Are we going to allow the last nail on the coffin of animal experimentation to be nailed?

Animal experimentation in pharmacology has been the mainstay of practical pharmacology teaching in India for many decades. Undergraduate students in medicine and pharmacy as well as postgraduate students in pharmacology and pharmacy had to (and still have to) perform experiments, both with live animals and with tissues, in their summative and formative examinations. Autonomic pharmacology was the main area of interest of the senior generation of pharmacology teachers. They conducted many experiments in autonomic pharmacology in dogs and cats and, therefore, had very strong experimental skills using these animals. This tradition was firmly handed down to their students, who were rigorously trained in these techniques. In the 1980s, pharmacologists started showing interest in clinical pharmacology and, with this change, there came less focus on the transmission of the experimental skills to students to conduct the complicated bioassays and live animal experimentation. After the CPCSEA came into existence, there were further problems with procurement of animals, maintenance of animal houses and approval of protocols for experiments using animals. Students became more vocal in voicing their views against animal experimentation, and postgraduates were less inclined to take up research projects for their dissertations that involved animal experimentation. Many academics wrote their views for and against animal experiments for teaching. The increasing consensus was that live and in vitro animal experiments for undergraduate medical and pharmacy teaching should be scrapped and replaced with computer-assisted learning and simulated experiments. However, teachers were still of the view that it was an important aspect of postgraduate training. With the so-called “dog experiment” no longer being performed, many departments turned to using rodents for autonomic pharmacology exercises. However, the experiments have lost their teeth when postgraduates realized that they could pass the practical examination with little or no skill in conducting these experiments. Some departments claimed that they trained their postgraduates to interpret the graphs that had been obtained previously and, in this sense, focussed on the important aspect of experimentation – the interpretation. I do not think many pharmacologists buy into this argument, which is obviously eyewash.