S8. E14: Dr. Hope Ferdowsian and Dr. Syd Johnson: Primates and Medical Research: A Matter of Convenience, Not Sound Science
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“We have this sort of human exceptionalism or human supremacy that that is used as the kind of baseline foundational justification for exploiting animals, that humans are just more important and we're more special in some way.”
– Dr. Syd Johnson
Dr. Hope Ferdowsian and Dr. Syd Johnson recently published an essay in the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum called, Primates and Medical Research A Matter of Convenience, Not Sound Science.
The essay begins with one rhesus macaque who will spend her life in a cage as part of an Alzheimer's disease experiment. They tell the story not only of this individual primate, but of animal research as a whole, how and when it started all the way up to where we are now, and also what an enormous failure most of it has been.
Around 90 percent of drugs that pass in animal testing fail on humans. With numbers like that, in any other industry, I’m pretty sure that we’d have given up by now. Not only is animal testing insanely cruel, but it's incredibly ineffective. So, why are we still testing on tens of millions of animals and spending billions of dollars on mostly bad research year after year? Money and because we’ve “always done it this way,” (and we have, since 6 BCE).
All systems that exploit, torture and abuse animals desperately need to change and the thing is, all of these systems can change. We have solutions. They exist and are getting bigger and better by the day. There are solutions to replace animals in the food system, in fashion, in entertainment and in medical research.
But the money train that goes into using animals in research isn’t slowing down, and not enough of us are demanding otherwise (and we are who is paying for it). I think in part, because not enough of us are aware of the cruelty and the inefficiency that is animal testing. We are paying the bill simply because, this is how it’s always been done.
But it’s not how it should be done.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
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Transcript:
Syd: [00:00:17] We have this sort of human exceptionalism or human supremacy that is used as the kind of baseline, foundational justification for exploiting animals, that humans are just more important and we're more special in some way.
Elizabeth: [00:00:42] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We'd like to thank Lush for sponsoring this episode. Lush advocates for people, animals and the planet. Through their ethically sourced ingredients and grants programs they give back locally and around the world. Lush aims to drive positive, long term and systemic change. This conversation is with Dr. Hope Ferdowsian and Dr. Syd Johnson. Hope and Syd recently published an essay in the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum called Primates of Medical Research A Matter of Convenience, Not Science. I read the essay a few weeks ago and I quickly realised how much there was that I didn’t know about animal testing. In the essay, they tell the story of a rhesus macaque who will spend her life in a cage as part of an Alzheimer's disease experiment. The essay tells the story not only of this primate, but of animal research, how it started all the way up to where we are now, and also what an enormous failure most of it has been. Around 90% of drugs that pass in animal testing, fail on humans. With numbers like that in any other industry, I’m pretty sure we would’ve given up by now. Rhesus macaques don't even develop Alzheimer's disease, and this has been the cycle with animal testing pretty much ever since it began. Not only is it insanely cruel, but it's incredibly ineffective. Hi Hope. Hi Syd. Thank you both for being here. I would love to hear just like who you are, what you do in the world and we'll get into why we're here.
Syd: [00:02:17] My name is Syd Johnson and I'm an associate professor of bioethics at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at Upstate Medical University. My work focuses on a couple of things. One is animal ethics, especially in the context of research with animals, and the other is on brain injuries in humans. So I do a lot of work in the space of neurology and neuroscience.
Hope: [00:02:44] I'm Hope Ferdowsian and I'm an internal medicine and preventive medicine public health Doc and co-founder and president of Phoenix Zones Initiative, a nonprofit that advances the interdependent rights, health and well-being of people, animals and the planet. Over the past 20 years or so, I've had the privilege of working in human rights and animal rights or animal protection. Over the past few years, I've really realized that I needed to create a platform to be able to work on issues and bridge silos across those areas.
Elizabeth: [00:03:21] I like to think I know a lot about what's happening to animals across the board, but there's a whole lot that I was completely unaware of. Mostly I just know it's really bad we test on bazillions of animals and 90 something percent of the time it's a fail when it goes to human trials. That is kind of the big picture of it all. But there's a huge history. What you two did in this essay that you wrote for the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum, you told the story of this rhesus macaque who was there for Alzheimer's experiments. Throughout this essay, you really explain how we got here and how it started. Let's start with that with the history and how animal testing even started.
