Wisconsin Public Television University Place UW Animal Research Forum  Lawrence Hansen, "Ethics and Efficacy of Experimentation on Animals"  February 17, 2011 UP556      cc >> Eric Sandreng: The purpose is to increase public discussion and understanding of issues surrounding animal research and to provide an opportunity for interested parties, and there are a lot of interested parties in this city, to discuss the complex issues that are associated with use of animals in research. Now animals in research is a very emotional issue. It's a very complicated issue. Passions run high and I think it's remarkable that we find ourselves in a state right now where this is probably the least contentious issue that's being discussed. But maybe that's a good start. That's really where we want to take this anyway. So there is a long list of people that I would like thank, and I'll do by saying thank you, people. But I do want to point out a few people. There was a forum planning group that was helping to put this together, and although the people on the group have quite different perspectives regarding the use of animals in research, we share tremendous passion about that issue. And actually we also share a very strong desire to bring this issue out into the public to have discussions like that. 

And I would like those of you who are here from that forum to stand up for a minute, please. [APPLAUSE] Thank you all very much. Tonight, we're going to hear from Dr. Larry Hansen, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Diego. I will let him do most of the introducing. And after he is finished speaking, we will have a chance to ask and have Larry answer or try to answer questions. The purpose, as I said, one of the purposes of this forum is to really try to reach an understanding, so we are inviting speakers that come at the issues of animals and research from multiple perspectives. So I would encourage you all to clap for the speaker and those you who agree with him can cheer and then the others, try to ask some probing questions. Let's really try to have an outstanding discussion about this. Again, that's really part of what this is all for. With that, I will mention at the end that I will be kind of running the questions at the end, and I've seen in the past there are times where people get up and give mini lecture, either as a preface to a question and maybe that's all they're doing, and I'll try to discourage that tonight. 

Try to keep your questions to under about 30 seconds. And if it's getting a bit long, I may stand up. Otherwise I'm ready now to turn it over to our speaker, and I'm very honored to have you as the kick-off speaker to this forum. Thank you, Larry. [APPLAUSE] >> Lawrence Hansen: Thank you very much. I feel very honored to be the initial speaker for this, I think very important, forum. And I appreciate the privilege of getting a chance to talk to you people about something that matters a lot to me. And it's funny, I find myself kind of nervous and anxious about this. I am a blatherer by trade. I talk all the time. 

And yet when I find myself talking about animal welfare issues and animal research, it just sort of goes up a notch, and I find myself much more emotional about it than when I'm teaching generic neuropathology or neuroanatomy. So you have to forgive me if I sound more anxious than usual. Trust me, I could bore the pants off of you if we were talking about anything over than animals and research. I want to start by tooting my own horn. There are few more obnoxious sounds than someone tooting their own horn. And so I blame this on my wife because she was helping me prepare this, and she said, first of all, you have to show them your credentials. And I said, but that's very self-aggrandizing and it's kind of embarrassing. And she goes, trust me, no one will pay any attention to you unless you establish your credentials; I'm married to you and I don't pay any attention to you. [LAUGHTER] So you have to tell them why you have an opinion about this as a result of your life experience and research and medicine. And I was having a discussion with some members of the panel earlier about words and how important words are, and I'm kind of a word nut, as a matter of fact, and probably because I was a literature major. 

And so words are a big deal to me. And I always teach by going back to the etymology of words, and I always say if you have to have a conflict about what a word means, we'll go to the dictionary. And Noah Webster is trump in what a word actually means. The interesting thing about words, of course, is that words don't just describe reality, words create reality. And people know that and they try to frame arguments and they try to influence conclusions by the way words are used. So we have to be very careful about words. But I'm going to be using some words today that will be, some people would say, are inflammatory or emotional, and so every time that happens we're going to go back and touch base with what the dictionary definition is and see if that isn't a valid application of word. Speaking of words, credentials comes from the same root as credibility and credence and Latin for trustworthiness. So this is supposed to make you trust me because I've been looking at medical practice and I've been looking at teaching and research for a long time. The medical, oops, I didn't mean to do that. 

The thing about credentials, I like credentials, they get you a job and then they get you promotions and all, but every once and a while they take you to strange places like Madison, Wisconsin, in the dead of winter. And the reason I've gotten involved in animal issues is some medical students initially came up to me when I was teaching medical students, and I also practice medicine, and these students at UCSD, and all of the stuff that I'm talking about that I can vouch for is from UCSD. I have reason to believe that much of it is similar to what goes on at the University of Wisconsin, but I want to stipulate that I can be an expert on the University of California use of animals and a couple other contexts. And I will defer to local authorities as to whether that applies to what's going on at the University of Wisconsin. Anyhow, at UCSD some medical students came up to me and said you make no secret for your love of dogs, do you know they're still killing dogs in freshman physiology and pharmacology. And I said, no, I didn't know that. And then they asked me, well you practice medicine, they tell us that you need to kill these dogs in order to be a doctor, and we want to know if that's true. And I said, no, it's clearly not true. And one of my guilty secrets in the past is when I was a medical student I killed dogs. I killed a dog in physiology and I killed another dog in surgery because they told me to do it, and I was just too gutless to stand up to authority figures at the time. 

And now that I've been practicing medicine for a long time, I realize how unnecessary that was. I often get stumped by a diagnosis. I do clinical pathology. I look at brain tumors from all over the community and even all over the world actually. So I'm something of an expert in brain tumors, and sometimes I get a brain tumor and I don't know what it is. And I have to show it to colleagues and do special stains and I have to weasel and equivocate, and I've never been in a clinical situation where I've thought if I only killed more dogs I'd be able to help this patient. So I told the students, no, you don't need to kill dogs to be a doctor but don't take my word for it. So we organized a Doctors Against Dogs Lab, and we got 300 San Diego physicians to sign a petition urging the physiology and pharmacology faculty not to kill dogs. We said, we're it doctors, we know you don't need to do this, don't kill the dogs. But they were PhDs and they thought they knew what it took to be an MD. 

And we said, you're not even doctors, not real doctors, no offense, but you don't practice medicine. And it got to be a big brouhaha. So that's how I got started in animals. And then some notoriety came from that, and I was contacted by an animal welfare group that asked me to look at a grant that contended it was going to help find the cause and cure of Alzheimer's disease. And it was a primate vivisection grant, and it had to do with looking at the visual pursuit, smooth visual pursuit and the vestibulo-ocular reflex. And I'm going to talk about that at some length because I got a copy of the grant and I read it and I realized they had to work hard to find a system less related to Alzheimer's disease than the vestibulo-ocular reflex and smooth visual pursuit. It has nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease. So I went up to San Francisco and tried to persuade their board of supervisors to prohibit this particular experiment that was going on at UCSF. It's a funny paradox. The two places that I always think of as the most liberal, the most knee-jerk liberal places are the People's Republic of Berkeley around San Francisco and the People's Republic of Madison. 

