental conditions, will react in identical or similar fashion".

 

The London Times reported on October 15, 1970, that pregnant rats, forced to inhale marijuana smoke at a New York laboratory, produced malformed off­spring, but Dr. William Geber, who conducted the experiments, made the point that "as a rat is not a human being, no positive conclusions could be drawn".

 

"Much of the experimental animal work on atheroma has held back our pro­gress rather than advanced it." (Medical News Tribune, London, September 18,1970)

 

According to the Washington Science News-Letter of August 22, 1970, three French scientists had made pregnancy tests forcing a great number of ani­mals to take the hallucinogenic drug LSD. The fetuses and the newborns showed no evidence that the drug produced deformities, but the scientists cautioned that "it is impossible to conclude from these experimental data that LSD may not be teratogenic (producing malformation) in man."

 

In respect to the safety of human virus vaccines, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the risk for cancerogenity of human virus vaccines is greater for those vaccines produced in animal cells than for those vaccines produced in human cells: the potential cancerogenity for any vaccine is diminished if the vaccine is produced in the cells of the animal species to which the vaccine is to be administered." (Laboratory Practice, January 1970, pp. 58-62)

 

As Dr. M.H. Pappworth, the eminent London physician and internation­ally known teacher of clinical medicine, wrote in Human Guinea Pigs (pelican Books, 1969): “No doctor, however experienced, can balance precisely the expected peri­od of survival without transplant against the period of the apparent acceptance of the transplant before it is finally rejected.”

 

As Dr. Pappworth further stated in Human Guinea Pigs: “I am far from convinced that this state of affairs is any more tolerable to the patient than the disease for which the transplant was done... The public should know that transplant surgery never cures the original disease and never makes the recipient a healthy person...All transplant surgery is a confession of failure, of unsuccessful early diagnosis and treatment.”

 

“Science, which gave promise of delivering mankind from superstitions, has itself turned into the most pretentious and the bloodiest superstition in history. This may well prove to be the tragedy of modern civilisation...Science, once the most brilliant form of common sense, was reborn as a god. Populace (laity) and scientists (priests) were alike told from on high that Science says this and Science requires that. Science was, however, a mechanical god...Other gods have required their priests to castrate themselves. Only science requires them to pluck out their human sympathies.” (Brigid Brophy in The Listener, 1969)

 

On July 10, 1969, the New York Daily News reported: "Col. John (Shorty) Powers, who resigned five years ago from NASA, today criticized the abortive flight of Bonny, the space monkey, as 'a complete and total waste of $92 million of my money'. Powers, who kept the public informed about previous space efforts as the 'voice' of mission control, said, 'You can learn more from a computer than a monkey. We finished with monkeys five years ago.'''

 

Henry E. Sigerist, the Swiss who held the chair of history of medicine at the Universities of Leipzig and Johns Hopkins, and whom many consider the outstanding historian of our time, describes Hippocrates' medical philosophy thus: "Nature heals. The doctor's task consists in strengthening the natural heal­ing powers, to direct them, and especially not to interfere with them. The dietetic treatment is the best. Through food the power regenerates itself. Hippocratic dietetics reached a level that to our day merit our great admiration." (Grosse Aerzte, 6th ed., Lehmann, Munich, 1969, p. 28)

 

In the German medical journal Muenchener Medizinische Wochenschrift (No. 34, 1969), Dr. W. Chr. Mueller of the 1st University Hospital for Women, Munich, reported after one of the most comprehensive studies in this area of medicine that "61 percent of all deformities in new-born infants, and 88 percent of all stillbirths, must be attributed to the effects of medicaments."

 

Protective vaccination against smallpox can also trigger off cancer in the form of malignant tumours, as was shown in the case of 38 people whose tu­mors resulted from the vaccination scar. This was the report on the fast page of the journal Medical News in 1969. Dr. Willard L. Marmelzat of the Univer­sity of Southern California reported at the second International Congress of Tropical Dermatology that none of these patients had ever been in contact with carcinogenous (cancer-forming) chemicals, and not one had ever received any injury or mechanical traumas at the site of the vaccination scar.

 

Rene Dubos, Pulitzer Prize-winner and professor of microbiology at the Rockefeller Institute of New York, wrote in Man, Medicine and Environ­ment (Praeger, New York, 1968, p. 107): "Experimentation on man is usually an indispensable step in the discovery of new therapeutic procedures or drugs...The first surgeons who operated on the lungs, the heart, the brain were by necessity experimenting on man, since knowledge deriving from animal experimentation is never entirely applicable to the human species."

 

"We are sorcerer's apprentices, especially in the scientific area. We boast of discoveries that are poisoning us. I believe that the future generation will need much time and courage in order to cope with the catastrophic consequence of our research." (Prof. Pierre Lepine, Director of the Bacteriological Department at the Pasteur Institute, Member of the Academy of Science and the National Academy of Medicine, in an interview with the French daily Alsace. March 17, 1967)

 

"In part because of possible major differences in responses to drugs in ani­mals and man, the knowledge gained from studies in animals is often not perti­nent to human beings, will almost certainly be inadequate, and may even be misleading. " (Arnold D. Welch, Department of Pharmacology, Yale University School of Medicine, in Drug Responses in Man, 1967)

 

Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics by T. Koppanyi and M.A. Avery, Vol. 7, 1966, pp. 250-270, confirming a report that has appeared in Slaughter of the Innocent:

 

“...Fleming was worried that penicillin (discovered by chance, without ani­mal experimentation - H. R) might be de-activated by blood, and his worst fears seemed to be confirmed when he injected a sample into rabbits. The result so discouraged Fleming that he progressively lost interest and restricted penicil­lin's use to surface infections.

 

“Later, Oxford scientists Florey and Chain resurrected penicillin and found that it cured infected mice. But the program failed to tell us that the choice of species was another piece of 'good fortune'. If the usual guinea pigs had been employed for the test (all guinea pigs were already dead in Florey's and Chain's laboratory when the tests began - H.R.), penicillin might have been discarded for ever, since it is fatal to this common laboratory species even in tiny amounts (and to hamsters too, incidentally).

 

“The good luck didn't end here, though. In order to save a dangerously ill patient, Fleming wished to inject penicillin into the spine, but the results of such administration were unknown. Florey tried the experiment with a cat but there wasn't time to wait for the results if Fleming's patient was to have a chance. Fleming's patient received his injection, and improved, but Florey's cat died. The lessons still haven't been learned.”

 

Albert Schweitzer is better known as a philanthropist than animal lover. But the last of his famous "messages to the world" from his bush hospital in Lambarane, delivered a few weeks before his death in 1965, concerned vivisec­tion. Addressed both in the French and German language to the World Congress for Abolition, which was being held in Zurich, it was also read on the Swiss TV station and said: "We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose sufferings on them. We have come too late to this real­ization. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it"

 

Dr. Charles Henry Kempe, University of Colorado. After a 20-year study, Dr. Kempe recommends abolishing smallpox vaccination. Since 1948 there have been no deaths from smallpox in the United States. In the same period more than 300 persons have died from smallpox vaccinations, including vac­cine-induced encephalitis. (The Evening Bulletin, Philadelphia, May 7,1965)

 

British Medical Journal, February 13, 1965, p. 399: "The effects of expo­sure (of sulphur dioxide) under experimental conditions may not be comparable to those of naturally occurring air pollution, since sulphur dioxide may perhaps act synergistically with other pollutants such as respirable particles. An effect of this sort has been demonstrated in the guinea-pig. Experiments showed that the increase in the pulmonary flow resistance after inhalation of sulphur diox­ide can be enhanced by the addition of an inert aerosol of sodium chloride. Yet careful experiments have failed to confirm that this occurs in man."