Syd: [00:04:09] Humans have been using animals in experimentation and starting in sort of anatomical studies. Trying to just see what's inside of us, how it works. For thousands of years, in fact, scientists have been doing that kind of experimentation with animals. Part of that was because they were forbidden from cutting open humans because of cultural taboos and religious taboos. So they started these explorations. It didn't take very long, however, before they did start to realize that humans and animals, of course, are not identical. Right? They have different structures. Things are connected in different ways. So once people really did start to look at the human bodies using cadavers, for example, they could see that there were differences between animals and humans. So we have this very long history of using animals as these sort of substitutes when we're not able to use humans. I think what's interesting is that that is essentially what we're doing today all of these many years later, despite scientific advancements, we are still using animals in experiments because we can't use humans in those particular experiments. Part of that is because we plan to kill the animals. Part of it is we want to be able to cut them open and see what's going on and also use very invasive procedures, infect them with illnesses, genetically modify them in ways that we simply cannot do. When we are talking about using humans, we're forbidden from using humans by law, by regulation. So in some sense, things haven't changed that much. One of the things that we want to say is it's really time that we change, because what we're doing, which we recognized long ago doesn't exactly work, is still not working.
Elizabeth: [00:06:01] I didn't know about the Belmont Report. I shouldn't have been surprised that we used to test on children and disabled people, but it did shock me. It's horrific.
Hope: [00:06:10] The Belmont Report came around because there were a lot of concerns about unethical experiments with human beings. There are some more easily recognizable experiments. For example, the Tuskegee experiments with African American men who were deceived into entering this 40 year long study of syphilis. Even when treatment for syphilis became available, it wasn't made available to these men because scientists wanted to study the natural history of syphilis or the natural course of syphilis without treatment, and that study was funded by the federal government. Then, of course, there were other experiments involving children who were disabled and institutionalized, intentionally exposing them to hepatitis and seeing again what the natural course of the disease is without treatment. So these types of scenarios come to light, and there's plenty of examples of them over time. Really, these individuals and these groups of individuals were used and exploited in these experiments because they were vulnerable for one reason or another. Their ability to provide informed consent, for example, in the case of children, they can't understand the reason for a study. They can't understand what's happening to them. Of course, they can't provide consent for certain things at baseline because they couldn't provide consent. They were often taken advantage of or deceived and entered into these experiments, these human experiments. So because there were a lot of concerns, public concerns about human experiments that were unethical, basically there was a call for a commission to be appointed by Congress that would look at the principles that should guide human research. Once Congress appointed that commission, it took about five years for the commission to produce the Belmont Report, which lays out these principles like respect for persons, which really translates into respect for autonomy or special protections for individuals who can't provide consent. For example, beneficence, which basically means do good, but it also encompasses this idea of non-maleficent's or do no harm or avoid harm and justice, which speaks to this issue of selection of subjects. So basically you can't select subjects for research if they are particularly vulnerable in one way or another and have a compromised ability to provide informed consent or to be exploited because of their vulnerability in society. So that's really what we rely on today in human research to guide institutional review boards who are making decisions about whether or not protocols, research protocols can go forward. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better now than it was before the 1970s when the Belmont Report was published.
Syd: [00:09:34] The mid 20th century period was a period where, in the aftermath of World War Two, we see a lot of these sort of research ethics codes come out because of these concerns about the exploitation of, for example, prisoners of war and internees during that period. So that is a period of tremendous change for human subjects in terms of protecting them. But what happened as a result is that science pivoted to using animals because they were no longer able to use humans.
Hope: [00:10:04] You know, now we have this academic industrial government complex that basically is meant to fund a lot of animal research, animal experiments. So it's really difficult to get around that because that's where the funding is and that's where really this like I said, this complex has been created.
Elizabeth: [00:10:28] We can really see the whole new world of materials emerging. It's slow right now, but it's coming. Maybe it's not government money going into these other industries. Right. But there's a lot of private money going into food and materials because people are aware and they're aware that this is going to be better for the environment for so many reasons, for the animals for certain. I think that the research, there's a big wall around it because I think so much of the public is really unaware, not only like the levels of how much it exists, how unsuccessful most of it is, what do we need to do to make the world hungrier for these alternatives?