And those are the two places where they do the most primate vivisection. It seems very odd to me. Anyhow, so that's how I got involved in all this stuff. The tenure is kind of nice. It allows me to come here and make these kinds of presentations and they can't fire me. So that's how I got started with this. And so today I want to talk about the ethics and efficacy of experimentation on animals, common ground or no man's land. Three things. Ethics, is it right or wrong? It is a good thing to do or is it a bad thing to do? And efficacy is, does it work? Does it produce the result that it promises to produce? If a primate vivisection experiment is sold as this is going to help find the cause and cure of Alzheimer's disease, is there any evidence that that's true? And wouldn't that change our final conclusion? Do the ends justify the means? Basically the ethics of doing research on animals, as far as I can tell, always come down to do the ends justify the means. So we have so know what are the ends. 

Are the ends to learn more about visual tracking? Are the ends to learn more about the vestibulo-ocular reflex? Are the ends to increase our basic neuroscience knowledge of neurophysiology? And if those are the ends, then the question is, is it worth making the monkeys go through some pretty horrible experiences to do that? Or do you want to raise the ante and say, well, no, the ends are to cure human diseases, and if this will cure human disease maybe we would be willing to do something to monkey that we wouldn't be willing to do if it was just to find out more about the neurophysiology of the vestibulo-ocular reflex. So that's efficacy. Does it work or not? And experimentation on animals, again I wanted define terms very carefully, we're only concerned with experiments that hurt animals. Nobody cares, and in fact we kind of like if Jane Goodall wants to crouch behind a bush and take notes on what the chimps in Gambi are doing. And I know a guy who does experiments on dog intelligence and people bring their dogs. And they love it. It's like when you do infant development experiments and people bring their babies and they find out how smart their babies are. So nobody cares. That's great. Love those experiments. 

We're only concerned with experiments that harm animals, physically, which is vivisection, and I'll define that in a minute, or psychologically. Harry Harlow is a big hero around here I notice. But he really did pretty horrible things. He did what I think of as psychological vivisection. He managed to prove that you can make a monkey fearful, neurotic, miserable, almost suicidal, and he proved that that happens when babies don't have their mothers. And in California the kids would kind of go, well duh. But anyhow, I think some psychological treatment of animals amounts to psychological vivisection, but that's kind of a stretch for the definition. So let's define our terms. Ethics of experimentation on animals. We're first going to look at the ethics, is it right to do this or is it wrong to do this? And then we're going to look at the efficacy. 

Do the experiments produce the promised results? So first of all, history gives us no reason, no reason to think that the ethics of scientists are any better than the ethics of nonscientists. Quite the opposite, in fact. You can do some very efficacious science that's totally unethical. And you probably are all familiar with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the Guatemalan syphilis experiments and the Willowbrook hepatitis experiments. And in my field there's a disease called Hallervorden-Spatz disease which was named after Dr. Hallervorden, who was a Nazis, no hyperbole, no exaggeration, really a Nazi doctor. And he was interested in some mentally impaired children. And as long as they were exterminating them anyway he said, listen, boys, bring me those kids' brains. And he published 12 papers after the war and it was good science. There's no doubt about it; it was good science. It was valid science. 

We still know that the disease that he described causes certain signs and symptoms. The confusion comes when we start talking about good science but science isn't good or bad. Science is an amoral enterprise. Science, when we talk about good science what we really mean is valid science, reproducible science, science that teaches us something about the way the world or the way animals or the way humans work. That's valid science. But it gets confusing when we start to say that's good science. It's not good in the moral or ethical sense, it's simply valid science. And efficacy and ethics are uncorrelated domains. There's no reason to think as efficacy goes up, ethics goes up or that it goes down. There's no relationship at all. 

It might be very efficacious if somebody really annoys you to shoot them in the head. That's very efficacious but it's not very ethical. So there's no relation. No inherent relationship between ethics and efficacy. And it's confusing to talk about good science versus bad science when people think good and bad means right or wrong. And then if I was making these slides again, I think I would have made a separate slide with just this sentence on it and I would highlight and underline it and put an asterisk by it. That like-minded people in groups gravitate to the more extreme positions held in common. And I think that's the foundation of all of this conflict. And that was discovered by psychologists, group psychologists, and they didn't bolt anybody into a chair or drill any holes in their skulls or anything. They did very ethical experiments, and they found it's a little bit counterintuitive but you get like-minded people and they don't gravitate towards a bell curve in the middle of their commonalities. 

They skew to the far left or to the far right. It's a little funny. So liberals who only hang out with liberals don't end up being sort of moderately left of center, they become very liberal. And the same thing with conservatives. And if you don't believe that, all you have to do is channel surf over to Keith Olbermann for a while. And he's funny. I enjoy Keith Olbermann. And he's ranting and raving and he's frothing at the mouth about liberal causes. And then, for a change of pace, you can go listen to Glenn Beck. And you realize oh, my God, like-minded people in groups gravitate to extreme positions. 

And they've lost their reality testing. And I think that explains a lot of what goes on in what I call vivisection, and I'll define that term in a bit, is that people who do it and the people who approve it have already concluded that it's okay and then they become increasingly extreme. I'm going to show some pictures of primate vivisections, and when I was getting this talk ready some of my best friends are vivisectors in one sense. I work in a neuroscience laboratory. I work with guys who do rat and mouse work. They don't really vivisect. They create transgenic mouse models. And then after a while they test the mice to see how smart or stupid they are and then they kill them. That's not quite the same thing as vivisection. They don't actually operate on them while they're alive. 

Anyhow, they walked in while I was getting some of these pictures ready of some of the primate research and they recoiled in horror. They go, oh, come on, nobody does that. And I said, yeah, people do this. I mean, they said things like those pictures must be fake. And I said, no, they're not fake. And this is from people who actually experiment on animals for a living but they're just rat and mice men. And when I was protesting outside the neuroscience convention, there was a big neuroscience convention in San Diego, and I'm like a dork. I'm holding up a sign with a vivisected primate on it. It was surprising how many of the neuroscientists who would come by and they'd say, geez, that's terrible, I only use rats and mice, I'd never do such a thing. And the problem is, again, this like-minded people in groups gravitating to the extreme position held in common. 

