258 HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 
STATEMENT OF DR. HELEN B. TAUSSIG, PROFESSOR OF PEDI- 
ATRICS, JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL, BALTIMORE, MD. 
Dr. Taussig. Gentlemen, I come to you today as vice president of 
the American Heart Association, as well as professor of pediatrics 
at Johns Hopkins Medical School ; also as a physician who has devoted 
her life to the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease in children, 
and as a doctor who first conceived of the operation to help blue babies. 
Therefore, I am naturally deeply cncerned with the laws which affect 
investigative work. 
The Moulder and Griffith bills are recommended in order to obtain 
humane treatment of animals. We are all in accord with that. It 
is the question of its effect on investigative work, with which I am 
concerned. 
Both bills demand that no animal experiments be undertaken un- 
less it can be proved that it cannot be done on invertebrate animals. 
If it were taken literally, it would be pretty impossible, and hold up 
a great deal of investigation. If it is not taken literally, it does not 
seem necessary. 
The Moulder bill definitely states that animal experiments should 
be kept to a minimum, and furthermore that bill states that the 
person who is to be the head of the Bureau be a lawyer with no ex- 
perience in laboratory work. In other words, the person who processes 
the requests for laboratory and experimental investigation, the man 
who ultimately judges the importance of these experiments, and the 
ability of the investigator, is not experienced in the field in which he 
is judging. 
Both bills demand that the entire problem be outlined, including 
the procedures used on animals. It is not quite clear whether changes 
in procedures require a new application or not. But the content in- 
dicates — that if you radically change the procedure, you have to file 
another application. 
May I review for a moment what Dr. Blalock did in developing 
the blue baby operation. He wished to find out whether one could 
help a baby who is suffering from lack of oxygen. He could not find 
an animal that had the condition. He had to try and simulate it. He 
wanted to try and see whether my suggestion was good and whether 
it would help before he undertook it on children. He tried to create 
pulmonary stenosis and found it was impossible. He would have had 
to file an application for that. 
Then we had to radically change the whole line of attack and con- 
sequently change the procedure and try to alter the circulation so that 
the dog would be receiving a large amount of venous blood instead of 
pure arterial blood in the body. Even that didn’t work. 
We had to go on to take out a lobe of the lung, and decrease the area 
of circulation in the lungs. Many people would say that was a 
radical change in procedure. We would have had to file still another 
application. 
The penalties in this bill for not conforming to that, and for extend- 
ing the idea that this is not in line with the original one, are so great 
that I think that none of us wanted to take a chance. All doctors 
wish to keep entirely within the law. That would mean two or three 
applications would be necessary to get one total experiment done. 