Syd: [00:11:12] There are alternatives to using animals in biomedical research and people have worked on developing those. We have found that certainly in some contexts they are better than using animals. So toxicology research, which looks at whether or not something might be poisonous, is far better when you use cell cultures that have been developed from human cells. There are people who are working to develop these human biology based alternatives to using animals. Part of what's holding that research back is that there's very little interest in doing it, and so very little funding that comes from, for example, government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, they devote a fraction of 1% of their overall funding to developing those kinds of alternatives. But it does seem to be the case that many of those alternatives will end up being much better for doing research than the animals that were currently using them based on human biology and human cells, rather than on mice or fish or rats or these other animals that we use in the millions. So there are alternatives being developed. If we devoted far more of our resources to continuing that development, we could see much more rapid change I think.
Elizabeth: [00:12:34] The general public like now, probably more than in most of our lifetimes, we know like if you say to somebody, yeah, meat's pretty bad and they now know what a factory farm is. This stuff probably 20 years ago, there was an awareness where food came from. I was driving last week and I was listening to NPR and there was an interview with a guy who's just done a cancer vaccine. The vaccine has worked at its first very specific kinds of cancer, and has worked in animal trials. So there's this whole like 15 minute story done on this vaccine. Then the last 2 minutes, the reporter kind of in this little inside baseball moment says, hey, this is great, but it hasn't tested on humans yet. Something to allude that it might not work. I'm like, well, if the percentage is like 90%, why are we even doing a story on this? Makes people if you don't know anything about any of this and you're listening to the same story in your car as I was, all you think is of course, we need animal testing. I think just the general narrative, like we need a narrative of how this is so absurd and also cruel and everything else.
Syd: [00:13:53] That information about how often research on animals fails to translate to humans. Scientists know it. It's widely discussed in the scientific literature among scientists. They recognize this to be a significant problem. In some areas of research we mentioned Alzheimer's in our piece in the Hastings Bioethics Forum, but stroke research as well. These are both illnesses that cause a tremendous amount of human suffering. But the research on animals also causes a tremendous amount of animal suffering. We have so far failed nearly 100% of the time to come up with effective treatments by using animals to look for solutions for these illnesses. It's true across the board that we have this high rate of failure. The scientific response has been, well, let's see if we can modify the animals and make them more like humans. Right? So they're creating transgenic mice that appear to have symptoms that might be similar to Alzheimer's symptoms. Right. Or we are trying to do psychiatric research on mice to find better drugs to treat those kinds of illnesses. But we're creating these sort of artificial manipulated animals that are even farther from being like humans than the animal in its natural state is. So our efforts to sort of create mice that might actually like humans in some contexts has so far failed. This has been the sort of dominant strategy of trying to make animal research work. So scientists absolutely know that this research doesn't work most of the time, but they have all these other reasons, as Hope mentioned, for wanting to continue to do this research.
Elizabeth: [00:15:48] The main reason is money, right? That's like the driving force. It's just always been done like this.
Hope: [00:15:54] Yes, it's always been done like this. So, you know, unless there's a clear vision or a way forward, it's harder to shift. We have to address a number of different factors. One is conflicts of interest, which we see across the board in terms of how animals are used and exploited in animal agriculture, for example, food production. But we also see it in animal research. I think, you know, the public has been intimidated, I think, by scientists who assert that we need to use animals in research. So dealing with kind of taking the veil off, if you will, and exposing what's happening for what it is, I think is part of what we have to accomplish. So there are a number of different things that we've pointed to. We wrote a Belmont Report for Animals that we wrote in 2019, and we had a follow up paper with our colleagues called Toward an Anti Maleficent research agenda. In there what we did is a really brief paper published in the same journal Cambridge Quarterly for Health Care Ethics. In there what we did is we really kind of laid out what needs to change. One is that we need an ethical framework that is more just than what we have today that basically guides the use of animals in research. We don't really have an ethical framework. The other thing we talk about in that paper is that we absolutely need funding shifts, as Syd was alluding to, we need funding to shift toward non animal methods and more human centered, patient centered biology. Then the other thing we talk about is the need for journals to change, journals published a lot of different, different experiments, research, a lot of which is not necessarily helpful, but that drives a lot of what gets done in terms of research. The other thing we talk about is that we need shifts in academia, so we need a different reward structure for faculty who are interested in tenure. We need to reward those who are more interested in innovation and ethical ways forward. Then that translates into what students, learners see and do as well. So if we're thinking about how to create different pipelines and pathways toward more human centered biology, non-animal methods, we have to think about the whole structure that really makes research possible.
Elizabeth: [00:18:45] When you're looking at alternatives and talking about alternatives, are we getting there in the sense of we could if all the money went that way, as opposed to the animal way we could actually start just replacing. Are there still big areas where we're like, no, maybe we should keep the animals in there. How far are we along alternative wise?