And that's actually, I'm going to come up with a solution to all of this. And I'm sure everyone will agree at the end and will fall into each other's arms and sing Kumbaya, I think ethical determinations about doing science should not be left to the scientists because the scientists are the least qualified people to make ethical determinations. Their ethics are no better than ours. Well, I'm a scientist so I kind of want to play both sides of the street. But the ethics of a scientist is in no way better than the ethics of a nonscientist. And history actually indicates they might be worse. They have all the expertise in the world to talk about efficacy, about how to do something, but they're not the ones to say whether or not we should do it. Just like the war is too important to be left to generals, I think ethical decisions about whether or not to do vivisections should not be left to vivisectors. In law, there's the term a recusal. They're the first people who should be recusing themselves. 

The people who tend to profit, literally profit in that they make money and profit in their careers and their publications and their research agendas, they'd have to be saints not to be influenced by that. But the way the system is set up now they're the ones who make the decision as to whether or not we should proceed with primate vivisection. They're the ones who populate the IACUCs. I apologize for dropping acronyms, but everybody knows what an IACUC is, right? Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, IACUCs. Okay. So back to words again. And I've already gotten into, I wouldn't call it a disagreement or an argument, but I've already gotten into a semi-spirited discussion as to whether it's fair to talk about vivisection. And people sure do like to spin. You might not like Bill O'Reilly but I like his concept of a no spin zone. And I think we should use words the way the dictionary defines them. 

And everybody is guilty of trying to spin or slant or euphemize or frame an issue to lead to a forgone conclusion, and it drives me mad. And so here I'll be an equal opportunity offender. I can piss off the pro-abortion people and the antiabortion people and the conservatives and the liberals because everybody does it. Everybody thinks their cause is so just that it's fair to spin or slant or distort. And here's one more unnecessary offense to the audience, I'm an animal rights guy, I love dogs and all that kind of stuff, but here's an offensive metaphor to use. I don't have a dog in this fight about abortion, I don't feel strongly about it. So I can see both sides trying to manipulate people in the middle. For example, antiabortion tells you exactly what these people believe. They think we shouldn't do abortions. But instead they want to be called pro-life. 

Well, who's not pro-life? A lot of people are pro-life. But the antiabortion people aren't necessarily pro-life not otherwise specified. They might agree in capital punishment or they might be carnivores and like to eat steaks and they want the cows to get killed. It's a world of difference between pro-life and being antiabortion. And the pro-abortion people are just as bad. They think abortion sounds kind of nasty. Who wants to be pro-abortion? So they're pro-choice. Well, who doesn't like choice? Everybody likes choice. But the pro-abortion people don't really mean choice not otherwise specified. They might not want you to have a choice to go to a gun show and buy an assault rifle. 

They just want the people to be able to have abortions. So call it pro-abortion, call it antiabortion. And this kind of stuff goes on and on. Government revenue enhancement instead of taxes. Government investment instead of spending. Affirmative action instead of quotas. And this was big in Vietnam when I was dodging the draft, the preemptive reactive strike. So, well, this is really an attack. A preemptive reactive strike. They used that term, the military guys. 

And then I always kind of liked, this came out in the Gulf War, servicing a target with ordinance as opposed to bombing. Maybe it would be better to say bombing. And one of my personal favorites is a long time ago they changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department, and then more recently, of course, in the Iran-Iraq war we have enhanced interrogation techniques instead of torture. So let's all lay down our arms for spinning and let's go to the dictionary. And I brought this definition from a book called Medical Meanings because I always teach with etymology and it gives you the etymology of words. And so I got this from Medical Meanings, 2nd edition. I didn't make it up. This is how vivisection is defined. Let's call a thing by its right name. Vivisection is the performance of experimental surgical procedures on living animals, especially in the pursuit of biomedical research. 

From the Latin viverae, to be alive, and secare, to cut. So we're talking about primate vivisection. And animal researchers, like all the rest of us, kind of like to make themselves sound as inoffensive as possible. So a lot of my vivisection colleagues will say we're biomedical researchers. There's a lot of biomedical research that doesn't involve vivisection. So they're spinning. Or they'll say, we're research neuroscientists. There's a lot of research neuroscientists like myself that don't vivisect. So let's just call it vivisection. And then, is vivisection cruelty? Well, I'll run the risk of being offensive but we'll go back to Noah Webster's dictionary. 

It seems like a fair, unbiased source. Noah Webster didn't have a dog in this fight either when he wrote the dictionary. So is vivisection cruelty? Well, the definition of cruelty is disposed to inflict pain or suffering. So it could even be psychological but certainly it's physical. Causing or conductive to injury, grief. So that could be psychological or pain. So are vivisectors engaged in cruelty to animals? Are vivisectors engaged in torturing animals? And, again, some people will say you're using emotional language. You're being emotional and not rational. I don't know how to be more rational than to go to the dictionary and check it out. Look at the definition of torture. 

Torture is anguish, that's basically really bad cruelty, of mind or body, agony. And I came across this while I was preparing these slides. United Nations' definition of torture which I'm not saying applies to vivisectors. It comes close but it drops off by one word. United Nations talked about torture is and act by which pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining information. So if you take out the person part, that's a pretty good definition of animal research. I mean, the animal researchers, I do not believe, the vivisectors, I do not believe, are sadists. I believe they are doing this to get information. And they are willing to do it to get information. And it's kind of like that same question about do the ends justify the means? And when they were using enhanced interrogation techniques in Iran and Iraq, or waterboarding, they would say, well, we need to get this information to save American lives. 

And if you had a guy and you were sure he knew that a plane was going to hit the World Trade Center and you could get that information from him, you might say go ahead and torture him. Because you'd save 3,000 lives. Do the ends justify the means? On the other hand, these were just Joe Shmoe Iranians or Iraqis or whatever they were that were in prison and they were kind of torturing them to keep them in line, maybe the ends don't justify the means. But I think that you can certainly say vivisection meets this definition except that it's applied to an animal instead of to a person. So by definition, Noah Webster's definition, all vivisection is at least cruelty to animals and some rises to the level of torturing animals. And if you want to contend that cruelty and torture are too strong to be accurate, ask yourself this question: if they were doing it to me, would I consider that I was being treated with cruelty? If they were doing it to me, would I consider I was being treated or tortured? And if the answer is yes, it would be cruelty to me or torture to me, then it's cruelty or torture to the other primates. Or so I believe. We should not shy away from brutal words if we are unwilling to shy away from brutal deeds, so I believe. I know that some of the vivisectors, some of the animal researchers, biomedical researchers, are thinking that these are pretty strong words, pretty tough talk. How many people have seen the movie True Grit? In the classic John Wayne version there's this scene where the duke is at one end of a valley and he tells Ned Pepper, he says, I mean to kill you, Ned, or take you to Fort Smith where you'll hang at Judge Parker's convenience. 

