PEOPLE LIKE to involve themselves in causes. Sometimes, as with Abolition or World War II's triumph over fascism, these are truly noble. At other times, the cause is at best misguided. Consider Prohibition or the Crusaders' prolonged attempts to impose Christianity on the Holy Land, a campaign that served only to attach its name to the similarly possessed who would follow.
While their causes may differ, crusaders of every epoch have three things in common: They demonstrate a perverse genius for convincing themselves theirs is the only moral position; they possess the unflagging conviction they must impose their position on those who do not share it; and they inevitably view their cause in terms of black and white. Never in shades of gray.
This tendency was reinforced recently when five Bank of New York branches were vandalized by animal-rights activists, who claim they want to force the bank to break its ties with a pharmaceutical testing firm that uses animals in its work.
The newest generation of crusaders has wrapped itself in the banner of animal rights. At first blush, that might not sound so bad, since most people believe animals deserve some kind of protection from human excess. But the animal crusaders will accept nothing less than according animals the same rights people enjoy. That means no fur or leather. No meat. No animal experimentation.
It is the last that concerns me most. I am, as my wife likes to call me, a "lab rat" who is taking part in scientific trials of promising new drugs.
Except, of course, I am not really a rat, a guinea pig or any of those other creatures scientists use before trying new drugs on people.
The reason scientists try their concoctions on animals before people becomes abundantly clear reading the consent form given people. This is not a form at all, but a 10-page sheaf, each one of which must be initialed and dated, until reaching the final page where you sign and provide the name of your next of kin, who would be notified in the unlikely event something really awful happened. The first nine pages offer a detailed description of what is required of the subject and the possible, although unlikely, side effects of the drug as determined from test animals that have received far greater doses than any human subject will ever get.
Informed consent involves more information than you might really want to have. For the animal crusaders this is an ethical crisis, as black and white as the letters on the sheet of paper where my signature certifies consent. None of those animals gave their consent, informed or otherwise, before getting huge doses of this experimental drug.
I don't see this moral violation quite so clearly as these new crusaders.
My vision is clouded by gray shadows of experience. The drug I will test is intended to treat asthma, a disease that afflicts 10 million people in this country, half of them children. About 5,000 people die of it each year.
Fatalities, like the disease itself, are on the rise. Most who die are young.
For researchers who develop new drugs to treat not just asthma, but many other diseases, there is a different ethical crisis involving drug trials.
"First, do no harm," is the admonition that has been passed on to generations of doctors since Hippocrates, and animal trials are the best way to make sure new drugs will not harm humans.
In other words, I might be willing to take a drug that hasn't already been through animal trials, but no reputable doctor would give it to me or any human test subject.
Animal crusaders want drug trials to be simulated by computer program, but no computer can accurately simulate a complete human, or animal, metabolic system. So, if animal crusaders get their way, development of all new drugs could be halted. Which is where the gray shadows of experience come in.
I can remember across many years, as a child, struggling for breath in a hospital bed, separated from two desperately worried parents by the forbidding plastic wall of an oxygen tent. In that hospital bed lies not only a patient, but a solution to the controversy. Animal crusaders have the choice, if they truly believe in their cause, to refuse treatment with any drug developed using animal experimentation.
But experience predicts there will likely come a day when the child in that hospital bed will be their own, and the choice will be between animal rights and the life of a child. In terms of ethical conflict, it doesn't get any more black and white than that.
