HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 69 
ology to students of medicine and of science, I cannot subscribe to 
the belief that pupil-performed experiments on living animals, or 
demonstrations of such experiments performed by a teacher need be a 
part of high school instruction in biology, or that undergraduate 
instruction in universities will suffer if a background of this kind has 
not been provided in high school. I am inclined to suspect that little 
would be lost even at the undergraduate level of instruction — in 
which I include the instruction in the basic medical sciences given to 
students of medicine — if much of the student’s individual experimen- 
tation on living animals, were replaced by demonstrations given by an 
instructor. It has been my experience that most experiments per- 
formed by undergraduate students become simply an exercise in 
technique that, even if it were properly acquired, would have little 
or no value for the subsequent career of the majority of them, while 
from lack of adequate technique the results of these experiments are 
often so equivocal or misleading as to have no educational value — -• 
unless it be to demonstrate the difficulty of biological experimenta- 
tion. 
In spite of the voluntary activities of the scientific societies, the 
universities, and the other institutions of research, reports still appear 
occasionally in the scientific journals describing experiments whose 
painful or destructive character it would be hard to justify on the 
grounds of the value of the knowledge expected to result from them ; 
it is probably reasonable to assume that more are done than become 
the subject of research papers. And the penalty of refusal of publi- 
cation, being applied retrospectively, can only discourage repetition ; 
it is unlikely to discourage first essays of this kind. 
Much of the opposition of teachers and research workers to the 
proposed legislation arises from their fear that its result would be to 
circumscribe their work by the decisions of administrators ignorant 
of the scientific niceties that prescribe certain lines of experimentation 
as preferable to others, and to burden them with the spate of form 
filing that seems to be the accompaniment of most kinds of licensure ; 
one fear, in particular, that has received a good deal of publicity, is 
that they will have to submit in advance detailed statements of the 
exact nature of the experiments they propose to do. Now, research 
is, by definition, an inquiry into the unknown; while it is true that 
just occasionally it may be possible to forsee the sequence of experi- 
ments needed to establish or refute a hypothesis, so that one might be 
able to describe to a licensing body the experiments to be performed, 
generally the design of each experiment is conditioned by the infer- 
ences drawn from the last, and the whole direction of a research proj- 
ect, perhaps even its purpose, may have to be altered in midstream 
if the inferences from the part completed indicate that this is desir- 
able. It is clear then that legislation that would require specie ap- 
proval of individual experiments would insuperably handicap the 
work of most scientists, and that even the individual licensing of whole 
projects would be a burden. 
If I felt that such restrictions were necessary to avoid the occa- 
sional performance of cruel experiments by a small minority of ex- 
perimenters, I, too, would argue that it were better not to legislate. 
But I do not think that this is needed. In my opinion, what should 
be done is — ■ 
