The dangerously naive and uninformed Point of view of psychiatrist Murry J. Cohen regarding medical experiments on animals published in The Tribune demands immediate, factual rebuttal. While the place and importance of experimental animals in medical research is hotly disputed today by antivivisectionists, certainly active physicians are aware of the dramatic improvements in the ability to diagnose and treat disease and alleviate human suffering as a result of such experimentation.
Some 80 percent of the factual bases for the physician`s ability to recognize and treat cardiovascular disease today were simply not known 15 to 20 years ago. Virtually every advance has come about through initial observations and experiments involving living test animals.
Experienced physicians recall the time as recently as the 1940s and `50s when ventricular fibrillation represented a fatally irreversible cardiac dysrhythmia. It was then already recognized as the fundamental cause of most cases of ”sudden death.
To meet the challenge of sudden death itself in experimental animals, and with the first development of chemical methods for stopping fibrillation
(defibrillation), and later by the process of electrical defibrillation, physiologists began to understand the role of precisely balanced
concentrations of ions within cardiac tissues in establishing electrical stability of the heart. With further evolution, the first successful electrical countershock was achieved, first in animals and then in human patients.
Physicians began to realize that prompt and aggressive intervention could control fibrillation and permit spontaneous ”start-up” by viable heart tissues. By 1960, such corrective defibrillation was emerging for human patients, and now every major medical center employs appropriate, routine fibrillation and defibrillation procedures therapeutically every day.
Without the availability of living (but properly anesthetized) animal models for the original research, how much of this could have been
accomplished? None. Each and every step along the way would have been totally impossible.
Research on this problem involving human subjects was unthinkable. Who would have volunteered for such experiments? But now, many who would have died without these discoveries can be resuscitated and live.
Entirely comparable facts support the development of new knowledge in nearly every major advance in understanding of cardiovascular medicine–the ability to bypass blocked coronary arteries, the treatment of cardiac valvular diseases, dramatic improvement in handling of strokes, and hypertension. Witness the utter failure of heart transplantation only 15 years ago. The dramatic and nearly miraculous therapy failed because medicine lacked the means to control tissue rejection and there was inadequate knowledge of the lymphocytes and immunochemical mechanisms involved.
Laboratory researchers began incisive and penetrating research, using test animals at every step, to determine why the body rejected the foreign heart. In only a few years, a totally new discipline of immunochemistry emerged with the production of immune depressant compounds which now permits transplantation not only of hearts but of kidneys, livers and other organs. None of this would have been possible without living models in which to develop new hypotheses, and in which to thoroughly test evolving, radically new concepts and theories.
The future is promising, with opportunities for continuation of these dramatic advances in medicine, but only if animal research is available to achieve them.
