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Scientists who question the validity of animal experiments are warning that medical progress is being held back because they are being “frozen out” by their peers.
A number of scientists based in the US claim they are being censored because of their scepticism, while others are said to be too afraid of the consequences to object to tests on animals.
In an industry where evidence is paramount, they warn of a culture of entrenched attitudes instead of open-mindedness.
Researchers say they are being forced to carry out experiments with animals if they want their work to be published, after their studies were rejected because they did not include an animal test. However, a UK-based defender of animal testing said claims of a divide between scientists were being exaggerated by animal rights campaigners.
In a study carried out by the non-profit Index on Censorship organisation and shared with The Independent, some said they were refused funding if they questioned the validity of animal-based methods. Others remain silent because they are worried about the implications when they go before grant review panels and journal editorial boards.
In a global survey, a third of respondents said they had been asked by peer reviewers to add animal experiments to non-animal studies.
Lisa Jones-Engel, who spent years conducting tests on monkeys in biomedical research, said she was ejected from a conference two hours before she was due to speak after telling the organisers she now worked for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta).
Organisers texted her asking to meet. “There’s the three of them plus the chair, and then they said, ‘Leadership has decided that you can’t do this’,” she told Index.
She says they took her security badge, and officials escorted her out of the hotel. “I’ve basically just been cast out as a scientist,” she recalls. “What the industry did that day was to guarantee that they had just solidified who I am and who I was going to be.”
In 2022, Dr Jones-Engel was among scientists assessing the long-tailed macaque, the species most widely used in laboratories, finding populations were declining dramatically.
The National Association for Biomedical Research, a US non-profit that calls itself the “national voice for animal research”, submitted a petition to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) against its “endangered” listing.
Dr Jones-Engel told Index: “I was personally attacked. A petition was written by the industry targeting me, another scientist and another activist saying that even though we’re scientists, because we are advocating for the listing of those animals to be endangered, that must mean this was all being driven by the animal-rights community.”
She said activist scientists received silencing treatments.
“In other disciplines, we accept scientist activists. We accept climate scientists who are activists. We accept physicians who advocate for their patients, who are activists about maternal rights. But within the animal research community, that is somehow considered anathema,” she said.
Charu Chandrasekera applied for a grant to develop a 3D bio-printed human lung tissue model, but one of the biggest criticisms from the peer review was a lack of animal data.
She says she knows scientists who stay silent because they worry about the implications when they go before grant review panels and journal editorial boards.
When she was establishing an alternative research centre, the response from the dean of science at one university was: “You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t want to offend the animal researchers here.”
She told Index there was a culture within the scientific community that regarded human data as merely anecdotal.
“The system is set up in a way that you can’t really fight it if you want to have a career in academia,” she said. “You have to publish or perish. You depend on these funding agencies for the money, and they’re requesting animal data.”
Now she is executive director of the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods, which promotes human biology-based tests.
When Frances Cheng questioned the use of animals during her training, she said she was not trying to highlight animal cruelty but rather that the methods were unscientific, with animal biology not translating to human biology.
When she wrote a line in the dedication of her thesis apologising to the animals she’d “unnecessarily” killed, her supervisor told her to remove it. She says she was told her job was to graduate, not to think about animal cruelty and translatability.
Dr Cheng, who later went on to become chief scientist in the laboratory investigations department at Peta, believes animal data is valued more than data based on human physiology.
She says that when she was volunteering at a hospital doing clinical research, she was blocked from the job of clinical trials coordinator because she was “an animal-rights activist”.
Dr Cheng claims that more recently, a commentary on issues with using mice and rats for human nutrition research was rejected because of her links with Peta.
All three scientists left the laboratories they worked in to follow careers advancing science without using animals.
Out of 90 respondents to a worldwide study, 31 scientists said they had been asked by peer reviewers to add animal experiments to their non-animal studies.
There have been huge developments globally in phasing out chemical testing on animals, including technology such as organs-on-a-chip, which simulates human organs.
In the UK, the government has announced that science minister Lord Vallance, a former head of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline who helped lead the response to the Covid pandemic, will lead the development of plans to phase out animal testing.
The Independent asked two leading US organisations that support animal testing, including the National Association for Biomedical Research, to comment, but did not receive a response.
A spokesperson for the UK-based Understanding Animal Research organisation was sceptical about the scientists’ claims, saying: “Those who do animal testing are also the biggest investors in non-animal technology by a massive margin, and about 80 per cent of bioscience funding goes to non-animal methods.
“They don’t seem to be having any problem whatsoever getting their non-animal data published, often using existing data to validate their approach rather than new animal tests.
“This sounds less like bias and more like the proposed non-animal model wasn’t likely to work for reasons that were obvious to the teacher, if not the student.”
