The Tooting Salon

A couple of years ago I chaired a debate at Cheltenham Science Festival called “Animal Experiments – Good, Bad or Necessary Evil?” At the end, the audience voted – “Good” and “Bad” were fairly evenly split, but the vast majority, and I was one of them, voted “necessary evil”. I’d now like to change my mind.
It’s taken a 16 year old school student to do what governments, universities and most of us have been too cowardly to do – stand up and say that experimenting on animals is a good thing. Without it, millions of human beings now alive would be dead or reduced by pain and disability. Unless you think a distressed rat is morally equivalent to a person knowing they face a lingering death, there is nothing evil in animal research.
Research labs are not bear-baiting pits. Of the scientists I know whose work has involved animals, one is a vegetarian – her argument being that animal experiments are essential, meat is not – and another winces at the sight of fur. Personally, I’m as happy to eat rabbits or wear them as I am to take an aspirin that was tested on them, but my squeamish friends do undermine the myth of the sadistic scientist.
The idea of “Animal Rights” turns the world on its head. The only laws animals know are the laws of Nature – laws that include “eat or be eaten” and “adapt or die”. Nature is more ruthless than any human could be, and if we worked by those same laws of the jungle, there would certainly be no animal welfare regulations. Lab rats lead strange, unnatural lives, unlike their wild cousins, but they also lead lives protected from all unnecessary suffering and from the variety of dreadful deaths from old age, random sickness, predators, hunger or thirst, that Nature offers.
It’s only humans that have the concept of cruelty at all, which is why we want to limit suffering in the first place. Do cats form ethics committees to discuss whether mouse torturing ought to be regulated? Do chimpanzees have laws about the humane slaughter of monkeys and other prey? No – because they’re not human.
For too long a handful of misanthropic bunny-lovers have impeded work that would expand our understanding of the natural world and equip us to prevent and cure human disease. We squirm at the thought that penicillin, vaccinations, and hundreds of other discoveries involved the discomfort and death of sentient creatures. But while we’ve been too embarrassed to speak up, fanatics who genuinely think that we are no better than rodents have been able to isolate those carrying out that research.
Scientists, accountants, even builders, have been threatened with physical violence, and attacked with bombs and baseball bats. Those who spoke at last Saturday’s Pro-Test march in Oxford now have police protection. But they cannot attack all of us.
If you think you’re no better than a mouse, you probably already don’t eat meat, drink milk, wear leather or wool. You should also stop taking medicines and carry a card refusing organ transplants. But if you’re a Man – or a woman with the balls for a fight – you can stand up for your right to know the difference.

I am, as you’ll know if you’ve looked at my website, half of a comedy science double act, the Comedy Research Project. Tongue in cheek, we claim to be testing the hypothesis that science can be funny, by locking a control audience into an adjacent room without comedians to see who laughs more. Sometimes we look at the bemused faces on the front row and wonder whether the control audience would be laughing louder. Are we, after all, just the placebo comedians in a double-blind trial?
Obviously, our audience is laughing too, but that’s the thing about the placebo effect – it does work. Tests consistently show that patients getting a dummy treatment do better than those getting no treatment at all. One of the few occasions when nothing is… er… better than nothing. Which is why new drugs don’t have to prove themselves better than nothing – they have to prove themselves better than placebo.
Now, scientists have gone one better. In a placebo face-off, they tested placebo tablets against placebo acupuncture. It’s already been shown that all placebos are not equal – taking four sugar pills works better than taking two, for example, and some colours work better than others. Now we also know that having needles apparently stuck in you (they retracted inside the stem) is more effective than apparently taking drugs.
Not so amazing. To pretend to stick needles into you, somebody (an out of work actor, perhaps) has to spend time talking to you, listening to you, and touching you. All things that make you feel better than lying on the sofa alone with only daytime TV for company. So here’s my idea – instead of ploughing NHS money into alternative therapies with no evidence that they work, why not just hire the out of work actors to come round to your house, be nice to you and make you soup?
There’s always the danger that this would be too pleasant – that recovery would be delayed as patients enjoy being pampered by people who are better-looking than average, and in some cases readier with their sexual favours (I’ve worked with actors). But at least they’d be saved from one of the negative effects of chronic illness, the narrowing of your world to yourself and your symptoms. I challenge anyone to remain self-obsessed in the company of an actor who is telling you about the parts they nearly got, should have got, or might get in the near future. It’s a bracing reminder that there’s a world out there with bigger problems than yours. Or theirs.