 

The Lancet, February 6, 1965, pp. 308-309 ("Side effect of Drugs"): "...Other effects, however, are unsuspected - for several reasons. Firstly, there may be a species difference in toxicity; for example, the dog cannot acetylate sulphonamide drugs, and so it is less likely than man to suffer from renal or ureteric pre­cipitation of the less soluble acetylated metabolites of sulphonamides, on the other hand, the dog is very susceptible to quinine and becomes blind at plasma concentration readily tolerated by man."

 

Dr. Fernand Attlan: "I consider the results of these abominable experiments are illusory. In addition the horrors which accompany these useless practices will always be incompatible with the sense of dignity and moral greatness of man. " Faculty of Medicine of Paris, Villers-Saint-Paul, Oise, France. (1964 )

 

Dr. Maurice R. Hilleman, director of virus and biology research at the American Merck Institute, stated in the American Review of Respiratory Dis­eases (90:683, 1964): “Another advantage of diploid cells is their freedom from contamination by undesirable viruses, naturally present in many animal cul­tures. In fact, had such cells been available in the earlier period, it is problemati­cal whether monkey-kidney cells would have been chosen for preparing polio vaccines and more recently developed vaccines.”

 

Dr. Hilleman also stated that Diploid Cells permit the growth of viruses that cannot now be grown in animal cells, adding: “This could pave the way for development of killed and live virus vaccines, especially the rhinoviruses, which are a principal cause of the common cold and for which there is no specific control.”

 

Dr. Ross Nigrelli, who directed the Laboratory of Marine Biochemistry and Ecology in New York, has been widely quoted as saying: "In testing drugs we use sea-urchin eggs. We could have told them about Thalidomide quickly had we tested it on sea-urchin eggs." (Margaret B. Kreig, in her book Green Medicine, 1964 Rand McNally, Chicago)

 

Dr. Henry Woglom (Leading cancer researcher, 1964): “It must first be realized that the output of work on cancer research is enor­mous. It may be true that from this mountain of labor nothing so far has emerged but a cancer bearing mouse.”

 

"The idea, as I understand it, is that fundamental truths are revealed in la­boratory experimentation on lower animals and are then applied to the problems of the sick patient Having been myself trained as a physiologist, I feel in a way competent to assess such a claim. It is plain nonsense." (Sir George Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, British Medical Journal, December 26, 1964, pp. 1615-1619)

 

"Thorough wound cleansing is the only treatment for a wound, and when it is carried out correctly antibiotics are not necessary unless either the circum­stances under which the wound was obtained, or the general condition of the patient, make the development of infection either likely or undesirable." (H.K. Bourns, B.A., M.B., B.ch:, B.A.O., F.R.C.S., in the British Medi­cal Journal, August 29, 1964)

 

Professor E.P. Lossouarn: “Animal experimentation is an error on the scientific plane, a bad action on the moral. This martyrization of living creatures, which has not even the excuse of utility, is a wrong action by which man turns against humanity.” (Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, Nantes, France, May 4,1964)

 

Dr. Pierre Jeandidier, Ex chief of Dennatological Clinic of the Faculty (Diseases of the skin, scalp and legs), France, April 1964: "There are no arguments or considerations that could justify all the pain in­flicted on all those unfortunate defenceless animals, and it is not too much to say that such practices are entirely inhuman, if reference to man has as yet any weight on the moral plane. The State owes it to itself to condemn them unequi­vocally and without restrictions."

 

Dr. Eugene Lob, Faculty of Paris, General Medicine & Diseases of the Eyes, Wasigny, France, April 16, 1964: "I have the honor to enclose herewith a certificate against vivisection, cruel and useless."

 

Dr. Frederic Benoit, Surgeon, Maternity Hospital, Wassy, France, April 1, 1964: “It is nonsense to believe that vivisectional experiments are necessary or use­ful for scientific progress - circumstances of vivisection are too arbitrary to have real interest, and the reaction of experimental animals cannot be identical to that of man.”

 

Dr. Raymond Lefevre, professor of the School of Medicine, Director of the Regional anti-Cancer Center, Reims, France, March 27,1964: "The utility of vivisection does not seem to me to be fully determined. Such products tried out on animals produce results ineffective in man."

 

"Another basic problem which we share as a result of the regulations and the things that prompted them is an unscientific preoccupation with animal studies. Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons. The predictive value of such studies for man is often meaningless - which means our research may be meaningless." (Dr. James G. Gallagher, Director of Medical Research, Lederle Labora­tories, Journal of American Medical Association, March 14, 1964)

 

Dr. B. Ossipovski, Formerly Interne of the Hospital of Paris, Chief of Clini­cal Medicine of the Faculty, Chief of the Laboratory of the Saint Louis Hospi­tal, Mac-Mahon, France, March 16,1964: "My accord, my assistance are yours concerning the terrible practice of ma­niacs and neo scientists. Men believe they are able to acquire physiological re­sults by torturing animals and formulating theoretical deductions which, in most cases, have revealed themselves absolutely erroneous."

 

Dr. A. Maignien-Courard, Ophthalmologist (Surgery of the Eyes), Nan­tes, France, February 6, 1964: "I am totally opposed to vivisection and experiments on animals, and have always recognized its cruelty and uselessness."

 

Dr. Gunther Kraus of Roswell Park Memorial Laboratories at Buffalo, New York, wrote in the American Veterinary Medical Association Journal (Vol. 143, No. 9, November 1, 1963): "In our laboratory devocalizing dogs is necessary because of human pa­tients in neighboring wards. We have used electrocautery for devocalization of more than 3000 dogs."

 

New Scientist, January 17, 1963:

 

"Recently a number of drugs have been shown to be teratogenic in animals...The latest drug to be incriminated in animal tests are the salicylates and as­pirin, which Professor P.C. Fraser of McGill University has observed are tera­togenic for mice.