Hope: [00:19:04] The problem is that we're we're treating animal testing, animal research as a gold standard when it's not a gold standard. So if we're always using that as the point of comparison, we're always going to fail to come up with something better. So one example that I like to give is that if you look at a graph of bioavailability and what we refer to as ADMET, absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicology. If you look at a graph of human bioavailability and animal bioavailability, especially what happens in nonhuman primates or dogs or rodents, the graph is all over the place. There's no linear relationship between how drugs behave in humans and other animals, and even between certain species that are relatively similar. We see differences. So for example, rodents and rabbits. So if we're relying on animal testing, we're also not seeing kind of the whole range of genetic variability in the human population. The neat thing is that we now have technologies that can mimic that variability, that genetic variability that we see across the human population if we would just implement those methods more. But the other thing that happens that I think we need to pay more attention to, both for the animals themselves and for humans, is that animals experience acute severe trauma in a laboratory, and they also experience chronic trauma in a laboratory. That affects their brains and it affects the rest of their bodies, their cardiovascular systems, their immune systems. You know, basically whatever organ system you can think of, it is affected by severe stress and chronic stress. We know this now in humans as we think about what happens with trauma over the course of a lifetime, even before birth and during development and growth and into adulthood. We know that this is true for animals as well. So it changes their brains. It changes the rest of their bodies. So you're not going to get accurate, generalizable information from animals that are basically kept in laboratories in sterile conditions that are nothing like what their normal natural surroundings would be, even if they are genetically modified and brought into those circumstances. So that interferes with results. It would in humans, it does in other animals. So, you know, if we are not using a gold standard to compare potential alternatives to, we are never going to find the best way forward.
Elizabeth: [00:22:14] When the animal testing thing comes up, there's always like a hold, but if my child had whatever, they don't want to let go of it. I think that's what I'm trying to push with you, with the two of you a little bit, is because people push it on me so much. That little scenario gets asked to me a lot, but I'm like, No, we shouldn't be testing.
Syd: [00:22:36] What's going on there is that what happens in research laboratories is hidden. It's certainly hidden from the public. Very few people, even within, say, a research university, know exactly what's happening within the lab in any given context. Right. There's their secrecy there. Some of that is to protect the research. Some of it is to prevent people from finding out what is really happening there and what is happening to those animals. In the sort of rare cases where there might be a whistleblower who reveals what's happening in a lab and it becomes public knowledge, people are rightly outraged about things that are happening to dogs, or things that are being done to monkeys. I think the vast majority of people are a little less concerned about what happens to mice or to rats, and probably think most of this research is happening with mice and rats. But, you know, as we have discussed. What isn't being told to the public by reporters, by scientists, certainly is that most of the research that we're doing is never going to benefit a human. Most of the research that we're doing is actually going to fail to translate into benefits with human beings. That's an important reason to say not only is it unethical. It's also bad science. We're using animals as if they are just equipment, as if they're test tubes, right. Or gloves or these other things that we can just sort of use up and throw away in a laboratory. But we're also not helping the patients who need cures, who need treatments, who need all of these other things. When we are simply wasting our time and our money and our resources using animals and experiments that are never going to end up benefiting humans.
Elizabeth: [00:24:35] In your paper, you mentioned the amount of human suffering that this causes, which I had never thought about before. But of course it does, because if this money and this time were going into actual things that worked, we'd be in a much better place. I think also right now, there's one of those times where because the dogs from the Envigo Lab that just all got 4000 beagles, if you don't know the story, we're just freed from this lab called the Envigo Breeding Facility, where they breed for lab animals. From friends, family, people who listen to this and read this, people are outraged across the board. It was all over the news. People had no idea that we keep dogs in labs and breed dogs for labs and how horrific. It’s those stories, I think those dogs got really lucky because those labs are all over the country with a lot more dogs and other animals in them. They are opportunities, I think, to really shine a light on what's happening because it's 4000 dogs out of how many millions of animals. Those dogs not only got lucky because they never even had to go to a real lab, they were in the crappy breeding facility, but the testing hadn't even begun.