And Ned pepper, who is played by Robert Duvall, goes, I call that pretty bold talk from a one-eyed fat man. So he might say, hey, cruelty, torture, I call that pretty bold talk from a skinny-ass Californian. So let me see if I can prove to you that this is cruelty or torture if you ask yourself the question, would it be cruelty or torture if it was done to me? So, again, I want to not wander off and make overarching statements. I want to talk about my experience. Stuff I can back up, I have documentation, I have copies of the grants where these things are described. And this is the one I got involved in at the University of California San Francisco when initially some animal welfare people said this grant in its introduction says that these experiments will help find a cure or a cause for Alzheimer's disease and we wonder, you being an Alzheimer's expert, is that true? And so this is what they do to the macaques, the monkeys in this grant. And I'm told that similar stuff goes on at University of Wisconsin, but I know this goes on at University of California San Francisco. So this is a grant looking at the smooth visual pursuit. So it's studying how we track  moving objects which is actually pretty cool. I'm a neuroscientists, I'm a neuroanatomist, I think that's cool. 

How do we track an object across our visual field. We can do it smoothly if we're following an object, but if we try to just move our eyes in that same arch we do it herky-jerky. So that's interesting. How do you manage to smoothly pursue a moving object. And it also studies the vestibulo-ocular reflex, and that's the hook up between your inner ear and your eye muscles. And in clinical practice sometimes people get nystagmus so their eyes beat in different directions. And sometimes, not that it's ever happened to me, but if a cop pulls you over for a drunk test, he'll have you follow his finger and he's looking for nystagmus because that's a manifestation of impaired vestibulo-ocular reflex. So it's all very interesting neurophysiology, no question about it. And it's actually valid science. But in order to study those things this is what they do to these macaques. 

They put titanium plates and bone screws into their skulls so that they can put the monkey into a frame and he can't move his head because if you're going to measure his eye movement you can't have the head moving around. And they put eye coils into the sclera of the monkey's eyes. And they put a cylindrical recording chamber into the monkey's skull so that they can put an electrode through the recording chamber and insert it into the monkey's brain so that they can measure the activity of individual neurons. And they implant similar chronic electrodes into the monkey's cerebellum so they measure the activity of the follicular nodular lobe. And they put vision distorting spectacles on the monkey, and they have to wear them for 12 weeks. And they put these cylinders actually in the monkey's skull bone. The mastoid process of the temporal bone is where your inner ear is, and that's where the vestibular apparatus is, and to study the vestibulo-ocular reflex you have to know what the vestibular apparatus is doing so you have to put a cylinder in there inside the bone. So that's a lot of manipulations. That's a lot of surgeries. If they did it to me, I'd say I was being treated with cruelty. 

In fact, I would say I was being tortured. And you can ask yourselves whether this would amount to cruelty or torture or not. And then, and this is kind of the over the top frosting on the cake, is after all that's done to the monkey, the monkey, in order to get the data that the researchers need, has to voluntarily track a moving object so they can record what's going on with the eyes and what's going on in the cerebellum and what's going on in the cerebrum and what's going on in the vestibular apparatus and that doesn't work unless the monkey has his head immobilized and you can see what his eyes are doing. But the monkeys don't want to do that. The monkeys, to be fair, are pretty pissed off. And I can understand them. So to get the monkeys to do it, they fluid deprive them so that they are dehydrated. And then they put a little hose in their mouth so if the monkey tracks, does his trick so that they can get their readings, he gets a sip of water. And I've read this grant and I was just amazed and I recoiled in horror from it and I found out that the monkeys can't even drink their fill on the weekend because they have to be thirsty to get to work on Monday. And they describe this as fluid deprivation to provide a work ethic. 

A work ethic. Now that's spinning for you. Nobody objects to a work ethic but you might object to fluid deprivation. And then, and this is the point where they kind of lose me, I'm actually being very serious about this, but in general I get in trouble for being very politically incorrect and I make jokes all the time and I get called to the Dean's office for too much horsing around. I agree with Oscar Wilde that life is far too important to take seriously. Except I get serious about this primate vivisection stuff and dog vivisection and cat vivisection. But I wonder, are these guys trying to be funny. This is from the grant and this is a quote from the grant is "that collars can be hooked with a pole to allow us to escort the monkeys to a specially designed primate chair." I'm thinking, are these guys like Snidely Whiplash or Simon Legree? Are they twirling their mustache and they're saying we can escort them to a specially designed primate chair? I mean, that's not the image that comes to mind with escort services. That's not what an escort service does. You'd have to pay plenty to get an escort service. 

They hook them up with collars and they drag them by poles. They're not escorting them to a specially designed primate chair. It's an especially designed chair in the same sense that the electric chair is specially designed. So when I read this, I wonder are they kidding around or do they just want to use words in a very special way. It sounds much better to say we're escorting them to a specially designed chair than we're dragging them to be trussed up and have their heads bolted into a frame. And these are some pictures of these guys. So this is a picture a friend of mine took of Frick. And Frick is a macaque and he's from the University of Utah and he's in one of these experiments. And here's his collar that you can hook up with a pole and here's his head with the bolts and the plates in it and here's Frick in his cage. And it's my impression, it's my contention actually, that first impressions about cruelty to animals are very reliable. 

They're almost never wrong. When you see an animal and you think it is being treated with cruelty, there's almost never an explanation, oh, I was wrong about that. I think first impressions are very valid. So here's the first impression. This is what they are doing to Frick to learn about smooth visual pursuit and the vestibulo-ocular reflex. And these are some pictures that friends of mine took from Covance, and this is Covance in Vienna, Virginia. And Covance I guess is a major player in the primate vivisection world out here too. So these are other experiments that are going on at Covance. And it's kind of hard to see what's going on here. You say, what is this? This guy has got his gloves on and he's on top of this cylinder, this tube, what's going on in that tube? You can't really see it too well, I'm sorry, there's a monkey in there. 

There's a primate in there and he's in this clear plastic cylinder with his arms pinned down like that to immobilize him so that they can do more research on him. And so ask yourself if they slid you into a clear plastic tube and immobilized you, would you conclude you were being treated with cruelty or would you conclude that you were being tortured? And here's a monkey at Covance again. He's stretched out on a rack. And here's something to age me. Look away from the gruesome picture and I noticed that there are some gray hairs in the audience along with my own gray beard. By the way, short term, this is a tangent, but I noticed you have a lot of Lincoln stuff. Lincoln is a big hero of mine. And Lincoln supposedly was sitting with his attorney general and the attorney general had a white beard like I did and he had completely black hair. And so somebody said, how come your hair is black and your beard is white? And Lincoln said, it's obvious, he talks more than he thinks. So I see some gray hair here. 

