On Lab Animals in Medical Research

To stem off of my last week’s posting about our dear friend Jeffo’s passing, I would like to take the time to support and hopefully bring to light justification for laboratory animal use in the medical research field to those of you are ignorant enough to disagree with it.

After an amazing experience in Alaska in 2009, I was offered a position at Genzyme Corporation as an Animal Care Technician (that’s right:  I went from cutting up mice for birds of prey to feed on to taking care of those mice in a lab).  I was, at the time, unaware of the direct significance my job had on what my friend Jeffo was dealing with.  About 6 months into working at Genzyme, I spoke with one of the researchers about what they were working on, and came to find that they were testing drugs which would inhibit the body’s rejection of a foreign heart in the recipient.  In these mice, there were literally 2 hearts pumping at the same time.  I felt SO proud to be helping with this research which could play a HUGE role in one of my best friends’ future, and immediately told him about it when I got home that day.

When I moved out to Los Angeles to work at UCLA in an almost identical setting, I was surprised to find that there are often extremely large anti-lab animal research protests.  It infuriated me to think that these people were all against what I (and countless others) believe to be such a respectable and important career, but I didn’t let it bother me too much.  It was only after Jeffo’s passing a couple of weeks ago that I thought of the situation again.

Have these idiots ever processed in their brains what their outlook on the matter would be if it were their child, or mother, or brother, or sister suffering and succumbing to a rare disease?  How would they feel if one of their best friend’s was losing a battle with an incurable disease?  I’m willing to bet that 99% of those animal “activists” would chose to have a few people investigate how to cure the disease rather than sit by and accept it.  If you happen to be one of these idiots, come talk to me when you lose someone you care about in said situation.

I know that by cleaning mouse cages for a year may have helped to save someone’s life, and I am extremely proud to be working in this field.  Even if all that comes out of this career is that one time I got to tell Jeffo about the research, and to have him tell me it made his day, this has been worth every minute.