Syd: [00:25:45] That's an example of the hidden costs of animal research as well, because we have these breeding facilities where just thousands, millions of animals really when you include the mice and the rats who are being bred, millions of animals are being bred every year to be used in research. They're being transported across the country to laboratories where they will end up dying. Last winter, when we had this truck crash in Pennsylvania, which was a truck full of monkeys who had been captured in another country, shipped to the US on an airplane and then loaded on a truck to send them to a laboratory. We don't think about those sorts of hidden costs and hidden traumas that are happening to animals and research. If we only focus on the final place where they end up and where they end up dying, which is in a research lab and there's lots of money in those breeding facilities as well. So there are lots of vested interests in maintaining animal research as the status quo.
Hope: [00:26:47] You can find breeding protocols from companies that have patented genetically modified animals. If you look at those breeding protocols, you'll see how many animals are bred and just immediately killed or left to die. Many more than actually make it to the laboratories. So just speak to those still with those hidden costs. Those are all individuals, all individuals that we're talking about. This is one of the reasons that we think it's so important to come back to this ethical framework, at the same time, we're asking questions about, is this good science? Is it relevant to finding human cures, for example? We need to always be asking the question, is it right? Is it ethically, morally defensible? Because if we ignore that question, it makes it a lot easier for those who are using animals to make money to continue on that path.
Elizabeth: [00:27:54] At this point in 2022, with all we know and where we are with technology and everything else. Is it ever right to test on an animal?
Syd: [00:28:03] The vast majority of what we're doing to animals is neither scientifically nor ethically justifiable. Right. We simply couldn't do what we're doing to them, to a human and it doesn't work. Right. For me, if it's not good science, there's simply no justification at all for doing it. The way that science justifies using animals is that there will be benefits for humans from doing this. I think most people think that that's right. That even if we sacrifice some animals, the benefits to humans would justify making those sacrifices. We use the same justification for using children in research, for using disabled people in research, for using incarcerated people in research. But in the case of animals, it's very clear that those benefits are just not happening. We are just throwing those lives away and we're throwing away money, but we're also harming humans ultimately. I think there are extremely limited ways in which there would be the possibility of doing some research on animals just as we do research on humans. So I'm thinking here of, for example, you know, dogs and cats can get some of the same illnesses that humans get. They can get cancers, for example. Could we use dogs and cats in a veterinary context where they are patients who have an illness like lymphoma or something, or skin cancer or something like that, just as we would use human patients in that context, I think it's possible to make that ethical but extremely limited ability to do that. I think the vast majority of the research that we're doing simply can't be justified at all, either ethically or scientifically.
Hope: [00:29:57] I just come back to these principles that are outlined in the Belmont Report respect for autonomy and special protections for those with the diminished capacity to provide consent, for example. This idea that we should avoid harm, do no harm. This question of is it just and so I would say in the majority of cases involving the use of animals in research, it isn't just and if we ask the question about consent, you know, if they could provide consent or withhold consent, what would they do? Clearly, no animal, human or non-human wants to be significantly harmed unless they make a decision for themselves that it's worth it for one reason or another. So I really think about children and animals in the same space, even though they are not the same, obviously. Right. Animals can be young and they can be older. So it's not to infantilize animals either. But, you know, within society, they have this compromised ability to protect their own interests. If we think about the differences in our ability to understand what they want and their ability to understand what we're trying to achieve, it's just very difficult to see how they would ever provide consent to be bred in the ways that they are bred, to be held in a laboratory, to be exposed to disease, to be exposed to ongoing pain and suffering, just like a human typically wouldn't provide consent. So it becomes a decidedly unjust enterprise, the whole animal research enterprise, as we think about it.
Syd: [00:31:54] We have this sort of human exceptionalism or human supremacy that is used as the kind of baseline, foundational justification for exploiting animals, that humans are just more important and we're more special in some way. We can use whatever tools, whatever animals are available to us in order to promote things that are in the interest of humans. One of the the key and important messages of the Belmont Report, however, was even in cases where there might actually be benefits for humans, we are still not entitled to exploit others in order to achieve those benefits. We're not entitled to exploit children of incarcerated persons in order to further human interests. So even in the context of research on other humans, there was this kind of exceptionalism in place, right? That certain people mattered more than others did. That is certainly informing the way that we think about animal research today. But a really important lesson that I think is often overlooked in the 20th century transition towards more ethical science with humans is that we basically hit a point where there was a hard stop, where scientists were told, you cannot use humans in this way anymore. It's unethical and we're going to make it illegal for you to do that. They were able to work with that. They made that shift once and it's time for them to put their ingenuity and their knowhow into making that shift again and moving away from animals.