 

“A drug can be teratogenic in one species and not in another. We must not jump to the conclusion that aspirin is teratogenic for the human. Some four thou­sand million tablets of aspirin, or preparations containing it, are consumed in Britain every year. If it were teratogenic for man the congenital abnormality rate would have risen considerably in the last few years in consequence and it has not... "

 

The Lancet, January 26, 1963, page 222 ("Animal tests for teratogenicity: "in fact, the pitfall is that, having found no teratogenic effect in a 'sufficient number of different species of laboratory animals', one can still not be sure of the effects on the human foetus, which is always the ultimate purpose of inves­tigation. "

 

British Medical Journal, January 26, 1963 ("Powerful analgesics"): "…such differences are very difficult to measure accurately, and many claims are put forward on wholly inadequate grounds. Animal species differ from one another in their sensitivity to drugs, and estimates made in experimental ani­mals are not reliably applicable to man. "

 

In Drugs, Doctors and Disease, historian Brian Inglis wrote that "the figures for animal experiments have continued to rise every year, not because ever bet­ter and safer drugs have been coming on the market, but simply because more drugs have been coming on the market. Paradoxically, the increase in tests on animals have reflected the growing recognition of how inadequate the tests have been in the past. 'It is commonplace in biological research,' the 1963 Report of the British Pharmaceutical Industry's Expert Committee on Drug Toxicity has admitted, 'that information from one animal species cannot be taken as valid for any other.' ...It is no longer, then, a matter of balancing the cruelty of suf­fering animals against the gain to humanity spared from suffering, because that is not the choice. Animals die to enable hundreds of new drugs to be marketed annually; but the gain is to industry rather than mankind. "

 

Dr. Louis J. Vorhaus, New York City Physician (The Saturday Evening Post, May 11, 1963): “Sick people need care, not research. Too many medical researchers seem to be less interested in human welfare or the quest for truth than in persona ag­grandizement.”

 

"The abolition of vivisection would not only have the effect of enabling re­search workers to avoid the pitfalls and fallacies associated with animal ex­perimentation and the dangers to human health and life upon the application of these results to mankind, but would, in fact, promote in the highest degree the true progress of medical science." (M. Beddow Baily, Member of Royal College of Surgeons, Licentiate Royal College of Physicians, in the Preface to his book The Futility of Experi­ments on Animals, London, 1962)

 

The amount of damage that has been caused by antibiotics and by the in­ability of modem science to understand health, biology and nature, can no longer be denied. Here is a summary of a series of articles which Dr. Raiga published between 1962 and 1963 in the French Bulletin de I'Association Genrale des Medecins de France:

 

"In the past ten years the number of penicillin-resistant strains of staphylo­coccus has constantly increased, especially in the hospitals, where we can see with our own eyes the extent to which serious staphylococcus infections are arising and multiplying during the treatment of quite different diseases. That oc­curs above all in maternity hospitals, where epidemics of such infections have reached disastrous dimensions. Today's therapies are tragically to blame for the fact that staphylococcus infections are constantly spreading; they were - at least at the beginning - chosen for the purpose of fighting infections...These cases take a still more dramatic turn when they are caused by antibiotics which are used by the doctor in order to treat harmless illnesses which would also be cured without any treatment. In such cases the medicine is without question the cause of death by therapy."

 

A French physician, Prof. Maurice Delort, did some plain talking at the inaugural session of the Academy de Bourges (December 16,1962): "Today's medicine is at the end of its road. It can no longer be transformed, modified, readjusted. That's been tried too often. Today's medicine must die in order to be reborn. We must prepare its complete renovation."

 

Excerpts from the testimony of Fred Myers, who represented the Humane Society of the United States in the Congressional hearings of 1962:

 

"I indict Harvard University, Northwestern University, Chicago University, Creighton Univesity, the University of Pittsburgh, the National Institutes of Health, Western Reserve University - every one of which I know to have been guilty of neglect and mistreatment of animals. I can and will supply details to any extent that this Committee desires... At Johns Hopkins University I have seen closely caged dogs suffering from advanced bleeding mange, without treat­ment... At Tulane University we found cats confined in cages suspended from the ceiling, with the wire mesh of the cage floor so widely spaced that they could not walk, stand, or lie down in a normal manner. At New York University I walked for hours, on a weekend, through several floors of caged dogs, cats, mon­keys, rats, rabbits sheep and other animals, scores of them wearing bandages of major surgery, and many of them obviously desperately ill, without ever en­countering any doctor, veterinarian or caretaker... In the Children's Hospital in Cincinnati one of our investigators found small rhesus monkeys chained by their necks inside steel cages so small that the animals could barely move... I have myself seen men with no academic degrees and with no pretense at professional qualifications performing the work of a surgeon in a laboratory of the National Institutes of Health. I have seen a fully conscious dog, with an open incision into the thoracic and abdominal cavity, lying on the concrete floor of a corridor on that same laboratory, writhing desperately but unable to rise, while men and women passed without so much as a sideways glance..."

 

A long array of research authorities confirmed in court, explicitly or by im­plication, what Dr. Raymond Green had written in The Lancet (September 1, 1962): "We must face the fact that the most careful tests of a new drug's effect on animals may tell us little of its effects on humans. There can be no doubt that Thalidomide was subjected to the most careful scrutiny. I myself took part in a trial to investigate its possible goitrogenic effect on man, even such improbable hazards having been considered by its British distributor...There are no drugs which do good which do not sometimes do harm. Animal experiments cannot obviate the risk and may even prevent the use of excellent substances. We must accept some risk or - perhaps the wiser course - do without new drugs."

 

British Medical Journal, August 18, 1962, page 462: "…Even after thorough testing for toxic effects in the laboratory a drug harmless to animals may yet be found to be injurious to the human being..."

 

In connection with the assertion that it is not possible to argue with any cer­tainty from animals to humans, consider the following testimonies from experts:

 

D.V. Parke, Department of Biochemistry, St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, University of London, New Scientist. August 9,1962, page 313: "... the empirical testing of the toxicity of drugs in a few animal species is, by itself, of doubtful value in assessing the safety of a drug, since the results ob­tained with animals can seldom be translated to apply to human patients. "

 

Bernard B. Brodie, Ph. D., National Heart Institute, Bethesda, Md. (Clini­cal Pharmacology & Therapeutics. Vol. 3, No. 3, May/June 1962): “Numerous difficulties are met in applying data obtained from animals to man. One of the most important of these is the factor of species difference in the metabolism of drugs. Thalidomide had been tested on many thousands of animals before being thrown on the market. In its February 23, 1962 issue, when the first warning signs of the tragedy were appearing on the world horizon, Time Magazine re­ported that Thalidomide had been marketed "after three years of animal tests."

 

"In his lectures around the world, Dr. Harry Lillie, of England, distin­guished both as Physician and Surgeon, makes the point that the trade of poi­soning living things and the manufacture of disease is big business today. 'I can say emphatically we are not going to find the cure for the diseases of our wrong ­living by the imposition of suffering on other living things. I know of no long term benefit, and I stress the words long term, that has come to the human race in the past by any research that has involved such suffering to other creatures.’" (From Town and Country. February 1962)

 

There is a 392-page volume published in 1962 by the U.S. government, oddly titled Humane treatment of Animals Used in Research: Hearings before a Subcommittee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives (V.S. Govt. Printing Office, Washington D.C.)

