What I Did and Didn’t Learn From the Insides of a Guinea Pig
My education required an animal to be murdered on my behalf on more than one occasion and without my consent
Early in my undergraduate degree, in my first lecture in medical ethics, the professor asked for a show of hands: How many of you think that it’s wrong to use animals in medical research? We young scientists, in our witless innocence, almost unanimously raised our hands. “By the end of this degree,” we were told, “you will have changed your minds.”
Indeed, many of us did lose this sensitivity. Third-year pharmacology classes required that each student isolate the guinea pig trachea (windpipe). This meant cutting open the skin of their chest, breaking apart the ribcage, identifying which of many similar-looking fleshy tubes we were after, and cutting it out with a pair of scissors. We were provided with detailed instructions and a diagram. Then using a needle and thread, each end of the isolated tissue was attached to a metal hook and placed inside an apparatus called an organ chamber, where it could be fed with oxygen and stimulated with chemicals.
We were told to ‘treat the animals with respect’ as their warm bodies were laid down in tissue paper on the…
