A recent article in Le Monde reports on growing scepticism within the medical community as to the value of using mice to test drugs that will later be used on humans. Twenty million mice die each year in such medical trials even though, for at least a decade evidence against the practice has been mounting. “Mice are great for basic research, for understanding overall patterns and grasping mechanisms,” said one researcher, “But once you start modelling a human disease to find the right treatment, you run up against major differences between us and mice.” Significantly, they don’t share human responses to common drugs – paracetamol and aspirin kill them, yet they are resistant to the catastrophic morning sickness drug Thalidomide – and a mere five per cent of the drug trials that yield promising results on them turn out to be useful for humans. Nevertheless they continue to be sacrificed in vast numbers.
Our indifference to the pointless destruction of so many animals is partly due to the enduring mystique of science. Today science, research and data are overbroad concepts that are often used to invoke an unanswerable authority in much the same way that church edicts were issued before the Enlightenment. There is a corresponding reluctance in the lay public to question the methods and practices of this hieratic community, even though it routinely revises or discards its earlier opinions and persists in conducting research on animals known to be poor substitutes for human subjects, in the process wasting hundreds of millions of dollars developing drugs that turn out to be useless.
We tend to think of data as an impersonal construct, a royal road to the truth, independent of human interference. Sadly, scientific truths are all too often subject to social, cultural and political pressures. For generations racist beliefs were substantiated by pseudoscience, often with the complicity of religion. Only when racism was countered in the real world was the science revisited and debunked. More recently, the sugar and tobacco lobbies in the United States have shown that it is possible to manipulate public perception of their products – despite compelling evidence of their harmful side effects – with great success.
Closer to home, we rarely give credence to local medicines and bush remedies because they lack the authoritative branding of foreign products. Despite the efficacy of dozens of bush cures that are readily available in this country, most of us would rather place our trust in a bottle of foreign pills. Our scepticism towards marijuana – which has long been shown to have a wide range of medical applications – is another example of this diffidence. Only now, decades after any sensible policy would have decriminalised the drug are we waking up to its potential benefits, largely because developed countries are in the process of switching over to its mass production for medical uses.
As with the question of laboratory mice, we should be more sceptical towards the received wisdom that influences so much of West Indian life. Not just medical knowledge – the insistence on using less salt in our diets, for instance, despite a lack of robust evidence for this advice – but drugs and trade policies dreamt up by supposedly better minds in far off countries. Scepticism, unlike cynicism, is hard work which requires knowledge and judgement rather than mere dismissiveness, but it is also a necessary part of any society’s learning to think for itself.
