Plus ça change: anti-vivisection then and now.

Abstract

The word vivisection has an old-fashioned ring, and anti-vivisectionist is even more suggestive of quixotic Victorian crusades. Yet speakers at a recent conference on Standards for Research with Animals: Current Issues and Proposed Legislation * invoked both terms frequently. As its title suggests, the focus of the conference was hardly antiquarian, and the unusually large audience it attracted testified to the timeliness of the topic. Several hundred researchers and administrators from major universities and hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies, as well as a sprinkling of humane members, came to hear two days of panels and discussions. There was a flurry of last-minute registrations, and the organizers had to schedule extra sessions of the most popular workshops. The sponsor of the gathering, PRIM&R (Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research), a nonprofit organization based in Boston, regularly mounts conferences about ethical issues in biomedical Founded in 1974 by a group of scientists and lawyers, PRIM&R considers itself an advocacy group for appropriate and ethical research that will both improve the quality of life and benefit society at a time when public sentiment towards research has grown increasingly hostile.' The topic of the October conference was chosen because it seemed very timely in this context of concern, but even so, the organizers were surprised at the relative intensity of interest in the fate of experimental animals. The prospectus announced that the conference would explore the present conduct of research with animals in this country with emphasis on the ethical, scientific, medical and administrative aspects of such research. The actual agenda discussed by most of the speakers, however, was considerably more focused. They were primarily concerned (as was their audience, on the evidence of question periods and hallway conversations) with the threat of increased lay interference in the design and execution of scientific Although the tone of their discourse was overwhelmingly temperate and respectful, most of the scientific speakers assumed that humane criticism was rooted in either ignorance (lack of scientific understanding) or false priorities (sentimental preference for animals over humans). They also assumed that the current movement to regulate the experimental use of animals was new, even faddish, a product of the expanded liberal sensibilities of the 1960s and 1970s. Several speakers claimed that the publication of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals in 1975 had provoked a sudden rise in consciousness and activism.2 Both these assumptions tend to underestimate the seriousness of the animal protection movement, the strength of the response it evokes among the lay public, and the depth of its historical roots. That is not to suggest that current resistance to scientific experimentation on animals is a linear descendent of the 19th-century agitation that prompted the first British legislation about the scientific use of animals.3 Yet it is revealing that several contemporary organizations preserve the term anti-vivisection in their names, despite Harriet Ritvo is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Ritvo is working on a study of animals in Victorian culture. * Held in Boston, 3 and 4 October 1983.