Campaign to end Sussex University’s animal experiments launched with publicity stunt

Violence-Free Science, a student-run group at the University of Sussex, is contacting all local and regional press to highlight the launch of a new and exciting campaign.

On Wednesday 9th May 2007, at 1pm, a peaceful demonstration will be taking place in Library Square at the University of Sussex. This will not only be to launch our campaign but to highlight exactly what is going on behind the heavily-guarded doors of our University, who have now been exposed experimenting on animals in cruel and pointless experiments. A Molecular Biochemist will be travelling here to speak about the science and ethics of the experiments.

The campaign has developed after students spent many months finding and examining research papers published in the public domain by the University. Experiments are being carried out on mice, rats, voles (caught from the wild), frogs, toads, chicks, guinea pigs, gerbils and rabbits, and range from testing alcohol addiction to illegal drugs. University departments have also been involved in particularly shocking experiments using bats caught from the wild, who went on to have electrodes implanted in their brains [1]. This, despite bats having an entirely unique and different method of communication and hearing to humans, was for “hearing research” and carried out two separate times in the last few years.

Colleen McDuling BSc (Med)(Hons), MSc (Med. Sc.), a Molecular Biochemist and our Scientific Advisor, has been looking over the research documents and has responded that these experiments have not only been cruel but wholly unnecessary and inconclusive to human studies, as the data cannot be accurately transferred from animals to humans. Such discrepancies have even been highlighted by the British Medical Journal, who concluded in a recent study that “discordance between animal and human studies may be due to bias or to the failure of animal models to mimic clinical disease adequately.” [2]

Other experiments detail how the University of Sussex made rats addicted to alcohol then forced them to press electrocuted levers to gain more addictive alcohol pellets; these rats were then shipped to Berlin for further experiments in another laboratory [3] before being gassed to death. The University have conducted countless studies on rats and mice using alcohol addiction, despite being situated in a place full of student volunteers who could be studied in a more appropriate fashion, producing results which would be relevant to human studies rather than being vague and only relevant to alcoholic rats.

An endless amount of experiments have also been proved pointless and a disgraceful waste of money. Many, especially the testing of illegal drugs such as cocaine and morphine, are funded by Medical Research Council grants – a charity that is funded largely by taxpayers, yet the results are continually proving to be irrelevant to human studies. In other cases, a researcher has conducted almost the same experiment -whereby holes are drilled into the ears of guinea pigs [4] – for over 20 years and still seems to have made no conclusions from this whatsoever.

Thus, the basic aims of Violence-Free Science are to work together with the University, medical research groups and our Scientific Advisor to successfully replace many of the current experiments with more reliable non-animal methods. A step by step plan, looking at existing research as case studies, will be formulated and put forward to the University. Not only is this on ethical grounds but also on scientific grounds, as there are over 400 alternative methods to the use of animals in research, all of which are proven to be more successful and relevant to human health, as pointed out by our Scientific Advisor. Eventually, we hope the University of Sussex can become at for forefront of cutting edge research - without the use of animals, and set a precedent for all other Universities to follow. This is both an exciting step forward for science and a more morally sound step forward for animal welfare.

More information, including scientific documents detailing just some of the experiments being carried out at our University, can be seen on the campaign website: www.violencefreescience.org.

ENDS