Animals and Alternatives: Societal Expectations and Scientific Need

Abstract

As Russell and Burch suggested more than 40 years ago, the most humane science is the best science. The path ahead is clear: pain and distress must be eliminated in animal experiments or reduced to an absolute minimum, and, as scientists, we must use the most humane approaches in our research. To accomplish the best science, we must train those who come after us in the principles and practice of humane science. “Each of them necessitated the community's rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it. Each produced a consequent shift in the problems available for scientific scrutiny and in the standards by which the profession determined what should count as an admissible problem or as a legitimate problem-solution. And each transformed the scientific imagination in ways that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world within which scientific work was done. Such changes, together with the controversies that almost always accompany them, are the defining characteristics of scientific revolutions.” (Thomas Kuhn, 1922–1996, on scientific revolutions) “Change is scientific, progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.” (Bertrand Russell, 1872–1970)