A Cure in the Popping Cavies
Some people don't have ethical questions about experiments using living animals. At one extreme are people who know that the mere presence of animals in laboratory cages constitutes profound immorality, an abuse of human power over fellow beings. At the other end of the ethical spectrum are the people who see animals as merely animate test tubes, fair game for any kind of manipulation that might lead to something useful for humankind.
Most people aren't blessed with such unquestioning certainty. Take me, for example. I know I'm alive now thanks to medical advances made through animal experiments, and I'd be not only ungrateful but hypocritical to say those experiments were morally wrong. Yet I'm uncomfortable about the treatment that experimental animals undergo. I approve of efforts to ensure humane treatment for them, and favor using animals only when alternatives aren't possible.
What about experimenting on animals just to see what happens? That sounds frivolous and cruel; phrased that way, I'd have said it would be wrong. Yet at least one human being was given a chance at a healthy life because of such an experiment.
The story appears in the 11 October issue of Science. Neurologist Harold Klawans was studying the side effects from using L-dopa, a substance the body turns into dopamine. In Parkinson's disease, the brain cells that normally produce dopamine degenerate. Administering L-dopa helps replace the lost dopamine and improves the tremors and other symptoms of parkinsonism. A colleague suggested that serotonin, another neurally important substance that declines with parkinsonism, should also be checked. Klawans was testing L-dopa in animals---cavies, or guinea pigs; he asked a graduate student to test a serotonin precursor on other guinea pigs. The student wanted to know what would happen. Klawans told her he had no idea, "But let's see. That's research."
It sounds like a crass way to treat animals, and the results appeared to be useless---and from the animals viewpoint, bad. The guinea pigs bounced uncontrollably, as if they suffered from elephantine hiccups. The more serotonin precursor they received, the worse they bounced. Loud noises, like hand clapping, set them into mighty bounces. The graduate student suggested they had produced an animal model for popcorn, nothing more.
There the matter rested, an obscure bit of seemingly pointless research, for two years. Then Klawans was introduced to a patient who apparently had a horribly malfunctioning brain. The young woman could not keep her eyes steady---they danced and twitched along with other uncontrollable jerking motions that made it impossible for her to walk. She could crawl, but badly. Sometimes when crawling, her limbs contracted so that she jumped off the floor. Then she looked like a kernel of popcorn in a pan.
Klawans had seen that peculiar bouncing before. He clapped his hands. The girl bounced. Klawans bet that like the guinea pigs, his patient was somehow overloading her nervous system with serotonin.
He was right. The source of her difficulty was not in her brain but in her chest, where a tumor known as a neuroblastoma was found. The neuroblastoma was secreting a substance like the serotonin precursor his student had used on the guinea pigs. The tumor was removed, and the girl was cured.
Klawans' experience was recounted by the Director of the Office of Animal Research Issues in the federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration. His work demands collecting such anecdotes and analyzing what they mean. The message he finds in the matter of the bouncing guinea pigs is that research based on animal experiments should have as few impediments as possible, though it must proceed as humanely as possible.
That sounds good enough, maybe, until one stops to worry about exactly what's possible and how those two aims conflict. But at least one young woman, and her family, can be grateful that the lines were drawn as they were with the bouncing guinea pigs.
