Misplacement, replacement, displacement
When considering the use of animals in research intended to have relevance for human health, the time may come when we look back and realise that animal experiments have been a huge and costly distraction, a path we might have done better to completely avoid.
If indeed we have taken the wrong turning, our task now is not to replace animal experiments; after all, there is little point in replacing a distraction. No, the task is to get back onto the correct path, which – if we are interested in human health – is research focused on humans and human biology.
Decades of experience show that – at least within academia, where basic and applied animal research is conducted – replacement isn’t working anyway. This is hardly surprising, since replacement requires animal researchers to voluntarily relinquish everything they have been working for and replace it with technologies they may be unfamiliar with and have no incentive to use. Within academia, it is more or less up to individual research teams to choose their own research topics and methodologies, so if the incentives, support or infrastructure for switching from animal to human biology-based approaches are not there, it will not be in their interests to do so. The regulatory sphere, however, is more tightly controlled: here non-animal tests for specific requirements exist, as well as greater economic and political incentives.
When animal researchers working within academia are asked why they don’t substitute their animal experiments with human biology-based approaches, they report that replacement simply isn’t a realistic option, that it is impossible to implement without disturbing the flow of their research. So, what is the ‘flow of research’? In the context of academic animal research at least, it is the flow of securing funding, publications and scientific careers – the flow of scientific capital, in other words. I write about the need to attend to scientific capital in a paper recently published in NAMs journal. In this paper, I also touch upon the concept of displacement, suggesting it is more in tune with an emphasis on phasing out animal research, whereas replacement, with its implication that there is something that needs to be replaced, continues to assert the primacy of animal research. Towards the end of a talk I wish I had come across when writing that paper, Nico Muller suggests that while replacement focuses on substituting existing animal experiments, displacement might focus on preventing more animals from entering the research pipeline in the first place. It’s a helpful distinction.
We erroneously placed our trust in animal experiments – a case of misplacement. But perhaps our trust in replacement is also misplaced. If we want to get firmly onto the path of human relevant research then we need to avoid the distraction of animal experiments and use human biology-based methods to answer questions about humans. That’s not replacing animal experiments, it’s avoiding them because they’re not relevant to human health.
For more discussion on phasing out animal experiments and how this might occur, watch Nico Muller’s talk and/ or read my paper, which provides a sociological perspective on the issue: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S3050620425000521
