Scientists that have to do the researching on animals is probably hard on their souls. But you know what else is hard on the soul? Walking through the Children's Hospital on my way to work and seeing mothers bringing in their four-year old kids for Chemo Therapy.
Just to clarify:
By law, the procedure must be done in the most painless way possible, using the least number of animals possible, with the best available techniques. Vivisection without sufficient analgesia to prevent perception of pain would be exceedingly rare, especially on animals "above" mice and rats.
Any research involving stents, for example, would be done with proper anesthesia administered by a laboratory animal veterinarian, just as it would be with a human receiving a stent.
Saying "at the end, if they haven't died, they are given a lethal injection" is also misleading. An endpoint must be clearly defined in the paperwork submitted to the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, and it is not acceptable for animals to "die" as a result of a procedure if that procedure is not specifically intended to cause death (and if it is, the researcher would need a very strong justification.) If an animal appears at risk of dying from the procedure, it must be removed from the experiment and either treated or euthanized.
As far as "a significant amount" of research being BS: if anyone is concerned about this (and I personally am) you should become active in learning about how you can improve the IACUC committees at the universities and labs near you. Each state has its own rules, but generally speaking the committee consists of a veterinarian, a researcher, and at least one member of the public not affiliated in any other way with the research institution.
Unfortunately, most of these people are overworked, undertrained and underpaid for what they do. I've sat in many IACUC meetings, and I've seen for myself that the IACUC is not effective. Let me take a step back and talk about what the IACUC is: they are a committee at a particular institution that must review every research proposal that involves animals, and they must sign off that it is okay for that research to be done. Unfortunately, doing a good job at this would mean that you must 1) have a background in statistics to ensure that research is minimizing the number of animals without compromising data (most lab animal vets do not have such a background), 2) you must be familiar with the literature or you must become familiar with the literature of each little sub-specialty of research to ensure that every investigation is likely to provide new information; finally, 3) you must have sufficient time to apply 1) and 2) to every single request that comes across your desk.
At the institutions I've worked with, the research is split among IACUC members for an initial inspection-- a typical workload may consist of 10-30 proposals each week per person. The IACUC member must read each of the proposals, decide if all the legal requirements are met (including statistical, analgesic, etc issues), and if not, flag it for discussion later. Each week, the IACUC will then meet, and each person will give a rundown of their cases. Now you have 3-10 people in a room (some states have big IACUCs, some small) and they must go over dozens of cases. The person originally assigned the case will run it by the group really quickly. If they had a concern, they discuss it with the committee and decide what changes need to be made and the most tactful way to bring this to the attention of the researcher.
I've spent a number of years around IACUC committees and helping IACUC members review their stuff, and I've never seen any member who could calculate p-values or do a T-Test. I've never seen one search the literature for more than 5 minutes for a duplicate or near-duplicate paper.
I'm not trashing IACUCs here-- it's not their fault. Basically they are given an impossible job. The lab animal veterinarian, for example, generally has a full-time job caring for thousands of animals at a big research institution. Other than the hour they spend in a formal meeting, the rest of their job is done whenever possible between animal care tasks.
I feel very strongly that IACUCs should be bigger, they should have time mandated during which to review their paperwork, and that each committee should have a statistician or someone who the public can trust to be highly proficient in statistics on it. Until this happens, regulatory oversight will be impossible in any realistic sense. via pet_medic
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