 

Sample extracts: "In any class of medical students you can always spot a certain number with sadistic tendencies." (page 218) "Trying to produce convulsions in dogs is terrible. I know they wouldn't let you see that, though. Shock experiments, removal of organs, blocking intestines, or the urine outlets so the bladder ruptures are only run of the mill...You'd be surprised to hear what professors and some students can think up. At night I keep thinking about the dogs. Imagine, after you have major surgery and you are between life and death... your little square of cold, draughty, cement floor­ing is cleaned by having a hose of cold water squirted over you. The dogs are soaked by this cold water - dogs right after recovering from surgery. No won­der most of the dogs die. If they live, within a couple of days or a week, they are used for a different experiment. One dog survived seven experiments." (page 250)

 

"I'm a student studying veterinary medicine. I was never and am not now in the employ of any humane society...This is a cry and a plea from a young person still holding on to a few ideals I have grown to believe in - and I am be­ginning to wonder if there is any real humane goodness among humans. I am not a sentimentalist, a crusader, or a fanatic; but I cannot, under any code or way of human life, condone what I, in a few short years, have seen." (page 251)

 

"There is no check whatever upon the wasteful repetition of experiments for which the taxpayer pays; no check on careless planning; no check on the outright sadist, who surrounds his real subconscious motive with a fog of scien­tific terms." (page 264)

 

"I recently asked a young physician how the newer medical students can judge the need for sedatives if the dog has been 'devocalized', as the scientists phrase it. His answer was startling. He said: 'It is the prevalent attitude in medi­cal schools now that dogs can't feel pain - dogs do not suffer. (page 311)

 

"I attended Chicago Medical School last September. I withdrew of my own accord...One of the conditions which led to my contempt towards this school was the cruel treatment which was given to the experimental animals." (page 346)

 

Dr. Ronald T. Grant, Guy's Hospital Medical School, London (Feder­ation Proceedings, Vol. 20, No. 2, Part 3, Supp 9, July, 1961): “The proper study of mankind is man. I think we are gradually coming to recognize more clearly...the gross differences not only of anatomy but also of physiology, both physical and mental, of animals from each other and from man...”

 

In May 1961, Dr. Pierre Bosquet had written in France's Nouvelle Critique: "Research is strictly subordinated to an immediate commercial profit. Cur­rently, disease is one of the major sources of profit for the pharmaceutical in­dustry, and the doctors are willing agents of those profits."

 

Already many years ago, Dr. Waiter Modell of Cornell University's Medi­cal College, whom Time had described as "one of America's foremost drug ex­perts", wrote in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics: “When will they realize that there are too many drugs? No fewer than 150,000 preparations are now in use. About 15,000 new mixtures and dosages hit the market each year, while about 12,000 die off...We simply don't have enough diseases to go around. At the moment the most helpful contribution is the new drug to counteract the untoward effect of other new drugs.” (Time, May 26,1961)

 

Writing in the New York Daily News (March 13, 1961), the long-time staf­fer William H. Hendrix recalled an interview, printed many times before, of the famous Dr. Charles Mayo (not to be confused with a later Dr. Charles Mayo): "I abhor vivisection. It should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil."

 

"The causes of diabetes mellitus remain unknown in both man and animals." (From an article in the Veterinary Record of July 9,1960)

 

"It is not possible to apply to the human species experimental information derived from inducing cancer in animals." (Dr. Kenneth Starr, of the New South Wales Cancer Council, reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, April 7, 1960)

 

"There really exists no logical basis for translating the result of animals to man." (Dr. L. Goldberg, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. Quantitative Method in Human Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Pergamon Press, London, 1959)

 

"Dr. P. Richter, of the famed Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hop­kins, conducted controlled experiments with drugs and hormones commonly in use and his results were published in the August issue of Proceedings of the Na­tional Academy of Sciences: His conclusions are a warning that, while certain drugs and hormones may have an immediate beneficial effect, the patient may suffer permanent damage which will not appear until months after disconti­nuance of the medication. These medicaments had already been 'proved' by the usual tests on animals, chiefly rats, to be perfectly harmless." (Cited from News-Post, Baltimore, August 5, 1959)

 

"The most phenomenal accomplishments in tuberculosis eradication have been achieved where little or no B.C.G. has been used, including Iceland, Ha­waii and the Netherlands." (From an article signed by seventeen doctors in the British Medical Jour­nal, June 6, 1959)

 

Dr. M. Beddow Baily, M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., Member Royal College of Surgeons, in his book More Spotlights on Vivisection (London, 1958): "Vivisection appeals to the basest instincts of fear and cowardice. Before the bar of justice vivisection stands condemned on three main counts: cruelty to animals, uselessness to man, and obstruction on the path of real knowledge."

 

Dr. Robert Gesell, Chariman, Department of Physiology, University of Michigan, April 1958:

 

“Consider what we are doing in the name of science, and the issue will be clear. We are drowning and suffocating unanesthetized animals in the name of science. We are determining the amount of abuse that life will endure in unan­esthetized animals in the name of science.”

 

Dealing with the assay of oxytocic drugs (i.e. drugs supposed to hasten par­turition): "With the exception of drugs acting on the soul, the most striking dif­ferences between animal and human experiments are probably to be found in drugs acting on the uterus. Much time and effort have been spent in trying to find new oxytocic drugs by experiments on animals, which later proved to be completely inactive when tested on the human uterus. There is thus a need for assay methods by which oxytocic drugs can be tested on the human uterus." (Dr. H.O. Schild, reader in pharmacology, University College, London; joint author of Clark's Applied Pharmacology: Quantitative Method in Human Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Pergamon Press, London, 1959. Report of a Symposium held in London, March 1958, p. 154)

 

"How are we to know that when a drug has been tried on 15 different species of animals, including primates, and shown to be harmless, it will be found harm­less to man? The reverse consideration also applies. How are we to be sure that a drug shown to be toxic to 15 different species of animals will also be toxic to man?" (Dr. A.L. Bacharach, Wellcome Chemical Research Laboratory, in Quan­titative Method in Human Pharmacology and Therapeutics. Pergamon Press, London, 1959, p. 196. Report of symposium held in London, March 1958)

 

The French medical journal, Revue de Pathologie Generale et de Physio­logie Clinique, reported in January 1958: "The vaccine modifies the soil of the vaccinated person and turns it into an alkaline and oxidised soil - the soil of cancer. This fact can no longer be denied. "

 

"This widespread animal experimentation...is of practically no use what­ever in furthering the art and science of medical practice. It is certainly up to the well-instructed members of the medical profession to denounce it. As re­gards to this journal at any rate. we shall continue to do so." (Editorial in the Medical Review for September 1957)

 

"It is a melancholy thought that hundreds of research workers spending hun­dreds of millions of money have been at work for well over thirty years on this problem, tobacco-smoking and lung cancer and at the end of this period we have advanced so little. if at all. The very volume of money and effort has built up an organized research which is no longer original. Its very bulk forces it through well-known channels." (Dr. W.A. Ball. Surgeon. Lancet. July 6.1957. p. 45)

 

"Contrary to the widespread belief based on studies in the lower animals the xanthine drugs consistently produce significant cerebral vasoconstriction in man." (Dr. Seymour S. Ketty. Chief, Laboratory of Clinical Science, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland. Triangle, Vol. Ill. No. 2. June 1957. pp. 47 and 51)

 

"The intensive research on carcinogenic substances which has been under­taken during the past quarter of a century has complicated rather than simpli­fied the problem." (The Lancet, February 16. 1957, p. 334)

 

"Pacatal was tested in animals by Nieschultz et al. (1954) and found to be well tolerated. Unfortunately, the high incidence of toxic side-effects in this group of patients suggests that the widespread use of Pacatal is unjustifiable..." (Dr. P.H. Mitchell, Dr. P. Sykes. surgeon and Dr. A. King. Surgeon, Brit­ish Medical Journal, January 26, 1957. p. 207)

 

Dr. James Burnet, M.A., L.B., M.D., R.R.C:P.E., in medical practice for half of the present century, (he died in 1957) a medico-Iegalist of high qualifi­cations and former editor of the Medical Times: "Nothing I was taught regarding the results of animal research was of the slightest value in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, but rather the reverse."

