Scientists Suggest Federal Penalties for the Theft of Laboratory Animals
When Walter Randall learned he had to undergo quadruple bypass surgery, he knew he was lucky that “it happened to me in 1982 and not five years earlier.”
Randall, a professor of physiology at Loyola University of Chicago, has studied the heart for 25 years and after his successful operation, he took a personal interest in how the cardiac surgeon was able to save lives, including his own.
“I looked at advances leading up to bypass surgery. I traced literally hundreds of them. Every individual advance and particularly (the ones) early on” were dependent on the use of laboratory animals, Randall said.
Randall expressed concern about the Saturday morning raid at UC Riverside’s scientific laboratories, where a group calling itself the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) took approximately 260 research animals.
“It’s a tragic misdirection of emotional excitement,” he said. “I can understand people being emotionally involved . . . (but) they are not informed about what they are doing.” Randall was at the annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology at the Anaheim Convention Center on Monday to share with fellow researchers his research isolating the nerve cell in a dog’s heart that sends impulses from the atrium to the ventricle. Because “the human heart operates so much like the dog’s,” Randall said that he hopes his finding will help cardiologists and heart surgeons.
Randall said the dogs he used for his research were anesthetized while he operated on them and then put to sleep. The dogs had to be killed, he said, because “in order to get that kind of information, I had to preserve the heart, I had to cut up the heart.”
Researchers reacted to the animal theft with ‘bewilderment and dismay.’
At a press conference Monday, Randall and three other scientists called for federal criminal penalties for acts of interference in laboratories using research animals, such as the one at UC Riverside. Robert Krauss, executive director of the scientists’ group, said such break-ins should be made a federal offense because thefts represent “almost a national conspiracy.”
In the past few years, nearly two dozen similar raids on laboratory facilities that use animals have occurred in the United States, Great Britain and Canada.
At a press conference at UC Riverside on Monday, campus law enforcement officials released a composite drawing of a man they believe may have been connected with the break-in. These authorities said an unidentified student working late Friday night saw the man wearing a white lab coat in the biology department building. Based on physical evidence collected, investigators believe six to eight people were involved.
A university official said that the raid caused “several hundreds of thousands of dollars” worth of damage and that research has been set back years.
The animals taken included one rare monkey, cats, rabbits, mice and gerbils. The ALF said the animals had been subjected to cruel and unnecessary practices. University scientists denied the charges and said they were concerned about the animals current well-being.
UC Irvine, which has a medical school and the largest medical research concentration in Orange County, has long utilized research animals, according to Joel Don, a campus public information official. “About 90% of our research animals are rodents, such as rats and mice,” he said. “The remaining 10% includes some rabbits and a few cats and dogs.”
Don said the research animals are necessary for the campus’s research and medical teaching missions. The animals come from breeding farms, he said, pointing out that the Orange County Board of Supervisors has banned disposition of unclaimed animals from pounds to any research facility.
Don said the UCI research animals are kept on campus and are used by the College of Medicine, by various biological sciences and the UCI Medical Center in the city of Orange.
Krauss described the scientific community’s reaction to the UC Riverside incident as one of “bewilderment and dismay. Scientists aren’t used to fighting these battles, we don’t want to fight them.”
Dr. Frank Fitch, an immunologist and professor of pathology at the University of Chicago, said that laboratory raids should be made a federal offense because such research is often funded by the federal government. “All taxpayers suffer from these break-ins,” he added.
Fitch said that he is using mice and rats to investigate the body’s immune system. If his laboratory were raided, it could destroy months of work, he said, adding that polio vaccine and insulin for the treatment of diabetes would never have been developed without the use of laboratory animals.
Randall said that approximately 300,000 people in the United States underwent some kind of bypass surgery last year. Without the advances made by researchers using laboratory animals, he said, “A large fraction simply would not be here. I simply would not be here.”
