The Gazette’s June 3 story on the death of a marmoset monkey in a University of Massachusetts lab was disturbing on many levels, not least of which is the apparent secrecy surrounding the work Dr. J. Paul Spurlock’s colleagues engage in. Spulock is the university’s director of animal care services and attending veterinarian. Is the UMass animal lab “fully accessible,” as he told the Gazette, even though he’s “not at liberty” to discuss it? Even more crucial is the question of using animals “as stand-ins for humans” at all — with “subjects” caged in a research facility. Animals, even primates, are not people, and their brains and bodies are not equivalent substitutes for human beings. For example, a large percentage of human drug trials fail, sometimes fatally, after being successfully tested on animals. Use of animals in experiments and product testing is based on a cruel contradiction: We claim experimentation is scientifically valid because the animals are sufficiently like us; but we justify procedures we would not inflict on humans because they are not sufficiently like us to matter.
Chris Rohmann
Florence