1280 
THE USE OF ANIMALS IN MEDICAL RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION 
acceptance by the scientific community of the 
development of certain criteria to eliminate 
poor technique in the use of animals in experi- 
mentation. 
Dr. Harmison: I think this underscores very 
clearly something vi^hich we all recognize, that 
animals are something more than a bottle of 
chemicals to be used and resupplied at a regular 
interval. At this point I think it's appropriate to 
now turn and look at this subject from a slightly 
different viewpoint, the clinician's direct view- 
point. I would like Dr. John C. Norman from 
Boston to give us his views. 
Dr. John C. Norman : I will begin by briefly 
giving you a bit of background. We have a 
laboratory in the hospital, at the large trade 
school in the northeast, in Boston, and it has 
a relatively large faculty. I won't go into the 
specific university, but I think its bureaucracy 
exceeds that of the megalopolis on the Potomac 
that's called NIH. It's a bewildering place to 
work but suffice it to say that there are about 
2,000 people on the Harvard faculty, about 18 
teaching hospitals, about 600 medical students 
in varying states of disarray come through it 
year after year. 
I think we've been made aware of the old and 
new laws, P.L. 89-544 and P.L. 91-579. I would 
hope that our compliance has been filed. I think 
we're all constrained by the quandary as to what 
to do about situations like this and since at 
Harvard all of the our lectures are still in Latin, 
I brought along three quotations. 
The first is "Avtor alia est," and essentially 
that means "the law is the law." I was reminded 
of another which my Latin teacher taught me 
many years ago down in West Virginia. "Pars 
cum partis," that is to say that "birds of a 
feather do flock together," and we're here 
concerned about the same sorts of problems. 
And finally, the terms of the problems that 
are involved, the last (I'm sure the fellows from 
Houston will know this) : "Illegitime non car- 
borundum." "We will have to persist." 
We don't have the benefit of a veterinarian in 
our laboratory. We run a very small unit, but I 
think we've done five or six thousand experi- 
ments in it over the past seven or eight years. 
I'm not quite sure where I should begin in terms 
of how we as clinicians feel. I'm in cardiovas- 
cular and thoracic surgery. So we do surgery on 
patients in the morning, and/or afternoon, and 
we work in the laboratory earlier in the morn- 
ing or later in the afternoon and at night. 
Now one thing I would like to leave with you 
is that we apply to our experimental animals 
the same criteria that we apply to patients. We 
treat our animals with a certain respect and 
we become quite close to them. I'd like to give 
you three examples in terms of animals that 
have stayed with us in the laboratory over two- 
or three-year periods. Dr. W. Jean Dodds knows 
about our hemophilic animals that we've flown 
in from Oklahoma from her laboratory, and 
from Ontario, in terms of splitting transplanta- 
tion for hemophilia. We fell in love with them 
immediately. Two of them lived in my office 
and made a shambles out of it over a two-year 
period, primarily because we were concerned 
about their welfare. 
Dr. Harmison and, before him. Dr. Hastings 
were aware of the animals we had in our labora- 
tory over a three-year period in terms of nu- 
clear power sources for artificial internal or- 
gans. They were extremely valuable. One was 
a little difficult to deal with. His name was 
Wolf. But we became attached to these animals 
and when we did sacrifice them, we did it with 
grace and style and had Dr. Harmison in Bos- 
ton to make sure that it went along well. 
I think that in terms of concern, in terms of 
academic medicine and the formulation of public 
policy, it behooves all of us to be aware of 
problems. A specific example of this was a 
phone call I got from a third-year medical stu- 
dent's wife about three weeks ago. We run an 
experimental surgery course for our third-year 
medical students, and you know the current 
posture of medical students, the ones who were 
around university halls in 1968 and 1969. They 
don't mind making us aware of problems. It was 
about 11 : 00 at night and I was in the laboratory 
per usual. We were going over contracts and 
grants and study sections, and getting ready 
to go on site visits, and her husband had been 
with us in experimental surgery that afternoon. 
We run a short course, it lasts seven weeks. They 
do minor and major procedures on experi- 
mental animals, and those animals are sub- 
sequently used in some of our experiments. 