Obviously I talk more than I think. But is there enough gray hair that anybody besides me remembers the Art Linkletter House Party show? Art Linkletter was great, and he had a segment called "Kids Say the Darndest Things." And so it's been my experience, because I work at an animal research intensive university, that vivisectors say the darndest things. When I discussed these kinds of issues that I think this is wrong, an ethical judgment, one of my, and he's a friend, as close as I can be to a friend with a vivisector, he said, no, the animals don't suffer that much. And I'm going, wow, what would it take before you say that much? I mean, why isn't this that much? And he dismisses it. And then I was watching a taped presentation from one of these sessions where one of the faculty members said one of the darndest things. He said that this is a sacrifice that we are willing to make to advance the health of our own species. And that reminded me, speaking of old fuddy-duddy stuff, about the old joke from Tonto and the Lone Ranger where they're surrounded by Indians and the Lone Ranger says, we are in a lot of trouble, Tonto. And Tonto goes, what do you mean we, white man. So we are willing to make this sacrifice to improve the health of our own species. The guy on the table is not the vivisector. 

The guy standing up is the vivisector. The guy on the table is the one that's being sacrificed. And it's not even a sacrifice in the old testament sense of the word. In the old testament you would burn the fatted calf. You had an animal that mattered to you. An animal that you were going to eat or you were going to sheer and you gave it up to please God. You give up something that you value. Obviously they don't value these monkeys, and they're not even their monkeys, they are our monkeys. We buy these monkeys. These are taxpayers' dollars for these monkeys. 

[APPLAUSE] So they're not even sacrificing their own animals. So that was a weird thing. To is a sacrifice we are willing to make to advance the health of our own species. And another one of the darndest things they said was when I was trying to end the dog labs, one of the physiology professors came to my office, and he said, Hanson, I don't see what your problem is. He goes, to me there's just a thick black line between humans and animals. And I thought, what kind of physiologist are you? That's the strangest thing in the world for a physiologist to say. I mean, if evolution teaches us anything, if science teaches us anything, if biology teaches us anything it's that there's no thick black line between humans and other animals. But the vivisectors, they really want to have it both ways. They want to say that there's this thick black line so we don't need to treat animals the way we would want to be treated and we don't need to worry about their pain and their suffering and their fear and their terror because there's this thick black line. And then the anti-vivisectors will say well then there's no justification for doing this because you can't get valuable data to improve the health of your own species because the animals are so different from us. 

And they go oh, no, they're close enough for that. They're similar enough to us that we get valuable data but they're not similar enough that we have to treat them the way we would want to be treated. So it seems to me they kind of want to have it both ways. Vivisectors say the darndest things. And here's that poor monkey stretched out, not suffering that much, according to some of my friends. And that sacrifice thing is interesting too because, like I said, the people on my floor, and some of these guys are my friends, I'm not happy with what they're doing but they don't vivisect, they just make transgenic mouse models and then they kill them. But when they get ready to kill them, I hear them talking in the halls, they never say kill. They never say kill these mice, we got to go down and kill these mice. It's always sack. We got to sack, sack, sack. 

And so I asked them, why do you say sack? And they say, it's short for sacrifice. And I say, why do you say sacrifice? And they say, because we're sacrificing them. And I say, you're sacrificing them for your interest and that's not the way a sacrifice was supposed to go in the old testament. You're supposed to sacrifice something, anyway they want to use sacrifice. It's back to words again. They don't want to walk around saying kill, kill, kill even though that's what they're doing. So we use words to disguise the truth from ourselves, or so it seems to me. So, okay, the last picture before we go on to the next topic is this is a guy in one of those specially designed primate chairs. Sorry it doesn't project very well. But here his feet are tied and his tail is tied and his chest is squashed in there and I'm not sure which experiment they're doing on them because his head isn't bolted so he might not be in one of these vestibulo-ocular reflex visual tracking, but if they were doing this to me, I'd think I was being treated with cruelty. 

Okay, so let's switch to efficacy. I think, the vivisectors can correct me on this, but my understanding is that their argument is that the ends justify the means. That's pretty much it, ethically. That we are doing this in order to do improve the health of our own species and, therefore, the monkeys are just kind of screwed. Or we're doing this just to advance our knowledge base. Knowledge is good; science is good. I'm a scientist myself. I've got lots of publications. I do science. I'm a huge fan of science. 

And so some of the vivisectors would say, well we're doing this to increase our knowledge about the neuro control of eye movement during smooth visual pursuit and the vestibulo-ocular reflex. Is that fair? Yes. Is that true? Yes. They are doing that. They are accomplishing that. It is good science. And then the question is, but look at the cost to that monkey. And they would say things like well it's a sacrifice we're willing to make, but that's because they're like-minded people in groups. I think if you were to get a sample of Wisconsin citizens and ask them is it worth it to learn yet more. These experiments have been going on for 30 years about visual pursuit and vestibulo-ocular reflex, maybe the people of Madison would disagree with that. 

But the like-minded people in groups are influenced by that phenomenon that a skew to the extreme position where pretty much anything goes. But okay, be fair. It does increase our scientific knowledge. And then does doing this to Frick advance the health of our own species? Well, that's interesting. Another one of the strangest things vivisectors say, I published on this at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and one of the kind irate letters I got back from a vivisector because I was saying how this has nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease, he said, Dr. Hansen cannot possibly know that it is beyond the realm of possibility that someday, somehow this will affect human health. Well, you got me. I mean, it's pretty damn hard to prove anything is beyond the realm of possibility that someday, somehow. And what that means is for them anything goes. Because nothing is beyond the realm of possibility that someday, somehow. But I would suggest that if you're not in that like-minded group of people skewed over to the left before you would allow this much pain and suffer, you'd want a more direct connection to how it is going to help people. 

And even then some people would say it's not worth it. Opinions would vary as to whether the ends justify the means. And what I have found, at least in this study, and I don't know if people in Wisconsin do this or not, this is from the grant, this is from the grant when I first got involved, they said this may allow us to find the cause and ultimately the cure for many diseases of learning and memory such as Alzheimer's disease. Nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease. Monkeys don't get Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease does not affect the visual tracking system. Alzheimer's disease does not affect the vestibular nuclei. It doesn't affect the cerebellar flocculus nodular lobe. It doesn't affect the ocular motor nuclei. Nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease. 