 

"The evanescence of our knowledge is something we rarely mention. We go from one cocksureness to another. Read your lecture notes of 1928 or 1929 if you have any. It is embarrassing to see how little those giants knew. But we are just as ignorant now. We have acquired a great many more wrong data since, if we have tried to keep up to date. Only we won't admit it, even to ourselves." (The Lancet, November 24, 1956, p. 11(0)

 

"... No drug is ever given a clean bill of health on the basis of animal test­ing. It is taken into the clinic and tried on human beings. Many don't know they are being used as guinea pigs... " (Evidence given by Dr. W.M. Hoskins, Professor of Entomology, Berke­ley, California, quoted in Our Daily Poison by Leonard Wickenden, published in New York, D.S.A., 1956)

 

In his book La sperimentazione sugli animali (2nd ed., 1956), Gennaro Ciaburri, one of Italy' s anti-vivisectionist doctors, provides among many others the following insight: "Normally, pressure on one or both eyeballs will slow down the pulse...This symptom has opened up a vast field for vivisection. Experimenters squashed the eyes of dogs to study this reflex, to the point of discovering that the heartbeat was slowing down - owing to the death of the animals..."

 

"Knowledge of the endocrine control of these processes is derived mainly from experimental studies on a number of different animal species. So great is the variation in response of these species to the hormone concerned that it would be imprudent to assume that the human breast behaves in a manner similar to the mammary gland in any particular species studied." (Dr. P.M.F. Bishop, The Practitioner, June 1956, p. 630)

 

"In animal tests (methylpentynol) was shown to possess high activity, de­sirable duration of action, low toxicity...one fatality for which methylpentynol itself was responsible has been described, the dose being between 4.5 and 6 gm. Death was caused by cardiac arrest. In view of this occurrence it has been ques­tioned whether in fact methylpentynol is as safe as animal experiments seemed to indicate..." (Medical World. March 1956, p. 216)

 

"While still appreciating the great curative action of modern drugs, we now recognise that there are many infections which they cannot overcome - either because the organism is not a species which responds to that particular drug or because resistance has developed; moreover the toxic effects are now becom­ing evident and the medical papers are full of instances where the patient has suffered more harm from this treatment that he would have experienced from his original infection..." (From a Clinical Article on Modem Chemotherapy by the head of the Che­motherapy Division of the National Institute for Medical Research, Medical World, March 1956, p. 473)

 

"Vivisection diverts the doctor's attention from the sickbed and he devotes it to the study of some utopian ideas that have nothing to do with practical me­dicine. "Dr Gennaro Ciaburri, M.D., biologist in Bologna/Italy, in his book La Sperimentazione Animale (Animal Experimentation), 1956, 2nd ed., p. 177.

 

"During the past 50 years scientists experimenting with thousands of ani­mals had found 700 ways of causing cancer. But they had not discovered one way of curing the disease." (Dr. J.F. Brailsford, M.D., Ph.D., F.R.C.P., in the Birmingham Evening Despatch. January 10, 1956)

 

"... there are still people who feel that the rat will guide us to a perfect diet, me, I think it merely guides us to the garbage heap." (Dr. Franklin Bicknell, D.M., M.R.C.P., The English Complaint, January 1956)

 

"Surgical heterodoxy is rife in operations on the stomach, for peptic ulceration is a very common disease, becoming commoner every year, and the clap­trap and sales talk of animal experimentation can be had for the asking and can be served up to support any theory, however bizarre, and any operation, how­ever unsound." (Sir Heneage Ogilvy, K.B.E., D.M., M.ch., F.R.C.S., in the Lancet. January 21, 1956)

 

"... Largely as a result of animal experiment, during which parts of the hy­pothalamus have been stimulated or destroyed, a concept of its function in its different parts has been built up. Results of these experiments may be confus­ing since a destructive lesion may produce an entirely different clinical state from that caused by an irratative lesion..." (The Medical Press, September 21, 1955, p. 272)

 

Once again, our sorcerer's apprentices cannot say that they haven't been given enough warning. Here is an example of the warnings as to the carcinogenic danger of smallpox vaccination. Dr. B. Duperrat, of the Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris, wrote in the French medical journal Presse Medicale on March 12, 1955: "Vaccination also causes leukaemia to break out."

 

"Recently, Dr. Harald Okens, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Copenhagen, stated that there is no compelling argument which can justify scientific experiments on dogs. For his part he categorically prohibited such ex­periments at the Institute of which he was head. In his opinion much good would be won if such experiments were forbidden by law." (Dog's Bulletin, February 1955)

 

"It must be pointed out that a phenomenon observed in a given organism under normal condition... is one thing, and a phenomenon observed under pa­thological conditions, especially when they are produced in the laboratory, as, for example, the stimulation of the brain, is another thing. They are, of course, absolutely different phenomena." (Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Selected work. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955, p. 383)

 

"In contrast to our detailed knowledge of the importance of Vitamin E for laboratory animals, great uncertainty remains as to its value in the treatment of disease in man..." The Lancet, Oct.1, 1955.

 

"Let us not deceive ourselves. The guinea-pig's reputation is spurious." (Editorial, The Medical Press, January 19, 1955, p. 45)

 

In Great Britain surgeons have had for a century experience with human patients only, for under the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876 it is provided that no experiment shall be performed on animals for the purpose of attaining manual skill. And it would be very difficult for anyone even today to disclaim Sir W. Heneage Ogilvy, medical doctor and Consulting Surgeon to Guy's Hospi­tal and Royal Masonic Hospital, who declared in the British Medical Journal (Dec. 18, 1954, p. 1438): "British surgery has always stood high because it can be claimed, and not without reason, that every surgical advance of major importance has come from this country."

 

Compared to such examples of British hypocrisy, which abound, the out-spokeness of their less inhibited American colleagues sounds almost refreshing, like the statement of Prof. George Wakerlin of the Chicago University, re­ported by The National (June 1954): "I want nothing to do with anything having the word 'humane' connected with it."

