• Question: If you were working in an important project would you harm animals?

    Asked by Andrea Echeverria to Andrew, Dan, Emilia, Helen, Katy, LauraAnne, Stephanie on 13 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Katy Griggs

      Katy Griggs answered on 13 Nov 2016:

      I personally have never done animal work. I work only with humans understanding how the body works.

    • Photo: Helen Hanstock

      Helen Hanstock answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      We have had this question a lot and whilst we have all said that we only work with humans I think that perhaps it needs addressing from an ethical standpoint.

      I have used animals. My university used animals to teach physiology for undergraduate labs. Sparingly, but it happened.

      There is much debate about how much experiments in animals relate to what actually happens in humans. But there are also many experiments we just can’t do on humans (ethically and practically) that have led to some really big discoveries in medicine.

      Animals don’t tend to be used in sports science very much because it is hard to ethically justify harming animals to improve human performance (and note that animal experiments have to pass through very rigorous ethical checks before they can take place). Ethics committees require that the experiments are designed so that animals suffer as little as possible. In studies of basic physiology and of major diseases such as obesity, psychological illness, cardiovascular disease and cancer animal models have been used extensively to improve our knowledge and understanding and test new drugs before they are tested in clinical trials on humans.

      One thing you can do with animals is breed several generations of mice, for example, selectively and very quickly that have (or don’t have) a particular trait or gene so that you can see how the animal’s physiology is affected by the loss of a particular gene/protein. This is something that would be virtually impossible to do in humans.

      So, I am not ethically opposed to animal experiments because they can ONLY be carried out if the idea can’t be tested in any other way. Because of this they usually provide unique understanding of the mechanism of disease or test a potential cure to disease.

      But as I said before I am not engaged in animal testing myself and I am personally much more interested in working closed to the ‘end-result’ by testing my ideas with humans.

    • Photo: LauraAnne Furlong

      LauraAnne Furlong answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      I haven’t worked with animals either, because my research looks at how muscles work in the human body. There is research done by others – several years ago before we had the technology we have today – which has looked at how animal muscles and tendon adapt to use and not being used. As Helen has pointed out though, this research is only done when there is no other way of doing so. The guidelines on this are very strict so animals don’t suffer unnecessarily.

      We now know that muscles and tendons behave differently in humans, because of where and how they attach and join bones, their lengths and shapes. We have computer programmes which allow us to make predictions about what will happen as we move. As a result, for the things I am currently working on, I don’t need to harm any animals.

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