And I've been following them around for years now making this point. And when the grant came up for renewal, perhaps I flatter myself, but I notice now because it's been going on for 20 years they took out the Alzheimer's. And the newest incarnation of the grant says it's going to shed light on the normal functions and pathways that are compromised in many strokes and motor disorders and potentially lead to new therapies for assisting recovery from strokes. Strokes? It's got less to do with strokes than it does with Alzheimer's disease. Strokes are all about blood flow. They're all about atherosclerosis, stenosis, thrombosis, ischemia, withholding blood, tissue death, infarction. I'm a stroke guy. I know at least as much about strokes as I do Alzheimer's disease. It has nothing to do with strokes or recovery from strokes. So why do they do this? I think that they do this in an attempt to deceive. 

Although, like-minded people in groups, if you hooked them up to a lie detector they would say well it's not beyond the realm of possibility that someday, somehow this will have something to do with strokes so I'm not telling a lie. One of the more honest responses I got after I published that article was from somebody who does this kind of primate research, and he said that's just grantsmanship. He goes, those of us who approve or disprove primate research, we never pay any attention to whether it has any application to human disease. All we care about is it good science. So I got to respect the guy to his honesty. And I think that's usually the case is all they care about is good science. But they want to make you care about it because I think that most of you, or at least a lot of people I know, would say this is too high a price to make Frick pay to learn yet more about visual tracking and the vestibulo-ocular reflex. But I don't know, grandma is getting kind of foggy and if this will cure Alzheimer's disease okay Frick, time to bolt your head in there. They're appealing to our fear and our selfishness. They're appealing to the worst aspect of us. 

They want us to throw all the other animals under the bus. And then this is another point I want to make. This drives me nuts, is it's dangerous to interrupt people when they're congratulating themselves. Because when you pat yourself on the back and you're startled you could dislocate a shoulder or an elbow, but they will say things like it's a sacrifice we're willing to make to improve the health of our own species. Which is a noble motive, everybody wants to improve human health. If that's really their motive, if their motive isn't just basic neuroscience, which I suspect it is, if their motive isn't advancing their research addenda or getting tenure or writing more papers or learning more about basic neuroscience, if their goal is to really improve the health of our human species, there are better ways to do it. In 2010 there were 10 million preventable deaths, people that dies of diarrhea, which we can prevent, people that died of pneumonia, which we can prevent, we can treat and prevent. It turns out if you really want to improve the health of your species, putting the monkeys in chair and bolting their heads in there is not a very cost effective way to do it. If you really want to save millions of lives, and that's what they say is their motivation, I'll take them at their word to improve the health of the human species, let the monkeys go and instead send soap to Pakistan. This was a study where they looked at what's the effect of hand washing and the prevalence of pneumonia and diarrhea in Pakistan. 

People didn't know to use soap. It turns out that if you teach them how to use soap, you cut the rates of diarrhea in half. So instead of two million kids, one million kids die. You cut the rates of pneumonia in half. So instead of four million kids, two million kids die. You save three million kids with soap. So if they're going to justify what they do based on improving the health of our own species, I think they are, to use another dog metaphor, barking up the wrong tree. Okay, thus, primates. But it's interesting, I got into primates secondarily. I really got involved in this animal stuff because of dogs. 

Boy, do I love dogs. And I got into this because the medical students asked me could I help them protest the dog vivisection labs at UCSD. So this is a dog and I don't know if it projects very well but this is a therapy dog. And this is dog who is visiting somebody in the hospital who is obviously pretty sick because she's got an IV in there. And one of the advantages to being a doctor is that I do go to the hospital three times a week and I run into therapy dogs. I love those guys. Therapy dogs got the little green jackets, and I always just drop down to my knees and I get some therapy. Because dogs are just, they love us. And dogs are to love the way salt shaker is to salt. They just sprinkle love on you. 

And if you look up to be, let's go back to definitions and stuff, look up the scientific name for dog. It's canis lupus familiaris, and it doesn't mean familiaris like familiar or commonplace or every day, it means of the family. Member of the household or an intimate. And dogs are the way they are because of us. We have been selectively breeding them for 10,000 years. That's a lot of generations of dogs, and every time we've been selecting for dogs to love us. That's the behavior we select for. And now they have no choice. We've created these animals that are hard wired to love us. Here's somebody loving a patient who he has never met, but the love is sincere because he can't help it. 

The salt comes out of the salt shaker. So you take this dog to the hospital and he loves the patient and the patient recognizes that. The patient responds to the love. And I guess you could say oh, I'm being emotional again. I'm using words like cruelty and torture and love but those are all animals' behaviors too. Dogs really love us, and they can't help it. We've done that to them. And so to do anything to a dog, other than treat it like a family member, is a betrayal. It's a betrayal of a bond between the species that goes back 10,000 years. Everybody likes to talk about human animals, nonhuman animals. 

Yes, there are differences between one kind of animal and another. Humans are animals but we're different from the other animals. And maybe that gives us the right to do what we want or maybe it doesn't. Dogs are different from other animals too, and we've made them that way. We have made them addicted to humans and to human love. And to treat them badly is worse than treating other animals badly. I'm not big, I'm a vegetarian and all that stuff and I'm not big on factory farms or steaks, but if you're a pig or a cow, you're just kind of screwed. You have no reason to expect anything better than that because humans have always been eating pigs and cows. And if you're a primate, no wonder you have to have the collar and get dragged because you know that somebody is trying to do really bad stuff to you. But a dog and a cat, also 10,000 years of selective breeding, they love us. 

They love us. So the dog therapy is nice. I was at dog beach with my bulldog, and I met a guy with his dog. And dogs are talking and we're talking and his dog was a rescue dog. And they'd been down to Haiti after the earthquake, and his dog had saved 15 people from the rubble after the earthquake. And now his dog was too old to do that and so now he's retired and he goes to the children's hospital and visits kids with cancer. That's what you can do with dogs. Or the vivisectors can do this with dogs. So this is from Huntingdon Life Sciences, and I don't know what it would take for them to switch the name to Huntingdon Death Sciences. But here they are giving toxic fumes to Beagles in toxicology studies. 

I have two Beagles. I have two Beagles. Naughty dogs. Sweet, naughty dogs. And if you look at the lab animal magazine, they have these painful ads of a beautiful Beagle there and they say our Beagles are so friendly they will never bite. You can do anything to them. Yeah, so Beagles are cute. They're so cute. They're even cute when they're killing them. The only time a Beagle isn't cute is after you've killed it and you've autopsied it. 

So at UCSD, where they were killing 50 dogs a year to teach physiology and pharmacology, they ended up with a pile of carcasses like this. Big bags of dead dogs. And we protested that a lot, and because we're academics and you want to do it the academic way, first we have the 300 doctors sign a petition saying please don't kill dogs, you don't need to do that to be a doctor. They ignored us. And then I did a peer review paper. I did a survey of all US medical schools, and I found out that 95% of US medical schools killed no animals to teach pharmacology, let alone dogs, and 82% killed no animals to teach physiology. So I thought, well, okay, I got it published. It's on my CV. And so I said, okay, I will send this publication to the IACUC, and the IACUC was mandated by an amendment of the Animal Welfare Act. And the IACUC's mandate includes the three Rs. 

