From: Arne Scheibel [scheibel@mednet.ucla.edu]

Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 7:34 AM

To: Chesselet, Marie F PhD.

Subject: Re: more on responding to animal activists

Dear Marie Francoise;

The intellectual arguments for animal-based research are certainly well known and they make intellectual sense. But we must remember that most of the support - and the arguments - from the activists are really based on feelings. These are limbic issues. In any discussions with their group, we must be prepared to handle things at that level. When I was Director of the BRI, I frequently had to meet with their members. I found that one has to be accepting of their strong feelings and support their sense of empathy for all life. In our turn, i pointed out how the animals were equally important colleagues in the challenging program to mitigate disease and suffering. Even if our animals were not our respected colleagues in these procedures, we would be defeating our own ends if we allowed them to have pain or suffer in other ways. That very suffering would contaminate or overwhelm the answers we were trying to tease out of the experiments. So for pragmatic as well as personal empathy-bound motives, it is always to our good (as well as theirs) for our procedures to be as atraumatic and painless as possible. Furthermore, animals are every bit as much the beneficiaries of such research as are humans. (Our animals probably receive more day to day attention and T/L/C than half of the human children in the world.) In any case, the Activist's feelings have to be accepted and we must show we also have feelings for these wonderful little personalities with whom we work. I think that it is only on this basis that the intellectual arguments can have any acceptability.

Arne