Hope: [00:33:44] Better ethics created better science. You know, if we look at the whole enterprise of human clinical research today, for example, and the standards that we rely on for clinical decision making, they are so much better today than they were even about half a century ago. So much of that has to do with an ethical push that Syd was alluding to, because the ethics had to be better and more rigorous, the science had to be more rigorous. So we are benefiting from that today in human medicine. There's no no doubt in my mind about that.
Elizabeth: [00:34:24] For people who don't know, there's something called the FDA Modernization Act of 2021. If this passes, first of all, what does it mean? And secondly, will it start the ball rolling in terms of bigger change or a bigger shift?
Syd: [00:34:42] The FDA currently has a requirement that almost any drug or medical device that is going up for FDA approval has to be tested in animals. So there's this requirement that they have in place that that has to happen. An interesting example of this being done was when the COVID vaccines were developed and those vaccines were fast tracked, there was a huge amount of international effort put into developing those vaccines. They were testing those vaccines in humans and getting those vaccines to the point where they could get this emergency use authorization without animal testing, but they still had to do that additional hurdle of doing the animal testing in order to get final approval for those vaccines. So there's a case where we didn't actually need to test it on animals. We had a disease that was affecting humans, that wasn't affecting mice, for example, and we still had to do it. It's sort of just regulatory box ticking and there will be other cases like that. But one of the things that the Modernization Act would do is to end that requirement that the FDA currently has that you must test on animals at some point.
Hope: [00:36:04] Most pharmaceutical companies want to see this change. You know, it's better for the bottom line in terms of money. People working at pharmaceutical companies also know that the science isn't good. So a lot of leaders, even at pharmaceutical companies, are interested in seeing the FDA Modernization Act passed because it would basically allow them more opportunity to use more human relevant methods in safety and efficacy testing early in drug development.
Syd: [00:36:42] It's not going to end the use of animals in research. There are still a lot of incentives to continue doing that research and still a lot of money being poured into doing that kind of research. So until we kind of plug up the financial pipeline that encourages people to continue to do this, I think we're going to see it continue.
Hope: [00:37:06] Passage of the FDA Modernization Act would make a big difference, because if we're thinking about the ways in which animals are used in research, drug development is a big part of the ways in which animals are used in research. What we also need to address is things like curiosity driven experiments that really have a long shot of ever translating into human benefit.
Elizabeth: [00:37:33] Is there anything that people can do to help push this or fight this?
Syd: [00:37:39] In the US ultimately, Congress controls the purse strings when it comes to things like funding for National Institutes of Health Research. There's a tremendous amount of money that goes into doing research on animals across the NIH. Should they be encouraged to start shifting that money towards finding better alternatives because, of course, we're wasting a tremendous amount of money. Billions of dollars were wasted on Alzheimer's research that did not ultimately benefit humans or result in effective treatments. So I think that to the extent that the money gets controlled at the congressional level, I think people have a way to influence what happens there. During the early 1970s, there were no animal regulations in the US in terms of what could be done to animals in research until the Animal Welfare Act was passed. One of the things that prompted the Animal Welfare Act to be passed was that a family in Pennsylvania had their dog kidnapped by someone who caught animals to sell them for biomedical research. This dog's name was Pepper. She was a Dalmatian and she was a beloved member of this family. They set off on this multi-state search to try to find their dog. Their congressman got involved. Multiple Congress people were involved in this. Ultimately, their dog, unfortunately, was killed in a laboratory in New York. But the outpouring of public outrage was so significant that multiple bills were put forward in Congress for something like the Animal Welfare Act. That is where we ended up with the sort of limited regulations that we currently have. So the public absolutely can influence what happens here.
Hope: [00:39:41] But the Envigo story could be one of those linchpins actually. If people are interested in going to transform medical research dot org, there are ways to sign on. There's ways to contact members of Congress, whether it's for the FDA Modernization Act or to get involved in other ways. Attend a session on how to write a letter to the editor for your local paper. The more people get involved and the more people are outspoken about these issues, the more members of Congress are going to respond and the more people, even at the National Institutes of Health, are going to start paying attention.
Elizabeth: [00:40:29] It's incredible when we have these moments like Envigo, I mean, as horrible as it is, it's like a little door opens to the public and brings back this awareness of something that goes right back underground really fast. I want to thank both of you so much. I learned a lot today, so thank you very much.
Syd: [00:40:47] Thank you.
Hope: [00:40:48] Thank you Beth.
Elizabeth: [00:40:57] To learn more about Hope and Syd and their work, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website Species Unite and click Donate. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna O'Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
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