You are supposed to replace the use of animals when alternatives are available. That's one of the three Rs. So I sent to the UCSD IACUC my article. Peer review article with the statistics, and I said it is incontrovertible that there are alternatives. If 95% of schools don't do this, there must be alternatives. You're not pursuing the alternative, you're ignoring one of the R, you are in violation of the animal welfare act. That was a very formal thing. And the response I got back from the IACUC was they had reviewed the dog lab issue and they found, and this is quotes, that it raised no animal welfare issues. And I'm thinking if life-long caging followed by vivisection followed by killing is not an animal welfare issue, what is an animal welfare issue? And that's the problem with IACUCs is they just don't say no. Yeah, so that's dogs. 

And then because I also have cats, it's funny, some people say there are dog people and cat people, that must be only people that haven't had dogs and cats because cats love you just as much as dogs do. They're just a little less overt about it. They're a little more subtle. They'll wait until you're asleep and then they'll jump up on the bed. But they love you because of 10,000 years of selective breeding and they can't help it. So I think there is an ethical difference between doing bad things to dogs versus doing bad things to rats or mice. It may, indeed, be a horrible bad thing to vivisect rats and mice but it's not a betrayal of a bargain, it's not a betrayal of a species that we've genetically engineered to love us. And the same thing with cats. And of course people do the same things to cats. I got involved in this. 

This is a study that's being done, of all places, at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. And this is a study that they want to look at Purkinje cells. I'm a big fan of Purkinje cells. They're big in neuropath. We look at Purkinje cells all the time. Selectively vulnerable, Purkinje cell atrophy, ataxia, I love Purkinje cells. So this study was, it provided proof for the existence of long pauses in the Purkinje cell simple spikes activity probably reflecting underlying bi-stability of membrane potential in the awake and behaving animal. And I will give them credit for this. They didn't contend that it had anything whatsoever to do with human health. They just wanted to know that the Purkinje cells had a bi-stable membrane potential. 

And the IACUCs said sure, go ahead. So, obviously I'm a dog man and a cat man and I'm a monkey man. And so I try to get UCSD, and again I refer to the experts on site about what goes on at the University of Wisconsin. I said, look, leave the dogs alone because they love us so much. Leave the cats alone because they love us. And leave the primates alone because they are so much like us. And in terms of literary construction, the sentence should be we should avoid vivisection of primates because they are so much like us and we should avoid vivisection of dogs and cats because they like us so much. But it isn't like us so much so I'm willing to sacrifice the literary quality and say because they love us so much. So just leave them alone. And in the defense of their animal use, they say, well, you know, 97% are mice and rats. 

Nobody cares about them. And less than one-tenth of one percent are the monkeys, dogs, and cats. So that's like, you can forget one-tenth of one percent. It's trivial. Unless you're one of the dogs or cats or monkeys. And so I said, okay, great. I said, I'm not nearly as radical as some of my friends, and I am willing to throw the rats and mice under the bus if I can do something for the monkeys and the dogs and the cats. Meet me one-tenth of one percent of the way. Is that so much? Just leave the dogs and the cats alone because they love us and the monkeys because they're like us. And they said, no, we're not going to do that. 

And it's interesting, they like to use terms, vivisectors do, they like to talk about animals rights extremists. We're always extremists. And they like to sort of hint that we're a little bit dangerous. That we're prone to violence. We're extremists. We're radicals. We're dangerous. We're prone to violence. Well, let me put it to you. If there's a dispute and one party wants the other party to meet them one-tenth of one percent of the way and the other party says no, who's being the extremist? And where does the violence come in? I'm just a dork holding a sign in front of the convention center. 

I'm not the one who's killing those dogs and vivisecting those cats and drilling and impaling those monkeys. So my contention was when you find yourself on an ethical slippery slope, build a terrace. We're not going to get them to leave the rats and the mice alone. I'm sorry about that. I feel bad about that. But I'm close enough to 60 now, I can see 60 very bright and clear from where I am, I'd like to accomplish something in my life before I check out. And I think I can get the public to support me in banning vivisection of monkeys, dogs, and cats. They're not going to help me with rats and mice. So build a terrace. Leave the monkeys, dogs, and cats alone. 

And if they would do that, it's interesting, if they would do that, the animals researchers would leave alone those animals, most of us would stop protesting. I grant you that might be bad, and Gandhi and St. Francis of Assisi would kind of feel bad about that, but they're much better men than I am. So I just kind of want to try to go after the low hanging fruit and get them to leave the monkeys and the dogs and the cats alone. Is there any hope? Is there any hope for the animals? Well actually there is. I'm a pathologist so I'm by nature kind of a cynical guy because I see an awful lot of dead people and I see an awful lot of people's brain tumors that they're on their way to death and I see Alzheimer's that we, in fact, can't cure or do anything about. So I'm kind of cynical and pessimistic but there is reason for hope. If you look at the historical record, there are animal abuses that are no longer legal. Again, back to Lincoln, because Lincoln is a local hero around here, Lincoln said about slavery he said, we believe that slavery is wrong and like any wrong that some men will commit if left alone it ought to be prohibited by law. Well we believe that cruelty to animals is wrong. And like any wrong that some men will commit if left alone it ought to be prohibited by law. 

So no, we're not going to persuade the life-long vivisectors to give up their drills and their hammers. You have to understand for vivisectors, doing this to animals is not a last resort. It's not like oh, gosh we have this one question, if we could just do this one experiment we'd get the question. We really hate to do this. It's a last resort to cause pain and suffering. For the professional vivisector, vivisection is a first choice. That's how they pursue their careers. That's what they do. And they don't think there's anything wrong with that because they are like-minded people in groups and they are slammed over against the one extreme position. So we're not going to persuade them. 

Although, in fairness, there was the Apostle Paul and the Damascus Road, so there is a historical precedent for dramatic conversion. And the guy who wrote "Amazing Grace" and worked for the abolition of the slave trade was a former slave ship captain. So twice in the last thousand years people have changed their minds. So there's hope, but I wouldn't count on it. So instead we're going to have to pass laws and protect these animals from the vivisectors. So bear baiting, bull baiting, dog fighting, dog fighting that's interesting too. If you read what happened to Michael Vick, he was surprised as hell that he was doing anything wrong. He was in a group of like-minded people. He was raised with dog fighters, and he hung around with dog fighters. It was kind of a clue when he named his kennels the Bad News Kennels what he was up to, and it kind of caught him by surprise that, gee, a lot of people think this is wrong. 

