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The Politics of Animal Research
| Article
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15331 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1989 |
2,362 Words |
| Author
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Larry Horton
Larry Horton is associate vice president for public affairs at
Stanford University. |
An earnest couple from Apple Valley, Minnesota, recently wrote the following letter to the president of my University:
Dear President Kennedy,
Our literature tells us that you are giving primates
cocaine and heroin until they die. Why are you carrying on
this hideous research? Does nonhuman life have no value?
This research appears very similar to the German Death
Camps during the Second World War. And it's 'OK' because
primates are killed. Please reconsider.
That fifty-four word text illustrates some fundamental problems with today's activism against research using animals. On one level, the facts about our research are simply wrong: we are not doing any such research at Stanford. But there is a deeper problem. The historical perspective is inverted. The Nazi reference is dead wrong for two reasons: 1) it ignores the antivivisectionist strain in Nazi philosophy and policy, and 2) it ignores the actual conclusions drawn from Nazi brutality and embodied in the postwar Nuremberg Code.
Correcting the Auschwitz Analogy
In the first year the Nazis came to power, they took decisive action on antivivisection. An early Nazi propaganda piece extolling Hitler's virtues includes this accolade:
your Furher is the strongest opponent of any form of animal
torment; especially vivisection, which is the 'scientific'
torture of animals, and a heinous product of the jewish
-materialistic school of Medicine, about which he
states: 'in the national-socialist state, this situation
will end very soon.'
In a 1933 press release by the Reich Press Agency of the NSDAP, the importance of the Nazi policy was proclaimed as follows:
among
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