[0:11]I'd like to start by asking you a simple question, and if you could raise your hand. How many of you have pets, or used to have pets? Wow, most of the audience, myself included. I'd like you to imagine your pet now, your dog, cat, hamster, or perhaps even a fantail goldfish, like Polygon, my companion about a decade ago. And in case you're wondering, she is called Polygon because she had this octagonal shape on her gill. I'd often sit entranced by her aquarium as she so completely absorbed in her world. And I think it's fair to say that many of us form a very deep emotional connection with our pets. We revel in their personality traits, uniqueness, and intelligence. And some of us might have felt the heartbreak of the loss of that pet. But I'd now like you to imagine if you were instructed to perform a scientific procedure on that pet. A procedure known to inflict pain or lasting suffering. You may be required to administer a toxin, or perform a surgery that would lead to debilitating disease. And at the end of the experiment, you would have to euthanize that animal and harvest its tissue. Now, obviously, to most of us, this would be a deeply unsettling, even disgusting thought. After all, we think of our pets as family members. It also clashes with our intuitions about animals, their capacity to suffer, their similarities to humans. And yet, this is the reality for tens of thousands of scientists, using millions of animals worldwide. In the US alone, about 800,000 dogs, cats, and monkeys, are used in research. A figure that pales in comparison to the estimated tens of millions of rats, mice, birds, and fish, animal groups that are specifically excluded from the US federal Animal Welfare Act. And when you think about it, how we relate to other animals is full of contradictions. We cherish some as pets, but relish others for their meats, and extinguish more as pests. The intelligence of a pig might rival that of a three-year-old child, and yet by rationalizing its role as food, we may place their sentience below that of the dogs and cats we have as pets. So it's perhaps hardly surprising then that some of these dissonances also extend into our culture of animal testing. Animal testing is deeply embedded in our scientific traditions, going back at least to the 2nd century AD, with Galen's vivisections on pigs and a variety of other animals.
[2:53]It's a method we've relied on, refined, and taught through generations of philosophers and scientists across the centuries. And yet, animal testing is an interesting topic. It's a highly contentious both within and outside the scientific communities. What's striking is the divide between public opinion and views that are held within the community there. In 2015, a Pew Research Center study found that while 87% of scientists affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science supported animal testing, that figure was only 47% of US adults. What's even more striking is that the views of students differ from those of their professors within academia. A 2019 poll at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that while 35% of students thought there was something wrong with animal testing, that figure had dropped to 20% of faculty. A figure even lower in biology faculty compared to those in the humanities. So what is it? Why is it that individuals' views when they go through academia on animal testing seem to change? Well, to see how that might pan out, I'd invite you to remember what it might have been like to step into the world of biology for the first time. Perhaps at school, you might remember your anatomy classes in biology, faced with a tray with a frog, say, or a rabbit laid out for dissection. Usually not made out of wool, though, I would add. Now, it's presented something as a hands-on way to learn the machinery of living systems. And while you might have felt a bit uncomfortable about doing it, you don't really see any opposition to it. And without rapidly approaching end of semester exam, you decide to go ahead with it. Now, fast forward to college, and you might now be sitting in lectures between half-sipped cups of coffee, maybe coming in at five minutes late at the back of the lecture hall, where experiments from on animals are flitted on and off screen. And in the articles and textbooks you'll read, the results of those experiments and manipulations might be presented as cartoonish illustrations. Perhaps a bit like these, some figures as I took from one of the, one of the textbooks we used to teach in your biology class here at Emory. As an undergraduate, you might also get accustomed to the full life cycle of an animal experiment, from breeding, through to euthanasia, or sacking. The language you might get used to using. You also get accustomed to reading these cage card items. You get accustomed to referring to animals by means of breeding dates, experimental condition, and cage number. Students are often discouraged from naming their animals. So this objectification of animals, in addition to some of the surrounding scholastic pressures that you're under continuously as a student in biology, may make us think about and act on animals in ways that might have seemed inconceivable to us before we came into academia. So how much of a problem is this chronic exposure to animal testing? Well, we know that it can desensitize students, as it can researchers. In fact, past surveys of students and researchers show that compared to counterparts