In the amendment to the law, which was discussed at the beginning of the week in the Knesset's education committee, Reid and a group of MKs from Meretz want to make Israel the only country in the Western world where it is forbidden to conduct experiments on animals "that are not for the purpose of saving lives"
In the 60s Torsten Wiesel and David Yuval performed many hundreds of experiments on monkeys and cats. With the help of these experiments, they were able to solve one of the most difficult puzzles of biology: how the brain decodes the image captured by the eyes. In 1981 they won the Nobel Prize. It is not clear if MK Yossi Sharid has heard of these studies, but he plans to ban them by law.
In the amendment to the law, discussed at the beginning of the week in the Knesset's education committee, Reid and a group of MKs from Meretz want to make Israel the only country in the Western world where it is forbidden to carry out experiments on animals "that are not for the purpose of saving lives". This wording is misleading. Without "non-life-saving" experiments, a considerable part of the laboratories in every university in the world can be closed.
No one owed his life to the experiments of Wiesel and Yuval. Not only were these studies not "lifesaving", it is impossible to name a single drug for eye disease that depends on their findings. Yuval Wiesel faced a basic scientific question - how does the sense of sight work, not a medical question. Perhaps in the future these findings could cure people of blindness. maybe not. The fame of Wiesel and Yuval does not depend on this question.
A perusal of the list of Nobel laureates in the last 30 years shows that Yuval Wiesel is not alone. Since 1960, with the exception of six cases, the prize has always been awarded to researchers who performed experiments on animals. Even if we stretch the interpretation of Sherid's law wildly, many laureates still remain outside the scope. The Nobel laureates are just a sample - they did research that was very successful. For every researcher who comes to Stockholm, there are tens of thousands working on similar questions with similar animals. Science depends on these tens of thousands of small, consistent steps. Therefore, the true meaning of this wild law is actually the elimination of a significant part of scientific research in Israel.
But this Enlightenment attack will disable not only researchers engaged in basic research. Most of the medical researchers, agricultural researchers and biotechnologists are also asked by the Meretz fighters to cancel their jobs. Experiments done on monkeys and cats made it possible to produce hearing devices that transmit electrical signals to the brain. Thousands of deaf people can hear today thanks to these experiments, which were not life-saving. Research done on monkeys by a researcher from the Hebrew University led to the development of an innovative treatment for Parkinson's disease. This treatment does not "save lives", but it greatly improves them. Likewise, every painkiller is tested on millions of animals before it is approved for use.
With the exception of the closing of a few dozen laboratories in Israel, there is nothing new in Meretz's amendment. The existing law already prohibits any experiment on animals whose purpose can be achieved in another way. The fear of a researcher who abuses the animals or neglects them is also addressed in the old law.
It is therefore difficult not to wonder, what led to the initiation of this dawnless amendment, and what background work preceded its bringing to the Knesset. Today there is no western country where such a law exists. The United States allocated five billion dollars to animal experiments last year. In 1996, experiments were carried out on more than 11 million animals in the countries of the European Union - all legal, and mostly with government encouragement.
Obviously, biology, biotechnology, chemistry, ecology, environmental science, psychology, zoology, and several other scientific disciplines depend heavily on non-life-saving experiments. Those who are truly concerned about the lives of animals surely know that of the animals killed by humans, less than ten percent end their lives in laboratories. Those who are truly concerned about animal welfare would prefer to focus on the miserable lives of millions of chickens, for example, which can be easily improved for a few pennies per egg. Those who check know very well that the sanitary, environmental and veterinary conditions in the zoos at the universities are high by any standard.
What brings the members of Meretz to go hunting for scientists? It's hard to know. Two weeks ago, the second channel broadcast, with great noise, images from a hidden camera, which was inserted into the laboratory where an operation was conducted on a laboratory monkey. Such surgeries have been done for years in dozens of laboratories around the world under full anesthesia and under veterinary supervision, and their goal is to allow researchers to measure the electrical activity in the brain. After the operation the monkey recovers. Wiesel and Yoval's experiments were also based on similar analyses. Along with the article, reports and commentaries were broadcast, that any short conversation with a scientist, had it been done, would have revealed their unreliability. But it is hard to believe that this broadcast has anything to do with amending the Meretz law. After all, it is impossible that such a far-reaching bill from such an enlightened party is merely a hasty response to a half-baked TV report.
By Yanai Ofran. The writer is a PhD student in biology at Columbia University
