ShareThisSue Leary once thought she might have a career as a biologist, but soon after getting her biology degree in 1976 from Pennsylvania State University, she concluded that path meant “being in a lab working with animals and probably doing not nice things with them.”
Instead, she moved into a career of management of non-profits, first dealing with aging and other issues, but since 1995, serving as president of the American Anti-Vivisection Society, the oldest organization in the United States established to oppose the use of animals in research.
The society is just as opposed to animal studies as it was when Caroline Earle White founded it in Philadelphia in 1883, but in recent years, the path to abolition has turned increasingly to helping scientists find and use better methods that don’t use animals.
One of its campaigns works to certify that cosmetics and other consumer products that claim to be “cruelty free” really are. Another effort mobilizes science students in high school and college to push teachers and administrators to use non-animal tools for instruction.
But the biggest push has been to promote the development of alternatives in toxicology and research into new drugs and medical devices. As head of the affiliated Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, Leary spends a good deal of time at scientific meetings, listening and nudging researchers about better tactics.
For instance, there’s the production of monoclonal antibodies, immune cells that are identical, having been cloned from a single parent cell. Until recently, the industry standard for growing those cells was to inject them in the abdomens of mice and let them incubate until ready for use. But after the foundation held a seminar with the National Institutes of Health to demonstrate that the cells could be grown as effectively in test tubes, researchers with NIH grants had to shift to the new method.
Leary says too many scientists have long-standing stakes in using the same methods and give only perfunctory looks to other options when setting up their next experiments. “I don’t know that there’s ever an instance where you can say there is no other way except to use an animal model," she said. "I would challenge them to find another way.”
(Email Scripps Howard News Service science correspondent Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com.)
