What do we owe laboratory animals?

When Lauren Strohacker received her second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine in the spring of 2021, she was delighted. It meant she could see her friends again, go to concerts, and live with far less fear that an infection would render her physically or economically crippled.

But it became a bittersweet memory. Shortly after Strohacker, an artist who lives in Knox County, Tennessee, in the US, returned home from the vaccination site, she read an article about the monkeys used in tests of Covid vaccines.

“I thought: I’m afraid of a silly needle,” she said. “And these animals have to deal with that all the time.”

She reflected on how her newfound freedom, and possibly her health, came at the expense of animals suffering or dying in vaccine development.

Simply being grateful for those animals seemed insufficient. Strohacker wanted to give something tangible in return. A little online research located the sanctuary fund of the National Society Against Vivisection, which supports the care of retired lab animals. She made a small donation. “Thank you was the least I could do,” Strohacker said.

His gesture embodies a voice that is rarely heard in discussions of the use of animals in biomedical research. These tend to be polarized between opponents of the research, who claim it is unethical and the benefits are exaggerated, and proponents, who argue that the benefits are enormous and justify the harm to animals.

The advancement of animal-free methods for developing drugs and testing product safety raises the possibility that the use of animals will be avoided, at least in some cases. But it will take years for that to happen, and few researchers think the use of animals will completely cease. As long as animals are used, therefore, the question remains: what do people owe them?

“The typical consideration is that if I plan the research well, have an important idea, and respect the animals, accommodating them with the utmost care and so on, then I’ve done my job in terms of the relationship,” said John Gluck, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of New Mexico, whose growing discomfort with the use of monkeys led him to become a bioethicist. “I think that’s just poverty.”

Scientists often point to the so-called Three Rs, a set of principles first articulated in 1959 by William Russell, a sociologist, and Rex Burch, a microbiologist, to guide experimental research in animals. Researchers are encouraged to replace animals when alternatives are available, reduce the number of animals used, and refine their use so as to minimize the infliction of pain and suffering.

These are unquestionably noble goals, ethicists note, but they may seem insufficient when weighed against the benefits derived from animals. The Covid vaccines, for example, which were tested in mice and monkeys and developed so quickly thanks to decades of animal-based work in mRNA vaccine technology, saved an estimated 20 million lives in their first year of use and yielded dozens of lives. of billions of dollars in revenue.

In light of this dynamic — which applies not just to Covid vaccines, but also to many other therapies that save human lives and generate wealth — some wonder whether a fourth R can be included: reward.

Hints of the reward idea can be found in the research community, most visibly in laboratories that arrange for animals — particularly monkeys and other nonhuman primates — to be retired in sanctuaries. In the case of dogs and companion species, including rats, they are sometimes adopted as pets.

“It’s kind of karma,” said Laura Conour, executive director of the Animal Resources Laboratory at Princeton University, which has a retirement agreement with the Peaceable Primate Sanctuary. “I feel like it balances it out a bit.”

The school has also adopted guinea pigs, anole lizards and sugar gliders as pets for citizens and tries to help with their veterinary care.

Adoption is not an option for animals destined to be killed, however, which raises the question of how the debt can be paid off.

Lesley Sharp, medical anthropologist at Barnard College in New York and author of “Animal Ethos: The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science” [Etos animal: a moralidade dos encontros entre humanos e animais na ciência experimental em laboratórios]noted that research labs sometimes create memorials for animals: commemorative plaques, bulletin boards with photos and poems, and informal memorial meetings.

“There’s this burden that the animal has to carry for humans in the context of science,” Sharp said. “I think they demand respect and to be recognised, honored and pitied.”

She acknowledged that honoring sacrificial animals is not quite the same as giving something back to them. To imagine what this might entail, Sharp pointed to the practice of donating organs after death. Transplant recipients often want to give something back, “but the donor is dead,” Sharp said. “So you need someone who is sort of their proxy, and that proxy is their next of kin.”

If someone gets a cornea or a heart from a pig — or funding to study those procedures — then they can pay for the care of another pig at an animal sanctuary, Sharp proposed. “You will have animals that represent the whole.”

A variation on this principle can be seen in the participation of children in potentially risky research, said Rebecca Walker, a bioethicist at the University of North Carolina. A sick child enrolled in a clinical trial for an unapproved drug may not receive any personal benefit, but this is considered ethically acceptable because the research will benefit a larger community of children living with this condition.

“You’re contributing to the group even if you’re not contributing to the individual,” Walker said. “This could be really relevant to the animal case.” For example, research on captive axolotls, a critically endangered salamander species, has yielded information on breast cancer, spina bifida, and tissue regeneration; in return, people can support efforts to help wild axolotls that are now struggling to survive in polluted waterways in Mexico City.

Giving something back to research animals would come at a cost. Some experts have suggested that a portion of drug revenue or research grants could be earmarked for this purpose.

“I’m surprised this hasn’t been done yet,” said Prem Premsrirut, CEO of Mirimus, a company that develops animal models to test new treatments. “I think for anything we do in science, we have to give to those who sacrifice, whether they’re human or animal.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves