Good story, if your Yorkie ever needs tracheal collapse surgery, you can thank animal research! Itsy Bitsy is a neat name for a Yorkie!
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I'm not sure what I expected to talk about, over lunch, with America's most-honored, nearly 96-year-old physician, Dr. Michael E. DeBakey.
Maybe what it felt like to perform the first dozen heart transplants in the United States? The excitement of developing the roller pump as a mere med student, which, 20 years later, helped make possible the first successful open-heart surgery? The satisfaction of performing the first successful coronary bypass? Or developing the first M.A.S.H. units way back in the '40s?
I did not think one of our topics would be his beloved Yorkshire terrier, Itsy Bitsy DeBakey, and the fact that, thanks to animal research, a tracheal operation and a hysterectomy bought the little fur ball six more years of romping in the dandelions.
But the fact that animal research helps save both human beings AND other Itsy Bitsies is too often overlooked, DeBakey said. And that fact was pressing on the sharp mind of this decorated medical statesman when we met a week ago in Washington, D.C.
With passion, he spoke about what he sees as the costly and troubling toll taken on research and on the lives and families of researchers by the most radical animal activists who target them. "They're really terrorists in this regard," DeBakey said.
And the very day I arrived back in Seattle, the FBI's domestic terrorism squad had arrested another animal activist right here at home. Joshua Harper was one of seven people arrested across the country last week on charges including torching researchers' cars, vandalizing homes and making threats against families.
Much to Harper's satisfaction, no doubt, such tactics have had an enormous effect on research according to the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research. Money for life-saving research goes, instead, to security systems and crime prevention.
In England, animal research virtually has been shut down.
But, when I asked two local leaders in the field about the pressure exerted by animal activists, they said the effect has not been all bad, after all.
"I jump on both sides of this issue," Mel Dennis told me. He's the chairman of the Department of Comparative Medicine at the University of Washington. He agrees with DeBakey "100 percent" that there comes a point when a surgeon-in-training must lay hands on a live, anesthetized animal. "And I worry about the competence of people who may go out into the practice of veterinary medicine who have not had the experience of working on live animals," he said.
In vet schools today, a small but vocal number of veterinary students is refusing to work on live animals. Some won't work on animal cadavers. And some will not perform euthanasia even when it is the only humane response to an injured animal's suffering.
Still, partly under pressure from animal activists, some exciting alternatives, such as computer programs and plastic models, have been developed that make learning far better now than when he was in vet school, Dennis said.
And sometimes those "inanimate trainers" are better than live animals because they allow students to repeat things over and over until they get it right.
Charlie Powell, public information officer for Washington State University's college of veterinary medicine, and a 30-year animal sciences veteran, agrees.
He says his school tries to meet the "philosophical needs" of animal rights activists who are also veterinary students. And that's OK with him so long as it doesn't go too far.
Powell is happy that, thanks to models, fewer and fewer live, anesthetized animals must go under the knife in the cause of human and animal health. But, while activists would like to stop all animals from going to a teaching facility like WSU, the truth is that 70,000 unwanted and "unplaced" dogs and cats are born in the United States every single day. Animals that will die and be dumped into landfills, he said.
About 100 of those animals come to WSU each year, alive. These are animals that would be destroyed anyway, Powell said. Euthanasia is performed and then they are embalmed and used to teach veterinary students how to save the lives of other animals.
Even animals like Itsy Bitsy DeBakey.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/paynte...paynter07.html