I’ve been sitting on this article for quite some time. Like, since the beginning of last semester. Like, since I first pitched my “science column” to the Orient.
Last fall, I enrolled in Psychology 276: Learning and Memory. Deviating from the traditional lecture/discussion/test/paper format, our class worked like a research team. The bulk of our work was devoted to lab, our professor serving as “Principal Investigator,” to answer the question, “What role does a region in the brain known as the hippocampus play in learning and memory?”
The question has been studied many times over, but we zoned in on a new aspect that hadn’t been studied before, whose results have not yet been published in peer-reviewed literature. I relished each day in lab, hypothesized and re-hypothesized compulsively, looked forwarded to each day of data collection and to the end of the semester when we would finally be able to analyze everything. Ultimately, we found surprising evidence that the patterning of visual cues affected how subjects learned and relearned a maze task.
Our research subject: Rattus norvegicus, the brown lab rat.
“What’s that?” you say. “Bowdoin has a rat lab? I read in an Orient article last semester that some girl plays with crickets here, but rats, too?”
What quickly became clear was how touchy this subject might be. Animal testing at Bowdoin College? Should I even string those words together in one sentence in this Internet-bound Orient article lest some animal rights activists search the terms and come to campus to ransack the labs in protest?
This possibility, I learned, has become a reality for many researchers across the country. A quick Google searched yielded numerous stories of eco-terrorism, harrassment and intimidation tactics directed at individual researchers, and extensive property damage of million-dollar labs, all in the name of animal rights (not to be confused with animal welfare). I had recently spoken to a Bowdoin alumnus who, now working at a prominent laboratory in another state, does not include the lab’s address on his business card (lab policy, it seems), to deter these very acts.
Bowdoin itself, just a few years back, had taken heat from the Humane Society of the United States after the Orient published a feature article on the College’s rat facilities (in the form of a Letter to the Editor and not a firebomb which some animal rights extremists have resorted to elsewhere).
Besides, I too was grappling with my role in my psychology research project. I would be performing surgery on a live rat, lesioning a small region of its brain, and then, after behavioral testing, sectioning its brain to verify the extent of damage I had induced. I struggled to assess whether my discomfort stemmed from pure squeamishness or a deeper moral anxiety. I had grown fond of my rat after weeks of daily testing. My dad offered, “Well, it’s not like you’re killing them.” Well, actually, I would be. I did. And before anyone gets alarmist on me and stops reading the article and labels me a murderer because I just implied that I euthanized a rat at the end of the semester, hold on. I do not aim to shock or anger. I just think if we’re going to have any sort of productive discussion, I think it’s important to be clear on the details from the beginning.
Many researchers have been intimidated and feel extremely protective of their animal laboratories because of controversy. The question, then, becomes how much information it is pragmatic to withhold (perhaps a lab’s address to protect against violence?) and when defensive steps muddy transparency and impede dialogue.
Many people see animal research as a purely unnecessary evil. Some contend that an ant’s life should be considered just as sacred as a human’s. Many doubt that findings in non-human test subjects have any value in human medicine, or believe that we could achieve the same scientific advances through human testing or “petri dish studies” alone.
There are others who agree with equal verve that animal testing saved their lives or their daughter’s or their father’s (and millions of others’ too), and that it can be done without sacrificing ethics.
The stakes are high. The topic deserves careful and informed consideration, whatever your proximity to animal research and wherever you fall on the opinion spectrum.
Through “Learning and Memory,” I came to understand how seriously Bowdoin takes animal welfare. I recognized that sectioning the rats’ brains was the only way in which we could draw connections between the rats’ altered maze performance and their altered brain anatomy. I understood that, if I ever wanted to reap the benefits of modern medicine, it was perhaps the fairest to the animals to confront, on a deeply personal level, their role in our advances.