 

"The argument from man is so much more convincing than the argument from mice - which, indeed, may be completely misleading as in the case of ure­thane, which has some inhibitory action on human tumours, but a marked, though temporary one on chronic human leukaemias." (Dr. C.G. Learoyd, Surgeon, Medical World, Aug. 1954, p. 172)

 

"Few neurological and probably no psychiatric disorders can be adequate­ly reproduced in animals." (Review, British Medical Journal, June 12, 1954, p. 1364)

 

"One is seldom justified in carrying over observations from one species to another. This includes the carrying over to human beings the observations made on experimental animals." (Dr. Carlos Hines, Physician and Clinical Researcher for Eli Lilly & Co. in the Indianapolis Star, March 16, 1954)

 

"It must never be forgotten that the results of animal tests may be of little value in forecasting the effects of a substance on man..." (Dr. J.M. Barnes, World Health Organization Monograph No. 16, 1954, p.45)

 

"No experimental worker can provide a single fact about human disease." (Dr. D.A. Long, London, from the National Institute for Medical Research, Lancet, March 13, 1954, p. 532)

 

"It is readily granted that a fracture and a burn on a dog are not the same as on a human." (Drs. Harvey S. Allen, John L. Bell and Sherman W. Day, Chicago,­ Illinois, Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, Vol. 97, November 1953, p. 541)

 

"Well-established facts about human disease have been ignored by ex­perimentalists and have had to be re-discovered before fallacies were recognised and corrected." (Dr. Clifford Wilson, The Lancet, September 19, 1953, p. 579)

 

"Although lung tumours have been described in many species, there is no laboratory animal which spontaneously develops tumours comparable to the or­dinary squamous or anaplastic carcinoma of the bronchus of man..." (Dr. Richard Doll, British Medical Journal, September 5, 1953)

 

"The folly of founding the actions of drugs on animal experiments cannot be over-emphasized. This is the case with chloramphenicol (chloromycetin). This drug was tried out for long periods on dogs and was found to produce only a transient anaemia, but fatal results have followed its use in human disease..." (Editorial, Medical Review. September 1953)

 

"The hypothesis that acid acting on nerve-endings in the floor of the ulcer is the primary cause of ulcer pain is based upon unnatural experiments, false anatomy, and faulty pathology... Many patients with ‘ulcer pain' have no nerv­es in the ulcer floor, some, have no acid, and some even have no ulcer..." (Dr. V.J. KinselIa, Sydney, Lancet, August 22,1953, p. 361)

 

"One of the newer antibiotic drugs, chloramphenicol, has been recorded as a cause of fatal aplastic anaemia in human beings. But extensive experiments on dogs have failed to show any evidence of injury or disease to the canine  species.” (Bulletin, Easton, Massachusetts, April 2, 1953)

 

"Mice were used in the initial toxicity tests because of their small size, but what a lucky chance it was, for in this respect man is like the mouse and not the guinea-pig. If we had used guinea-pigs exclusively we should have said that penicillin was toxic, and we probably should not have proceeded to try to over­come the difficulties of producing the substance for trial in man..." (Dr. Howard Florey, Nobel laureate, co-discoverer of penicillin, "The Ad­vance of Chemotherapy by Animal Experiments", Conquest, January 1953, p. 12)

 

"I am particularly concerned not with the wickedness but with the folly of experiments on animals...To apply the results of experiments on dogs to the aetiology and treatment of peptic ulceration in man is as scientific as to base a course on post- natal lectures to mothers on a study of the maternal habits of the female kangaroo." (Address by Sir Heneage Ogilvie, M.D., surgeon, to Leeds Medical So­ciety, December 12, 1952, The Lancet. March 21,1953, p. 555)

 

"Most of our knowledge of transplantation is based upon experiments in animals; but these, it seems, differ as much from man in their response to ho­mografting as in the diseases from which they suffer..."     (Leading article, Lancet, November 29, 1952, p. 1068)

 

"So long as the research worker plays about with mice and other animals and becomes completely divorced from the clinician and the pathologist, no pro­gress will ever be made with cancer research. So far it is a total failure, and is likely to remain so for so long as it is conducted on what we consider to be en­tirely wrong and fallacious lines." (Notes on Books, Medical Review, November 1952)

 

"We confess disappointment with he practical issues of experimental re­search in cancer. It has told us much about malignant tumours in the lower ani­mals but this, if applied to man, does not tally with experience." (Medical Officer, 1952.)

 

"Any work which seeks to elucidate the cause of disease, the mechanism of disease, the cure of disease, or the prevention of disease, must begin and end with observations on man, whatever the intermediate steps may be...Man is a species that in many respects is quite unlike any species kept in cages and sub­ject to the kinds of experiments that can be made by any discipline other than clinical science. " (Sir George Pickering, M.D., University of London, The Lancet, November 8, 1952, p.895)

 

Dr. Ludimar Hermann, former Professor of Physiology at Zurich Univer­sity, was quoted by Lord Dowding as follows in the House of Lords on October 14, 1952: "The advance of science, and not any usefulness for medicine, is the real aim of vivisection. No true researcher thinks of the practical application of his work. Science can do without this justification, with which it still has to defend itself in England."

 

"I will not discuss the research work that has been done to find the cause of peptic ulceration, because it leads to nowhere. Most of the work has been done on animals, and animals do not get peptic ulcers." (Sir Heneage Ogilvie, M.D., surgeon, Nursing Mirror, October 21,1952)

 

"Experimental evidence may be dangerously misleading, for in the words of one gastric surgeon, 'not all of our patients behave exactly like dogs' " (Annotation, The Lancet, September 20, 1952, p. 572)

 

"Vaccines prepared from animal brain tissue, containing either killed or a mixture of killed and live virus, are capable of protecting animals, but are poten­tially dangerous for man when inoculated parenterally. Feeding live virus to ani­mals is quite another matter from doing so to man." (Leading article, British Medical Journal, September 6, 1952, p. 551)

 

"Warning is given not to carry over, without reservation, to man, the con­clusions based on animal experiments. In the monkey none of the powerful car­cinogens has been shown to produce cancers." (Review, The Lancet, August 9,1952, p. 274)

 

"Vagatomy is unsound, in the way that any procedure based chiefly on ani­mal experiments is apt to be unsound..." (Sir Heneage Ogilvie, M.D., surgeon, British Medical Journal, August 9, 1952, p.302)

 

"There were important differences between the reactions of the uteri of dif­ferent species to pituitary hormones and between in vivo and in vitro experi­ments. Great caution was therefore necessary in making any inferences about the action of drugs on the human uterus from such data."     (Prof. G.H. Bell, at the 13th British Congress of Obstetrics and Gynaeco­logy: British Medical Journal, August 2, 1952, p. 281)

 

"When Forssman, in 1929, by repeated cardiac catheterisation upon him­self, showed that the procedure was not only possible but apparently without undue danger, a new era in cardio-vascular investigation began." (Practitioner, July, 1952, p. 40)

 

"The discovery of the ovarian hormones, oestrogen and progesterone from 1917 onwards, and later the gonadotrophins of the anterior pituitary, opened a wide field in physiology. The astonishing effects of all four hormones when given to small laboratory animals led to great expectations of their therapeutic value in obstetrics and expecially gynaecology. These early hopes have been disappointed. " (Dr. Alec Bourne, surgeon, Medical World, June 13, 1952, p. 4(0)

 

"I cannot over emphasize the fallacies inherent in the efforts to apply di­rectly to man the results of animal experiments in the field of hormones." (From the testimony of Don Carlos Hines, M.D., before the Delaney Com­mittee of the House of Representatives, Jan. 31, 1952)

 

