Question: Do you harm animals in your work?

Ee Lyn Lim answered on 14 Jun 2013:

Sadly I’ll have to say yes. This is a very difficult question to answer, not least because there are so many ways to look at it. I’ll tell you why I personally believe it is the right thing to do, and above that, what steps we take to make sure that no animal we work on ever goes to waste, or suffers unnecessarily.

Animals are necessary in many areas of research because they allow us to study things that can’t be studied in humans. For example, cancer cells from a human patient often contain so many mutations that it’s impossible to tell what’s causing which effect. Using mice, we can change one gene at a time and learn what each of them do, so we can point out the main culprit behind the cancer and design a drug against it. Even at that stage we only know for sure that a drug does what we want it to do if it’s worked in a mouse. Many mice are involved in answering each question, but the results could help just as many human patients. In some rare, wonderful cases, we can use data we learned from mice years ago to treat a new disease in humans – this has happened in my department, where doctors have come asking about a patient with a serious lung infection and given only 3 weeks to live – and we have been able to say, we had some mice which were ill in the same way, so we think he might have this mutation, and this drug might work to cure him.

Many people believe, though, that we shouldn’t use animals to achieve things we can’t achieve by ourselves, because the life of a mouse is as valuable as the life of a human. Of course that is true and good. But the question then is, should we allow other humans to die of injury and disease, while we know that we are able to find a cure? There is no correct answer to this dilemma, and you can only decide for yourself which path to choose, and why. I believe that humans are just one species among all the species of living things in the world, and that, as a member of this species, I should do everything I can to help this species survive. Maybe it seems unfair to use modern technology against animals, but human intellect is also a product of nature, and there is no reason not to use it to the best effect. Maybe it seems unfair to put a human life above a mouse’s, but I don’t have the power to save both…and I am not a mouse.

Now that I’ve decided how I feel about working with animals, I make sure that my work does as little harm as possible to the animals. Here in Europe there are three strict principles that we must follow when we design experiments that use animals – we must replace animals with other models (like cells in a dish) if that will give us equal results, we must reduce the number of animals used to the bare minimum, and we must refine our experiments to cause the least discomfort possible. Everything about the animals, like how big their cages should be or how they should be held during the experiment, has had a lot of thought from people who study animal behaviour, so that we try to be as considerate as we can possibly be.