Because he was in a group of like-minded people. And a lot of the primate vivisectors are kind of surprised. Well maybe the primate vivisectors aren't surprised that people think what they're doing is wrong. But the encouraging thing is the closer we get to the people rather than the experts, the more you leave the fate of animals to people with a vested interest in using them, the worse off the animals are. Once upon a time no doubt the guy who was running the bear baiting ring said what are you interfering, it's my bear. You can't pass a law that says I can't bear bait; it's my bear. And Michael Vick would say they're my dogs, I can do whatever I want. But it brings to mind this politically incorrect joke that I think covers the hope for the animals. So the joke is this, and this is more typical of me because I am politically incorrect and I get in trouble for this. So this is really rich guy is at a party and he sees this gorgeous woman over there and he goes up to her and he goes I'm really rich. 

I am like Bill Gates rich and you are hot, would you have sex with me for a million dollars? And she thinks, a million dollars? I mean, how long could it take and I'd be set for life and I could go to school. Half an hour? Okay, I'll do it for a million dollars. And then he says great. Now, will you have sex with me for $10? And she goes, $10? What do you think I am? And he said we've established what you are, now we're just haggling about price. [LAUGHTER] So that's what we've done with animals, we've established, we're going to interfere with people. We're going to stop people from doing things to animals, even if they are their animals that we disapprove of. Now we're just haggling about where we draw the line. We're going to stop bear baiters. We're going to stop bull baiting. We're going to stop dog fighting and cock fighting, crush videos. 

There are animal cruelty felonies in 46 states, and animal law is a huge burgeoning field in law schools. California Prop 2, you probably heard about that, that's a proposition that we passed in California that tells you if you're a chicken rancher that the chickens can't be in cages so small that they are unable to spread their wings or stand up and turn around. They used to have them so crammed in they couldn't stand up or move their wings. And every time this happens, every time there's a movement to improve the quality of animal life, the people that are most involved with the animals will say well we're the experts, we're the chicken farmers. We know what chickens need. The factory farmers, we know what pigs need. Well this Prop 2 banned gestation crates for sows and it banned veal crates for little calves and it banned battery cages for chickens, despite what the factory farmers said. The encouraging thing is the closer you get to people, the better the animals do. If you make a statewide proposition like California did, Prop 2, the agriculture industry is against it, the chicken farmers are again it, the veal, they're all against it, but if you get enough people, the people will actually give the animals a break. They get closer to the people. 

Just recently in Missouri there was an amendment to the Constitution to improve the supervision of puppy mills. Missouri is the biggest puppy mill state in the country. There are more puppy mills and dogs in cages, miserable, horrible lives. They go to pet stores. And they had a huge lobby fighting against this Missouri puppy mill amendment. And it passed in Missouri where there are more puppy mills because there were enough people. You get a big enough end and you'll get a pretty good idea as to what's ethical. You just need a bigger end. And the problem with IACUCs is they don't have anybody on there that represents regular people, or if they do, they're routinely outvoted and they're just a token. But the IACUC is interesting. 

Animal Welfare Act was actually passed in 1965 in response to a just horrific photo expose in life magazine about concentration camps for lost and stolen dogs. Class B animal dealers were stealing dogs out of people's yards or taking puppies from a free to good home ad and sending them off to animal research facilities. And somebody took these pictures, and as a result of that they passed the Animal Welfare Act. And the Animal Welfare Act was later amended to mandate these IACUCs. And the animal welfare people thought this is great, there's going to be somebody with a voice on the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. It turns out anybody who uses any animals in a university setting has to get approval from an IACUC. And so the animal advocates were thinking this is great, there's somebody looking out for the animals. Turns out it didn't work out that way. But there's another phrase that at least the IACUCs exist, and if we could amend the law so that there could be a broader representation of citizens on the IACUCs rather than just the vested interest of the vivisectors, it could actually work. There may well be a case where they have a hot new treatment for spinal cord paralysis. 

And maybe somebody could persuade the general citizens that if we paralyze this monkey and then try to cure him, it will directly lead to treatment of paralyzed veterans. And maybe the citizens will say, okay, then the ends do justify the means. Maybe so. I don't know. But they have a right to weigh in on it, and they certainly have a right to weigh in on whether vestibulo-ocular reflex is going to cure Alzheimer's disease. I think they'd call that one in a second. So IACUCs are interesting because I think they are, to use a phrase I once came across, hypocrisy is the complement that vice pays to virtue. So the existence of IACUCs, it's kind of a rubber stamp and it's a fig leaf and it doesn't really protect the animals but the fact that it exists is the hypocritical complement of the virtue of looking out for animals' interests. And here is some more. This is kind of interesting. 

European Union banned vivisection of great apes. Do you think the vivisectors wanted them to do that? No. Swiss Supreme Court refused permission to do these kind of visual tracking experiments because they said there isn't enough direct relevance to human health. So this is too intense cruelty and insufficient justification. Same thing happened in Munich. Same thing happened in Berlin. They banned those exact same experiments that I'm trying to get them to stop at UCSF and that are going on in Wisconsin. Oklahoma, for God's sakes, Oklahoma, a red state, the Oklahoma State University administration was confronted with an issue that somebody had gotten a grant to do anthrax vaccine testing on macaques, and they said, no, you're just not going to euthanize primates on this campus. Oklahoma. Take that Madison, Wisconsin. 

But, Dane County, the Dane County noble attempt, when I gave this talk before that initiative failed I always thought Dane County was showing the way. This is the idea is you have to have citizens who are not prejudice in favor of animal research on a panel to balance the people that are in favor, you could say, okay, all the animal researchers have to recuse themselves because they are hopelessly biased by their research agendas and nobody is allowed on here who is a PETA member. Let's just take guys from the sandwich shop. And then the PETA guys can make their case, like jury duty. They send out a summons and you have to decide what's going on. [APPLAUSE] That's what I think. Okay, so I've kind of blathered and blundered my way through this, and it's because it means so much to me that I'm less articulate and less funny than usual. So I will end with a guy who's much more articulate than I am and much wiser than I am. And this is Mark Twain, and he said this when he was inducted into the London Anti-Vivisection Society. He said, "I believe I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. 

To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pains which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity for it and is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further. It is so distinctly a matter of feeling with me and is so strong and so deeply rooted in my make and constitution that I am sure I could not even see a vivisector vivisected with anything more than a sort of qualified satisfaction. I do not say that I should not go and look on, I only mean that I should almost surely fail to get out of it the degree of contentment which, of course, it ought to be expected to furnish." So I'll leave him with the last word. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]