Physiology, Propaganda, and Pound Animals: Medical Research and Animal Welfare in Mid-Twentieth Century America

In 1952, the University of Michigan physiologist Robert Gesell shocked his colleagues at the business meeting of the American Physiological Society by reading a prepared statement in which he claimed that some of the animal experimentation being carried out by scientists was inhumane. He especially attacked the National Society for Medical Research (NSMR), an organization that had been founded to defend animal experimentation. This incident was part of a broader struggle taking place at the time between scientists and animal welfare advocates with respect to what restrictions, if any, should be placed on animal research. A particularly controversial issue was whether or not pound animals should be made available to laboratories for research. Two of the prominent players in this controversy were the NSMR and the Animal Welfare Institute, founded and run by Gesell’s daughter, Christine Stevens. This article focuses on the interaction between these two organizations within the broader context of the debate over animal experimentation in the mid-twentieth century

The 2002 Edelstein Award address: To bond or not to bond: Chemical versus physical theories of drug action

As the sciences of chem. and pharmacol. advanced in the nineteenth century, scientists began to speculate about and investigate the interaction between drugs and the organism at a cellular level. By the early twentieth century, there was considerable controversy over whether drugs exerted their effects on cells largely through their chem. or phys. properties. Developments in org. chem. had made possible the beginnings of an investigation of the relationship between the structure of drugs and their pharmacol. action. These studies, combined with the receptor theory developed by Paul Ehrlich and John Newport Langley in the early years of the twentieth century, lent support to those who argued that drugs act by chem. combining with constituents in the cell. Those who were more influenced by the emerging discipline of phys. chem. argued instead that drugs exerted their action through physicochem. properties that caused changes in the cells, rather than through firm chem. (essentially covalent) bonding to the cell. This paper will explore this debate and its place in the history of chem. and pharmacol

A History of the Development of Alternatives to Animals in Research and Testing

Growing public interest in animal welfare issues in recent decades has prompted increased attention to the efforts to develop alternative, nonanimal methods for use in biomedical research and product testing. In A History of the Development of Alternatives to Animals in Research and Testing, the first book-length study of the subject, John Parascandola traces the history of the concept of alternatives to the use of animals in research and testing in Britain and the United States from its beginnings until it had become firmly established in the scientific and animal protection communities by the end of the 1980s. This account of the history of alternatives is set within the context of developments within science, animal welfare, and politics. The book covers the key role played by animal welfare advocates in promoting alternatives, the initial resistance to alternatives on the part of many in the scientific community, the opportunity provided by alternatives for compromise and cooperation between these two groups, and the dominance of the “Three Rs”—reduction, refinement, and replacement.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ndhab/1006/thumbnail.jp

A History of the Development of Alternatives to Animals in Research and Testing

Growing public interest in animal welfare issues in recent decades has prompted increased attention to the efforts to develop alternative, nonanimal methods for use in biomedical research and product testing. In A History of the Development of Alternatives to Animals in Research and Testing, the first book-length study of the subject, John Parascandola traces the history of the concept of alternatives to the use of animals in research and testing in Britain and the United States from its beginnings until it had become firmly established in the scientific and animal protection communities by the end of the 1980s. This account of the history of alternatives is set within the context of developments within science, animal welfare, and politics. The book covers the key role played by animal welfare advocates in promoting alternatives, the initial resistance to alternatives on the part of many in the scientific community, the opportunity provided by alternatives for compromise and cooperation between these two groups, and the dominance of the “Three Rs”—reduction, refinement, and replacement