Research Ethics at the Bottom of the Ice Bucket

Remember those summer weeks when your entire Facebook feed was filled with people pouring cold water over themselves and making some form of disgruntled exclamations about the fact? Everyone from Victoria Beckham to my own mother took part in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and good on them too.

The ALS foundation in the USA raised $100 million in August 2014 off the back of the ice bucket challenge. For comparison, in August 2013, it raised just $2.8 million. ALS is a terrible condition and the money donated by ice bucket challengers is already beginning to be put to use helping find cures for it. Other international funds such as ALS Australia and MND here in the UK have received orders-of-magnitude increases in donations, and are also funding research, both domestic and international.

Most medical research relies heavily on the use of animal models to characterise how diseases affect sufferers, and how they can be controlled and cured. Research into ALS is no exception. Public opinion of animal testing for medical purposes remains largely in favour, but is dropping. 10 years ago, support for medical research on animals stood at 75%; it’s now down to 68%.

As well as this drop in support, pollsters Ipsos MORI found that if you phrase the question differently, you get different results. Asking the public if ‘Animal Research’ was acceptable, 68% of people replied that it was. If this is changed to the more grizzly ‘Animal Experimentation’ the number in favour drop to 64%.

64% is still a large majority of public opinion in favour of animal testing. However the most interesting finding of Ipsos MORI’s poll was that only 30% of Brits feel they are “well informed” about animal research in the UK. 1 in 3 respondents thought that animals could be used for cosmetics research, even though this has been illegal for 15 years.

The ALS foundation is not secretive about how its money goes to animal experiments; you can click straight through to a press statement about mouse model research from the ALS homepage. However it has been careful to spend most of its new cash on stem cell research to avoid any potential public outcry from people who donated without realising they would be supporting animal testing they could be opposed to. The sheer volume of donations it received combined with the fact that up to 36% of the population are opposed to animal testing — and 70% don’t really get what it entails — suggest that a large spending spree on pulling rats apart would almost certainly result in a negative backlash.

ALS charities now sit on pots of gold larger than some countries’ economies. They may be able to hold off funding vivisection in the short term whilst the public eye is still on them, but they’re going to have to spend it on animal experiments eventually. And rightly so: diseases aren’t cured by pouring buckets of water over celebrities.

Instead of posing a dilemma to these charities, this is now the perfect time to engage with the public over animal testing. The charities should publicly promote all their different types of research — including their animal models — and describe how these tie in to other human based studies. More effort could be made to discuss the strict ethical frameworks that surround animal testing with the public, as well as the efforts made to prevent unnecessary suffering, and the current research that’s taking place to do away with animal models entirely.

The goodwill that ALS research is currently experiencing is unprecedented and could prove the perfect backdrop to increase the understanding of animal research that the public both wants, and is owed.