A Not So Secret Society

As the screws continue to tighten on the vivisection industry it must be obvious to those with interests vested in it’s continuation, that their survival strategy is not working well for them and that their most pressing need must be to find a way to win over the growing number of people who are deeply sceptical about the moral and scientific justification for using animals in medical research. The opposition’s latest foray into Machiavellian plots to bolster up their industry did not go unnoticed by the SPEAK campaign, and as is usually the case, not much happens inside the enemy camp, without it coming to our attention.

The aim of the latest - not so secret - meeting called by Simon Festing of the Research Defense Society was to discuss how best to deal with the anti-vivisectionist “threat” to their livelihoods and how to ensure their job security.

Nancy Rothwell

Among those present at the meeting were key vivisection luminaries including Nancy Rothwell, Jean Bradbury, Vernon Barber, David Clough, and Professor Roger Lemon. This tight-knit group of less than impartial individuals are united by this: that all - bar none - have blood on their hands, all bar none are loyal to a system that benefits them financially. So let’s take a look at some of these partners in crime. Simon Festing obviously needs no introduction, but how about some of the others?

Nancy Rothwell - when she isn’t trying to justify the torture of animals - acts as Vice-President for Research at Manchester University. She is Chairperson of the RDS, and also sits on the Pharmaceutical Industry Competitiveness Task Force (PICTF), a group set up by Lord Sainsbury (another keen PICTF participant), to make life as easy as possible for the vivisection industry. No guesswork needed to work out that animal protection groups are barred from the round table, which is reserved for leading figures and companies in the pharmaceutical industry as well as the Labour Government.

Nancy Rothwell is also a key player in the Medical Research Council, a body that is supposed to promote and fund both animal and non-animal medical research. However, given that most of its management are vivisectors such as Colin Blakemore, who holds the top position as Chief Executive within the organisation and spent 30 years blinding kittens with no calculable benefits - apart to himself, that is- it’s hardly an organisation that will promote non-animal based research at the expense of animal research even if the former is more effective.

RDS council member Jean Bradbury works for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and resides on the committee of the IP Institute, whose remit is very similar to PICTF and is made up of all the main exponents of vivisection.

Vernon Barber, a man with an interesting pedigree, seems to have cut his teeth in the public arena whilst working as a food science adviser to the National Farmers Union, where he was a keen supporter of GM crops. He is acting current policy coordinator for the Animal Science Group (ASG) for the British Biosciences Federation, yet another organisation set up to promote and defend the torture of animals inside laboratories.

David Clough, formerly a director of research at Roche UK, is now on the board of Fulcrum Pharma PLC, a company which exists essentially to make money by promoting drug projects through testing and research to the market place.

Professor Roger Lemon, Honorary Secretary of the RDS, was the subject of an expose in 1996. Lemon’s recent potted history is highlighted below to give you a real flavour of the sort of people who were present at the meeting.

In 1995, Lemon was working at the Institute of Neurology and is now its Director. Unfortunately for him, one of his then team of lab animal technicians was an undercover investigator who documented Lemon’s project, which involved a number of macaques. Throughout the project, Lemon demonstrated complete disregard for the macaques, whom he saw dozens of times a week during the study, which was supposed to look at the effect of strokes on skilled hand movements. It was information that had been available since the mid 1800s…

Mary

One of those selected as part of the study was Mary, a pig-tailed macaque - an intelligent, docile species considered suitable because they are thought able to tolerate long-term procedures. After electrodes were surgically implanted into her brain and bolted to her skull with a steel plate, she was trained to press levers to gain food rewards. To render her more performance-compliant for each experiment, she was routinely starved 24 hours before.

She was housed alone in a tiny cage little longer than her outstretched body. She had no bedding material or nest area, no privacy or toys and had only minimal furniture - a step and a piece of wood on two chains. With no facility for exercise, and denied even the minimum necessary to satisfy some of her basic instincts, her life was punctuated by fear, pain, hunger, deprivation, and enforced isolation. Unable to avoid people, she bared her teeth defensively at everyone who entered. Her existence was a recipe for insanity.

…Which is exactly what had already happened to Chelsea, a rhesus macaque, who was also in the room. Supposedly placed there as company for Mary, the two couldn't communicate, since the rhesus and pig-tailed are not species that normally interact; housed separately, they were unable even to touch - something that is essential in primate socialising. The isolation and deprivation had taken its toll on Chelsea. She paced the tiny floor of a cage identical to Mary’s, exhibiting repetitive behaviour, swinging her head at the same point in each circuit, a routine, which she maintained even when there was some activity in the room to watch for a change.

One crab-eating macaque had his skull opened and a dye applied. He was found recovering from anaesthetic in a padded cage, which resembled a cot. As he regained consciousness, his small form and unsure movements made him look like a human baby at the mercy of the world. He was to be killed several days later, and the dye examined. He spent the interim days cowering terrified in a corner of the cage.

The criminally inadequate housing broke numerous parts of the Code Of Practice (COP), often referred to as 'strict government guidelines' by defenders of vivisection. These basic criteria were not met in the cases of Mary and Chelsea, who spent endless months in conditions that were inadequate even as temporary measures; conditions, which in the event, were still in place when they were inspected by the Home Office inspector. Despite the clear breaches, nothing changed...

Lemon believed he was immune, but his victims were not forgotten, nor have they ever been. A ten-minute programme featuring Mary and Chelsea was shown on peak time television in 1996 on BBC1. Yet the Home Office took no action against Lemon, although the evidence showed his project to be a disgrace even by the standards publicly claimed by the most extreme of pro-vivisectionists.

Despite this, he has gone on to maintain a secure and privileged position within the industry. His story is neither unique nor exceptional. It seems that the more extreme your hands on work, the more secure your position. Indeed, the more one delves into the facts surrounding the vivisection and pharmaceutical industry, the more it becomes clear, that those at its very heart run an incestuous little club demonstrating precisely why medical research using animals is allowed to continue. Driven by its single-minded aim of streamlining and co-ordinating the flow of drugs onto the market, it is little more than a protection racket, with organisations such as the RDS presenting the ‘acceptable’ scientific face - the face that says: “We care about the welfare of human patients. We care about finding cures for diseases. And because we care, we have to use animals to save human lives”.

As is common with any privileged and wealthy individuals, the main aim of those in the industry is to protect their financial and political powerbase; the more it is threatened, the more extreme the long shots. Their attempts at mounting counter-offensives haven’t really notched up any brownie points for them recently. Their 500-strong signed petition of eminent pro-vivisection scientists might have had more of an impact if the signatures hadn’t belonged to those with distinctly vested interests; the media reported it, but it turned out to be a bit of a damp squib.

Conversely, an independent survey - such as the one commissioned by the Europeans for Medical Progress, which questioned 500 GPs - highlighted the increasing concern amongst real medical professionals that information from animal experiments doesn’t extrapolate to humans. In fact, that concern amounted to a staggering 82% of the 500 GPs questioned. Now that was a story. But did we see it in the newspapers or on the television? Well…no! As the saying goes: “Why let the truth get in the way of a good story”!

So, what will the outcome be of this hush-hush meeting of soon-to-be-has-beens? Who knows, but SPEAK will be watching and listening-that much you can count on!