A Massive Victory for Lab Animals
Yesterday, the NIH issued a statement that could be the beginning of the end for the use of animals in experiments:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is adopting a new initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research. Developing and using cutting-edge alternative nonanimal research models aligns with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent initiative to reduce testing in animals…
“For decades, our biomedical research system has relied heavily on animal models. With this initiative, NIH is ushering in a new era of innovation,” said NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
The NIH has, for decades, been one of the largest and most stubborn advocates for the use of animals in experiments. Nearly half of the $47 billion in grant money from the NIH goes to animal experiments, and former directors of the NIH have been among the most vigorous defenders of animal research. Consider former NIH director Francis Collins’ statement to Congress in 2021: “Every experiment that is done with animals is done appropriately with rigor and reproducibility… For the foreseeable future, if we’re going to make advances in things like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, rare diseases, we are still going to need to depend for a lot of that effort on animal research.”
The NIH’s reversal on this will have massive and immediate impacts. Indeed, like its statement on chimp research in 2013, it could set off a domino effect that ends all experiments on animals — and in a timeframe of years, not decades or centuries. (Chimp research ended a mere 2 years after the NIH indicated that it would reduce funding of such research in 2013.)
But the impacts of the NIH’s change in policy won’t be limited to just animals in labs. Rather, the NIH decision is part of a broader political trend: rising awareness of, and attention to, animal rights. From bans on fur spreading across the globe to the Supreme Court’s decision upholding bans on pig gestation crates, we are seeing something unprecedented in the history of animal rights: real political momentum, with the power to create real change. This is the sort of momentum that can create unstoppable, scalable change.
Just another reason I’m very confident that we will see animal liberation in our lifetimes!
Awesome!
Yes, I think one thing you could keep an eye on is breakthroughs made by AI directly outperforming animal-experimentation based cures. AI has yielded relief in this field, in a good example of what an absence of _just some_ human speciesist biases can provide. I am beginning to learn about the history of animal experimentation. It seems to have emerged out of earlier traditions of fortune-telling using animals' organs. It is a densely concentrated maze of human ideologies.
One thing that stands out to me is that the main originator of vivisection, Galenus, was also a main preserver and conveyor of herbal medicine traditions. AFAIK he overemphasized vivisection and did not explore herbal medicines and dietary routes enough. But his writing about herbology also was substantial and full of authority for a long time and thus herbology was a lesser field and always paired with much more impressive surgery, which was what Galen displayed before large audiences, and largely made his name by. This seems to be partly because Galenus was a highly confident and capable experimenter and communicator. He had very high status with clients in the upper echelons of Roman society and the Roman military. In an age when the average lifespan was around thirty years he lived to over 80 years because of his self-treatment. The sheer amount of information that AI rapidly can coordinate can provide relief from the legacy of Galenus --- this authority of early medicine whose methods have been augmented but never basically questioned except by ardent herbologists and animal rights activists.