“We must ensure that the discomfort about the use of animals for science remains part of the discussion”

As an ethicist, how do you look at animal testing and animal-free innovation?

Being opposed to animal testing is not always an ethical position, but being for animal testing is not, by definition, unethical. It is important to examine your views and the assumptions underlying your views. How can they be defended? What are your arguments? People who support animal testing often base their position on anthropocentric or zoocentric principles that focus on human beings, and in which animals are generally assigned a lower moral status. Your position is also influenced by cultural and personal beliefs.

Some animal testing is done on higher species such as primates. The reasoning behind this is that ‘animal testing on higher species is done because they are so much like humans’. But this argument also makes testing on primates and other higher animals morally problematic: they are so similar to us humans. You could argue that this makes their moral status comparable to ours as well. In our culture, we see animals like mice as vermin, which is why it may be more acceptable to some that they are used as laboratory animals. For years, there were discussions about the use of labradors in Maastricht, even though that study was ethically justified. But some may be morally outraged by the use of dogs as laboratory animals, because labradors are also pets.

Your ethical position is that it is morally wrong to use laboratory animals.

Well, my position is that it is morally problematic. I think it is too simplistic to say that it is morally wrong, full stop. That would be a general judgment. But I can say that, in general, I find the use of laboratory animals morally problematic.

We must ensure that the discomfort about the use of animals for science remains part of the discussion. We will achieve nothing if we get stuck in a ‘yes it is, no it isn’t’ back and forth. If we want to work this out together, I believe we need to find a suitable alternative that can be used in scientific research. This can be done by promoting animal-free innovations. A transition to animal-free innovation sounds complicated. The goal is innovation - development, improvement - and that also has to be a transition. The ZonMw More Knowledge with Fewer Animals programme has been set up for this purpose. Our goal is to promote innovations that can replace the current use of laboratory animals. Replace and reduce by moving in another direction.

Is replacing animal testing the same as innovation?

No, replacing is replacing. If there are animal-free technologies that have the same function as the animal experiment, then you have to use those of course. But innovation means that you consciously develop those technologies to improve the existing practice. In this case what you really want to do is improve research, preferably using methods that do not include laboratory animals. I have some concerns about this. The current narrative is that the science also needs to be better, but in my opinion you can also do the same research using other means. That is how I think we might overplay our hand: replace, innovate, and improve science. One of those three probably will not work out at some point and that plays right into the hands of the opposers of the transition to animal-free innovation. Within TPI, the link to replacement has been abandoned. Personally, I would like to see the requirement disappear that the result also has to be better science, whatever that means.

The best thing would be to use more human tissue and data. I would like to see what is possible using human beings as test subjects. What can we do with the data that is already available on vaccine development and the people who fell ill as a result? We can then also look for causes. Those are other ways of dealing with health. And we have new and promising technologies such as organs-on-a-chip. And the CRISPR-Cas technology. Jennifer Doudna (University of California) and Emmanuelle Charpentier (Max Planck Institut Berlin) rightfully received a Nobel Prize for this technology, which allows you to very accurately copy and paste DNA, without any side effects, it would seem. Of course you have to be very careful using it, but I would like to see us go down the path of using human test subjects more.

What complicates the transition?

The biomedical research practice was built on animal testing and if you mess with it, many issues will arise. So that evokes resistance. But innovation should be up for discussion. You can also effect change that will yield a new reliable research practice. We will then probably train other scientists. In addition to working with pipettes in labs, this includes reading data, chips, and data from health apps.

In the political arena, the focus is strongly on the number of 500,000 laboratory animals per year. This number is not going down. What is your opinion on that?

If there are good arguments for the use of these laboratory animals, then a number like that is meaningless to me. If carelessness is involved, that affects me. But that is not the case in the Netherlands, due to solid ethical and technological considerations at the front. Politicians focus on the absolute number. But maybe we have simply become very efficient. Research groups share data obtained through animal testing with each other. The proceeds per experiment are very high. What I do find very painful is that many animals bred for research are killed when they are not used, for example because they do not have the right genetic background. This number also equates to around 500,000 animals. We are now working on putting rats and mice not suitable for research up for adoption, but those numbers are small. This does not remove the moral problem.

What role does the political arena have to play?

What I am mainly concerned about is politicians’ desire to give certain developments a push, stop them or bend them. In the development of some medicines, laws and regulations dictate that animal testing is required. So that truly makes it a matter of political determination. The legislation surrounding mandatory animal testing very much gets in the way of the transition to animal-free research. It needs to be said that this is outdated. The fact that laboratory animals are now used unnecessarily as a result, is problematic to me. In the Netherlands we can put our neck on the line by wanting to be the frontrunner. Other countries are also looking at us. It is not just a nationwide but also a European issue. Broad-based European support is necessary to effect change. So that is something we simply need to do.

How hopeful are you when it comes to the future? Looking 10-20 years into the future, where do you think we could be?

I am usually very hopeful about progress, but sometimes I am not. For years, I have been conducting an assessment among my students. I propose a number of situations to them and then they have to decide ‘what would I do’? The answers they pick are representative of a type of ethical reasoning. What I see is that students are moving away from an anthropocentric worldview to a more zoocentric worldview, and in recent years, even more towards a biocentric and ecocentric worldview. This means that these young people appear to find other life forms morally relevant, and not just people and higher species. Life is becoming more complicated, because more and more actions need to be morally justified, but that does not stop them from taking this fundamental moral stance. I see a lot of young researchers going in that direction and that leads to the potential for new solutions to the issue of animal testing.

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