"In the pursuit of discovering the cause of cancer it cannot be gainsaid that organized research has failed. In every civilized country in the world innumer­able scientists of all grades, working indefatigably in all manner of institutions and laboratories, are using up uncountable man-hours, irreplaceable materials and millions of pounds - all to agonizingly small human profit... Many of our greatest discoveries resulted not from endless experimentation but from the pro­cesses of native thought." (Article "Ab Ovo Cancer", Medical World, Jan. 25,1952, p. 576)

 

"Thomas Addison's monograph of 1855 opens with the words: 'It will hardly be disputed that at the present moment the functions of the suprarenal capsules, and the functions they exercise in the general economy, are almost or altogether unknown.' Like so much of his writings, these words are still true. We have accumulated a mass of facts, but we still can say little about the organ­ism." (Dr. F. G. Young, Professor of bio-chemistry, University of Cambridge, British Medical Journal, Dec. 29, 1951, p.1541)

 

"There has never been any justification for the assumption that a given ex­perimental operation reveals the natural function of the cortex. What the ex­perimentalist has produced is a disorder of natural function - what the clinicians would call a symptom - and we may not assume that a symptom is the same as a normal function or process. Yet that is the assumption that generations of cor­tical stimulators have made, and this is predominantly why we have not yet got a satisfactory generalization as to the control of purposive movements by the cerebral cortex. " (Dr. F.M.R. Walshe, The Lancet, Nov.17, 1951, p.898)

 

"... Much of the work consists of long feeding tests on the experimental ani­mals, but the results can be strictly applied only to these animals - usually rats." (Leading article, British Medical Journal, Oct. 13, 1951, p.897)

 

"At the CIBA Foundation, London, on July 3rd, Prof. Houssay reviewed his group's work on the influence of sex hormones on the incidence and severity of experimental diabetes in the rat; but he first warned his audience not to ac­cept these results for other animals or for humans." (Annotation in The Lancet, July 14, 1951, p.70)

 

"...results obtained experimentally in such animals (guinea pigs) certainly cannot be taken to hold also for rheumatic fever in man, since argument by anal­ogy of this sort has only too often proved fallacious in the past." (Leading article, British Medical Journal, Ju1.7, 1951, p.37)

 

"The gastro-intestinal tract in man is unfortunately very different from that of animals, and the results of a new operation for gastric disease cannot be pre­dicted from operations on dogs." (Editorial, The Lancet, May 5,1951, p.1003)

 

"Localization is an artificial observer-made attribute of the brain...The brain and its ordinary owner have no knowledge whatever of localization, and except for those interested in it as a subject for study, it is of supreme indif­ference to the individual and his behaviour. Localization in a rigid sense is an abstraction of the sort which may take us further and further from reality." (Dr. Wllliam Goody, Assistant Physician to National Hospital, and Con­sultant Neurologist University College Hospital. Lancet, Mar. 17, 1951, p.627)

 

"As the years pass, cancer seems to be on the increase. The search for the cause has up till now met with a very poor result, largely owing to the fact that cancer research has been and is being conducted on laboratory animals... We believe that until research switches over to the clinician and leaves the labora­tory investigator of cancer to grieve over his failures, no real progress will be made." ("Cancer, an Abstract Review," Medical Review, Feb. 1951)

 

"It was difficult to foresee from experiments on animals how far a muscle relaxant was likely to affect respiration in man...It was equally difficult to fore­see, from laboratory experiments, the duration of the effect of the drugs in man." (Dr. H. O. Collier, chief pharmacologist at AlIen and Hanburys, Ltd., Brit­ish Medical Journal, Feb. 17, 1951, p, 353)

 

"The characteristic effects in leukaemia were detected solely as a result of clinical observation. The various leukaemias in the mouse and rat were relative­Iy refractory to the influence of urethane, and the remarkable effect in the human might have eluded discovery if attention had been directed to the animal alone. That illustrates the hazards of such work." (Prof. Alexander Haddow, British Medical Journal, December 2, 1950, p. 1272)

 

"It seems clear therefore that one is not justified in depending on the result of animal assays to determine the relative potency of oestrogens in the human subject." (Drs. P.M.F. Bishop, N.A. Richards, M.B. Adelaide, and Neal Smith, The Lancet, May 6, 1950, p. 850)

 

"Practice on dogs probably does make a good veterinarian, if that's the kind of practitioner you want for your family." So wrote Dr. William Held, internationally famous Chicago physician ­one of the many great medical men who regarded the practice of vivisection as dangerously misleading for medical art.

 

"When oestrogen first became available for clinical use, there was an un­derstandable over-enthusiasm for its application... If one depends on the beau­tifully embossed brochures which exhort the practitioner with every mail, one falls, unhappily, into the security of the illusion that there are neither contrain­dications nor side-effects in the use of oestrogen." (Drs. Robert A. Kimbrough and S. Lion Israel, Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 138, December 25, 1949, p. 1216)

 

Dr. Charles Lyman Lamer, as cited by Morris Bealle in The Drug Story, 1949: "Since the regimentation of Medicine by quacks and medical gangsters in control of the American Medical Association, this organization has become one of the most vicious rackets in the country. "

 

The famed German Doctor Erwin Liek - of whom the major German en­cyclopedia, Der Grosse Brockhaus, says, "he advocated a medical art of high ethical level, which takes into consideration the patient's psyche" - gives us the following information:

 

"Here is another example that animal experimentation sometimes can't answer even the simplest questions. I know personally two of Germany's most authoritative researchers, Friedberger of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Nutri­tional Research and Prof. Scheunert of the Institute of Animal Physiology at Leipzig. Both wanted to investigate the simple question as to whether a diet of hardboiled eggs or of raw eggs is more beneficial. They employed the same ani­mals: 28-day-old rats. Result: over an observation period of three months, Fried­berger's animals prospered on a diet of raw eggs, while the control animals, which got hardboiled eggs, pined, lost their hair, developed eye troubles; sev­eral died after much suffering. At Scheunert's I witnessed the identical experi­ments, with exactly opposite results." (From Gedanken eines Arztes, Oswald Arnold, Berlin, 1949)

 

But even more revealing is what the vivisectors themselves say in their un­guarded moments about the uselessness of vivisection for medical science. In Experimental Surgery, the monumental vivisection manual (Baltimore, 1949) J. Markowitz gives fair warning in his introduction that "The operative technique described in these pages is suitable for animals, usually dogs. How­ever, it does not follow that it is equally and always suited for human beings. We refuse to allow the student the pretense that what he is doing is operating on a patient for the cure of an ailment"

 

So this top expert states explicitly that vivisection doesn't really help train the surgeon, he even says it can be misleading, and furnishes a memorable example: "In our student days intrathoracic surgery sounded very mysterious and formidable. We know today that it need not be so. What caused the diffi­culties was that the surgeons assumed the nature of pneumothorax as en­countered in the dog to be similar to what will occur in man. This is only true for the side that is opened, for a man has two separate chests, each harbouring a lung, and each capable of sustaining life...In the dog, even a small puncture of one pleural cavity will cause fatal collapse of both lungs."