in non-animal labs, they're more likely to experience elevated distress and anxiety associated with working with animals. And in the long-term, burnout. One particular student, for example, said, I'm a student, I for the first time I saw my labmates working with mice, and when I helped with dissections, I went home and cried. Since then, I've managed to compartmentalize my feelings towards them, and didn't break down when I gassed three to learn cervical dislocation. So students and researchers face a bind. On the one hand, they might feel attention between their ethical values and what they're being asked to do or learn. But on the other, they feel that by not engaging in these practices, it might somehow derail their career or research objectives. Those that they see rely on animal models. Another student said, I'm a biology student, and I have to decide on my specialty for next year. I want to go in biomedical sciences, but I would be required to experiment on animals. I don't really know how I feel about that, I love animals, but I also want to help people get cured. I don't know if I am strong enough. And even now, it's feels like something of a mouse in the room, as it were. A topic that's hard to discuss, whether it be with your principal investigator, your PI, or even with other lab mates. You either find ways to cope with it, or you choose another field. And as a student in cell biology, who later moved into neuroscience in my Master's and now PhD, I witnessed this firsthand. In lectures that taught both the modern day and classical experiments in neuroscience, the likes of Hubel and Wiesel's work in cats, seminal to understanding of the visual system. Or Thomas Graham Brown's work in cats and dogs whose spinal cords had been severed to study the motor system. And while powerful experiments, there's rarely, it was rarely accompanied by an ethical discussion about, firstly, the animal morbidity the experiments involved, or if we were to design the experiments afresh, how we might have done so in a way that avoided it. I'm reminded in one particular instance, as a Master's student, I was working on mouse pups between the ages of zero and two weeks. And during that time, I struggled with a paradox. A paradox of, on the one hand, performing procedures that I could see visibly causing suffering, to both the mothers and the pups, but on the other hand, seeing this suffering as necessary for the biomedical research that could advance human health. And I'm reminded of one instance in particular during that time, when going over to one of the lab fridges to collect a sample, I was confronted with this mass of whole vial brain, whole vials filled with mouse brains, seemingly flow out of a fridge and roll across the floor. It was a sobering reminder of the costs of scientific progress, to say the least. But it was also a moment that I realized that I had a choice. That I could go down that path, force myself to normalize this level of periodic use of animals and eventually killing those animals, or I could find an alternative. An alternative that didn't involve animals. And was a path that led me from working on young mice, as you see here, to working with young humans at the Marcus Autism Center where I'm now doing my PhD. But how do we resolve this paradox? Are we forever doomed to trade animal suffering for human well-being? To acknowledge the rich mental lives of these animals, while also banning human interests at their expense? Well, ethical values in research continuously evolve at a stunning pace, sometimes. Once, it was considered more permissible to perform experiments on humans, non-consenting humans. We heard earlier about the Tuskegee syphilis trials. But as a result of ethical and legal reform, we no longer perform those experiments. And some would argue, that a similar ethical turning point should happen when it applies to other animals, too. But the debate is complicated, and it's complicated by the fact that animals have been, have been seminal in several of our scientific discoveries throughout the past and current century. The development of the polio vaccine on the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to name a few. But for every success with animal models, there have also been the many unstated failures and defeats. In pharma, about 95% of drugs that are developed in pre-clinical animal models, never make it to the intended human population. And much more of that research isn't published. So we it raises an important question, which is how much of the animal research that we do, is important for human health, and how much of it persists due to historical precedent? By addressing this question, it will put us in a position where we can actually reduce much of our reliance on animal models. For example, a Dutch study investigated 110 research projects, and found that often researchers overwhelmingly chose an animal model not on the basis of its relevance to the research question, but on the availability of existing resources, both institutional and expertise. And while, of course, animal models are not yet over-placeable in all aspects of research, we should feel ethically and scientifically compelled to exhaust all those options before we use animals as a last resort. And fortunately, this paradox that we've been facing, is not a fixed reality. It's one that's continuously redefined by emergent technologies. And I'm pleased to say in the 21st century, we have an exciting armory of