In a forum, more than 400 researchers and academics protest against the “caricatures” of certain associations opposed to animal experimentation.
In 2014, the Russian artist Andrei Kharkevich inaugurated a sculpture of a singular kind, in front of a building of the Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Siberia. It represents a rodent knitting a strand of DNA like a babushka, with an air of sadness and dignity. An ironic and affectionate tribute to the laboratory mice and rats sacrificed by science.
There is something. In France alone, about two million animals are used every year for basic or clinical research, to study physiological mechanisms or to test drugs. This annual tribute is essentially made up of rodents (two-thirds) and fish, but there are also chickens, dogs, cats, a few monkeys… and an octopus. A situation that abolitionist associations denounce relentlessly, with methods that sometimes take scientists the wrong way.
Against the “new prophets”
In a column published this week in Liberation, more than 400 leading French researchers and academics from the main French research institutions (CNRS, Inserm, Pasteur, Curie, etc.), apply themselves to criticize the state of public debate by matter. Among the petitioners : Jules Hoffmann, immunologist and Nobel Prize in medicine 2011, Margaret Buckingham, biologist and member of the Academy of Sciences, or André-Laurent Parodi, veterinarian and former president of the Academy of medicine.
“Using very questionable communication techniques (stolen videos, then assembled, cut and distorted remarks, defamatory slogans), certain small groups, disguised as whistleblowers, question the bases of biology with astonishing aplomb”, s ‘insisted the authors of the petition. And the researchers denounce the “defamatory campaigns” of these “new prophets”, praising “extraordinary alternative methods to animal experimentation which would answer all questions relating to living things”.
The “3 Rs”: replace, reduce, refine
The forum recalls that animal research complies, in a mandatory way since 2013 in France, to the so-called “3 R” rule: to replace the animal model by a substitution model when possible; reduce as far as possible the number of animals used; refine procedures for reducing pain or stress to animals. But animal experimentation remains a “still essential link”, believe the authors, who alert to the state of public debate and call for “to privilege exchanges between the scientific community, patient associations and the general public”.
Who is in the sights of the signatories? If no name is specified, the forum immediately follows an alert video broadcast in November by the Animal Testing association, and relayed by Liberation. We see an animal woman from a Parisian research laboratory, presented as a whistleblower, commenting on the disastrous fate of laboratory mice: euthanasia by cervical dislocation or CO2 asphyxiation, exsanguination, autopsy. The images and comments cast doubt on the level of effective control over these practices, which are very common and formalized but little known to the general public.
Another likely recipient of the forum: the Antidote Europe association. In 2011, she was at the origin of the European citizens’ initiative Stop Vivisection with the European Commission, which had collected more than a million signatures and called for an outright ban on animal testing. More recently, she distinguished herself by a poster campaign in the Paris metro, still visible at the moment, with the slogan “Why test our drugs on animals?” We are not 70 kg rats! “. Suggesting that it would be possible to do without animal experimentation.
A necessarily distant horizon
If the animal question raises more and more ethical questions, there is a broad consensus within the scientific community to deem it unrealistic to hope to do without completely of the animal for at least several decades. Artificial skin, used in cosmetics, is often cited as an example of a replacement model, but it is a very limited field of application, with relatively low health issues. It is otherwise with research on the physiopathological mechanisms of diseases or even with the preclinical development of drugs.
Biologists are just starting to produce in vitro convincing biological tissues (organoids of the pancreas or bladder, for example) and are very far from knowing how to emulate, or even understand, the details of the immune, nervous, endocrine or genetic phenomena taking place in a complex organ or tissue. Not even to mention the human body taken as a whole. This is the reason why drugs, before being tested in clinical trials in humans, are systematically evaluated in animals. If it was necessary, the Biotrial case once again recalled how essential this phase was, on pain of putting animals at risk… humans.
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