Page 37 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

focus and purpose in life was to become a doctor. I attended the lab but refused

to be the one in our group to administer the drugs. It distressed me so much that

I have only the faintest recollection of what actually happened that day. Only my

regret and the memories of the dog splayed supine—its open chest cavity and

the rich pink color of its heart—remain.

Each year, more than 100 million animals—including mice, rats, frogs, dogs,

cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, fish, and birds—are killed in U.S.

laboratories for biology lessons, medical training, curiosity-driven

experimentation, and chemical, drug, food, and cosmetics testing.1 The truth is

that research done on animals does not translate to humans. This has been

reported by prominent medical journals such as the Journal of the American

Medical Association2 and the British Medical Journal3, and echoed by former

4
directors of the National Institute for Health (NIH)and the National Cancer

Institute (NCI).5 In 2006, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration stated,

“Currently, nine out of 10 experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we

cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory

and animal studies.”6 Despite this information, approximately 47 percent of NIH-

funded research involves experimentation on nonhuman animals, and in 2012,

NIH budgeted nearly 30 billion dollars for research and development.7,8 In

addition, many charities––including the March of Dimes, the American Cancer

Society, and countless others—use donations to fund experiments on animals.

Pollution from biomedical waste is another concern. A steady stream of

pharmaceutical byproducts, both from human and veterinary medical practices

and waste from medical supplies is leached into the environment each year. The

largest pharmaceutical offenders are sex hormones, antiparasitics, antibiotics

and steroids, which have already begun to alter the composition of bacteria in the

soil, the insects that feed on them and on and on up the food chain. Antibiotic

waste from manufacturing is one of the leading causes of antimicrobial

resistance to antibiotics –a global emerging health crisis. China, one of the

largest sites of antibiotic production, has pollution of active antibiotics in all of its