 

"The sensitivity of animals varies from laboratory to laboratory, and there­fore it is impossible to compare potencies arrived at in one laboratory with those of another. It has been usual to assume that the sensitivity of all mammals is roughly the same for oestrogen, but there is now considerable evidence that such is not the case, and that it is most unwise to assume that the human female will react in the same way as laboratory animals. This work is of very great interest in that it shows the folly of applying results obtained on animals to the human being." (Prof. Dr. E.C. Dodds, Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Vol. I, No. 3, 1949, pp. 143-45)

 

Atomic radiation (from atomic bombs) - In Clinical Excerpts, Vol. XXIII, Nos. 9-10, Sept./Oct., 1948 (p. 85), there is an article on "Medicine and the Atomic Bomb". Under the heading Effects of Irradiation, the following com­ment occurs: "These depend on the species. Thus the pigs, goats and guinea- pigs ex­posed on the vessels of Bikini were not affected in the same way, and different experimental animals tolerate greatly different quantities of radiation without death. This is unfortunate from the research worker's point of view, since it pre­vents the application to man of conclusions from animal experiments."

 

Sir Macfarlane Burnet, M.D., Sc.D., Ph.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.A.C.P., F.R.S.: "It is notoriously dangerous to apply experimental results from animals to the treatment of human beings, because human and animal physiology show subtle but important differences." (The Lancet, July 3,1948)

 

"The Folly of Torturing Animals", an article by Millicent Morden, M.D., Physician and Surgeon, New York, in The Abolitionist, Sept./Oct. 1947:

 

“The supposed utility of the practice of vivisection is a misconception. Animals are entirely different from man. Nothing of value to man has ever been discovered by vivisection. We do not need to experiment on animals to know our soil is so depleted that man and animal are both half-starved. If the money spent on vivisection were used, instead, to help the soil, people would not have to buy vitamins.

 

“Some of the highest paid salaries go to the boosters of vivisection. When this money talks it makes queer claims. We may not be able to argue with the noted individual who claimed to have learned how to sing by means of ex­periments on the throat muscles of a dog, but to all similar assertions we would answer: There is a better way of accomplishing the same purpose without torturing the animal.

 

“Animal experiments have brought forth some very dangerous drugs, vac­cines and serums. We have all seen horrible results. Animal tests, including Wassermann, are considered unreliable by experienced doctors. Medicines can all be accurately standardised without the use of animals. Several chemi­cal houses have stopped using animals in testing the strength of digitalis, be­cause the strength varied 300 per cent when animals were used. The action of drugs on animals is different from their action on man. Animals have differ­ent digestive juices and a blood that has only a fraction of the oxidising power of that possessed by man. Man's blood-stream makes a quick improvement when given the juices of raw vegetables and fruits. The animal's response is much slower.

 

“I have done a great deal of laboratory investigation. I have worked with­out pay, taking the place of experimental animals. Human remedies must be tried on human beings. Surgery made tremendous advances owing to the emergencies of this recent war and not because of animal torture.

 

“I cannot question the honesty of the doctors who say that animals do not suffer in the laboratories. I do say they must be blind to suffering. After their tortures, the agony expressed in the eyes of the animals is unforgettable. Vivisection is the rock on which the noble medical profession - as well as the lives and health of humanity - is being dashed to pieces.”

 

Dr. Salvador Gonzales Herrejon, Director of the Mexican National School of Medicine, published a long article condemning vivisection in the New York Journal American (July 13, 1947), including:

 

"Anything the students might learn of anatomy by working on dogs is un­important in relation to humans, for the location of the viscera, spleen, nerves etc., of the animal, although somewhat similar, is different We see clearly that in vivisection students perform high surgery with results which are gained only by the high physical tolerance of the animal, and they operate with the irrespon­sibility which this high tolerance induces. Is it prudent to teach the student that he can open the stomach of a human with such facility? And is it not unjustifi­able cruelty to permit students to make an unnecessary and mutilating operation on a dog today, make another tomorrow, and again another, and so on until the dog dies? Is it not an immoral method of teaching, destroying respect for life, proper sentiment and piety? Obviously it is."

 

"We well remember how there was a boom in hormonal therapy. Much of the vaunted good results obtained were wrongly deduced from animal experi­ments...These results, when applied to humans clinically, were found to be not only erroneous but in some cases highly dangerous." (Review, Medical World, June 6, 1947, p. 471)

 

"Tuberculosis in human beings and tuberculosis in animals are distinctly different, although they are produced by the same micro-organism. The disease in animals is relatively simple in character, and fairly predictable in its course, whereas in the human being it is far more complex; so one must not assume that a drug that is effective in the laboratory animal will be equally effective in man." (The Lancet, July 20,1946)

 

Dr. Arthur V. Alien, one of Chicago's best-known physicians, a specialist in industrial medicine, Fellow of the American Medical Association, grad­uate of the Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery, for 26 years chief sur­geon for the Commonwealth Edison Company, in the American Weekly, July 1, 1945, under the heading "Animal Torture Worthless to Science": "Both as a medical man and a human being I am opposed to vivisection. As a physician, I believe vivisection to be wrong in principle. I do not believe it is right to create disease and suffering in order to study it. I know it is not neces­sary to do so. Animal experiments have been going on for more than 300 years. If they were ever going to be of benefit to the human race, surely they should have proved themselves by now."

 

In the National Magazine, which folded in June 1954 because it kept at­tacking the vivisection business with articles written by honest physicians, the same Dr. Aden wrote in an article that made anti-vivisection history and was titled "Vivisection is a business": "Few persons seem to realize that vivisection is a business. Men enter this business for the same reason they enter any other business: to make money and to further their own interests. The leaders in this business must know it's phony."

 

"...Facts incontrovertible in the laboratory are applied to clinical medicine in a manner quite unwarranted. The best examples are the indiscriminate use of hormones and the ready acceptance of the biased blurbs of research propagated by commercial travelers.” Dr. Frangcon Roberts, British Medical Journal, June 16, 1945, p. 848)

 

Dr. Alfred Gough, Hon. Consulting Surgeon to the Leeds Hospital for Women, writing in the Medical Press and Circular, March 14, 1945, stated that: "The practical results of treatment with sex hormones fall far short of what might be wished. One reason is that the results of animal experiments cannot be ap­plied to women." (Quoted by Dr. James Burnet in Medical World, May 18, 1945, p. 431)

 

"The great onrush of laboratory and animal experiments is in so many re­spects threatening the very foundations of practical medicine. Diseased condi­tions cannot be correctly imitated in experimental animals, so why persist in making such experiments?" (Extract from Medical World, May 18, 1945, by Dr. James Burnet, one of the best known British physicians, late Examiner to the University of Aberdeen)

 

Current Topics Medical Press, May 16, 1945: "Physiology of the Pan­creas", p. 306. "There can be no doubt that observations on human subjects are of more importance than animal experiments."

 

In an article entitled "A Surgeon Looks at Two Wars", published in The Lan­cet. September 30, 1944, (p. 428) Colonel Cutler, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.C., refer­ring to the effect of penicillin on gas-gangrene declared: "Here we see an example of the fallaciousness of transmitting laboratory data directly to man. No animal responds to infections as man does."

 

"No experimental shock in animals can be completely identified with clini­cal shock as we do not know in what the latter consists." (Dr. G. Ungar, Paris, The Lancet, April 3, 1943, p. 421)