emergent technologies, both in biomedical work, as well as our work in computational science. I'd like to touch on two of those main approaches now. The first of these are organoids. Oh yes, and this is the Belmont Report, very important. Organoids are foundational components of our work in molecular science. They allow researchers to capture complex cellular interaction in a 3D environment. The power of organoids is that stem cells can be taken from any participant and made to self-assemble into a variety of different organs. And so far, we've been able to create brain organoids, lung organoids, skin organoids. The beauty with these mini organs is that they are actually quite representative of the organs that they try to capture, all within human models. They've already been applied, for example, to study Alzheimer's disease or Zika virus infection you see on the right here. But beyond brain organoids, we've also been able to use organoids to replace our reliance on models that have used rabbits in the past. For example, in testing cosmetics by means of skin grafts, creative technologies that can take stem cells from humans to derive these models. And I'm proud to say that here at Emory University, we even have an organoid hub. A central resource for scientists to be able to study the nervous system in both that disease and in health. The second of these approaches relates are organs on a chip. Like the first, they use cell culture, but combine us with fabricated materials in order to capture a complex set of interactions between different tissue types. In fact, you can even string together different organ types including lung, heart, bone, skin, combine it into a type of a vascular apparatus and even air flow, allowing you to capture complex organ interactions on a dish. The power of this technology is that it is also cheaper than animal regulatory testing, and allows you much faster throughput of, for example, testing drug body interactions. For example, a team at Columbia University was able to use this multi-organ on a chip to test a variety of drugs of liver drugs including doxorubicin, finding very it's experiment of experimental clearance that were comparable to when they were tested in human subjects. Another team at the Vison Institute, a forerunner in developing lung on a chip models, used such a model like this in order to develop and screen for treatments during the course of the pandemic, allowing for a much faster throughput of treatments against the fight of COVID-19. And I'm excited to say that many areas that historically relied on animal testing, especially in cosmetics and environmental toxicology, have now shifted to the use of these emergent technologies. For example, Canada recently became the 44th country to ban cosmetics testing. In the US, eight states so far no longer use cosmetics in animals. They've also updated their environmental protection laws to screen out animal testing when it comes to the environment. And across the world, a number of centers have been founded in order to evaluate alternatives to animals. In the states, for example, we have the alternative fund for animal research. So where do we go from here? Where animal testing is a debate that remains prevalent both societally and scientifically, but one that you all have a say in. By looking at polls collected from the public, a series of emerging trends come about. The first of these is that animal testing is usually acceptable only when it's done for medical purposes, when it can only be done in non-human animals, translates well to human health, and minimizes the amount of animal suffering involved. In contrast, the approach we often use when it comes to animal testing are the three Rs, which are replacing the existing models we have with animals and to online, into animal alternatives, reducing the number of animals we use, and refining those approaches to minimize the suffering involved. By taking input information from our public and allowing that to guide when we consider that research to be permissible and when it is not permissible, we can drive changes in our legislation in order to advocate for research that will advance you, the target consumer. For example, some scientists have even advocated for a fourth R, responsibility, ensuring that the work that we do has a clear link to the broader societal impact. Of course, core to this model is also individual action. And perhaps the lowest hanging fruit comes in cosmetics. By looking out for these labels, you can ensure that your choice of banding doesn't involve products that were tested on animals. I'd like to end by starting the importance of students in this discussion. By proportion, undergraduates and graduate students make up the bulk of work that's done in science in the lab. Simply by choosing to incorporate animal testing, animal choices of animal models into your selection of a lab, questioning outdated procedures and pushing for those alternatives where they exist. You can drive real material change at all levels of how science is funded and conducted. Wouldn't it be great if we could do our research, let's say come home from the lab, put your lab coat up, and not have to feel this compartmentalization between the animals that you use in your research and the pets that you might have at home. If the two could sit readily in your mind. It's a bold and perhaps uncharted territory, but one that I think our collective resources are very well placed to put us in.
