Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

Letter: Lab expansion wrong

Posted on January 8, 2009January 9, 2009 by Staff

UNC is expanding its animal research labs and storage facilities. This is as backwards as ignoring solar energy to build more coal-burning power plants, since medical advances have rendered most animal research outdated. In 2008 Medical News Today reported advancements in human brain imaging were proving better at devising pain management for conditions like osteoarthritis than decades of animal research. Cancer research projects using complex 3D human cell cultures and mathematical modeling are also proving superior to animal experiments. In 2008 CNN Health ran the headline “Scientist: Stem cells could end animal testing,” citing the superiority of human stem cell research to animal research. Using human cell tissue to develop vaccines is also considered safer than using animals, since undetected animal viruses may jump the species barrier (think SARS). In 2007 the US National Academy of Sciences recommended less reliance on animals in toxicology studies and more focus on in vitro methods using cells “preferably of human origin” in order to generate “more relevant data.” In 2004 the British Medical Journal published an article [titled] “Where is the evidence that animal research benefits humans?,” stating animal research had inherent flaws and that funding for animal research was holding back clinical research and medical innovations.
The fact is, animal research doesn’t carry over well to humans. For example, the arthritis drug Vioxx tested safe and even beneficial to the heart in animal tests but was pulled from the market after causing an estimated 320,000 cases of heart attacks and strokes in humans. And sometimes it goes the other way. For example, penicillin was discovered in 1929 but wasn’t used until 1939 because its failure to cure infected rabbits had convinced researchers it was worthless. There are hundreds of similar examples.

So UNC’s expansion of its animal research and storage facilities gives us the following: outdated medical research; needless animal suffering (ever wonder why there’s not more discussion on this?); air pollution from incinerators used to burn the dead bodies of hundreds of animals; and potential harm to our environment and possibly humans due to the spraying of the treated (but not treated to drinking level safety) animal research waste water into our forests.

Why does our government continue doling out grants (your tax dollars) for outdated animal research? The Medical Research Modernization Committee has suggested part of the problem is resistance to change (like we’ve seen in the energy sector). But maybe a bigger question is why aren’t local activist groups devising a plan of action to lobby legislators in Raleigh on this issue?

Robin Cutson
Chapel Hill

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme