What’s Special about the Ethical Challenges of Studying Disorders with Altered Brain Activity?

Abstract

Where there is no viable alternative, studies of neuronal activity are conducted on animals. The use of animals, particularly for invasive studies of the brain, raises a number of ethical issues. Practical or normative ethics are enforced by legislation, in relation to the dominant welfare guidelines developed in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Guidelines have typically been devised to cover all areas of biomedical research using animals in general, and thus lack any specific focus on neuroscience studies at the level of the ethics, although details of the specific welfare recommendations are different for invasive studies of the brain. Ethically, there is no necessary distinction between neuroscience and other biomedical research in that the brain is a final common path for suffering, irrespective of whether this involves any direct experience of pain. One exception arises in the case of in vitro studies, which are normally considered as an acceptable replacement for in vivo studies. However, to the extent sentience is possible, maintaining central nervous system tissue outside the body naturally raises ethical questions. Perhaps the most intractable challenge to the ethical use of animals in order to model neuronal disorder is presented by the logical impasse in the argument that the animal is similar enough to justify the validity of the experimental model, but sufficiently different in sentience and capacity for suffering, for the necessary experimental procedures to be permissible.

Biotechnologies and Animals: The Impact of Genetic Engineering on Human-Animal Relationships

“…Overall, rodents provide a good tradeoff between the complexity of physiological functions necessary to meet the scientific objectives of biomedical research and the need to minimise ethical concerns, excluding animals with higher phylogenetic positions and increased capacity of suffering, according to current legislation on animal experimentation and animal protection. Hence, the preferential use of rodents for biomedical technologies can be (maybe surprisingly) viewed as a strategy promoting replacement for the use of higher animals (Cassaday 2015), and therefore benefiting from the fulfilment of one of the 3R principles (i.e., Reduction, Refinement, Replacement; (Russell 1959)).…”

“…The general implications of biotechnologies have already been discussed in the previous sections; issues that are more specific to biomedical research and that may result in the emergence of novel ways of considering animals are now introduced. On the one hand, all examples described below are problematic from an ethical point of view, starting from a basic conflictual assumption: an animal is similar enough to humans to justify its experimental use for human medical needs, but is sufficiently different in sentience and capacity for suffering for allowing the necessary experimental procedures (Cassaday 2015). On the other hand, it may be argued that all these applications of biotechnologies comply with the ethical guidelines on medical research arising from the 1947 Nuremberg Code, requiring that experiments be based on results of animal experiments to minimise unnecessary human suffering (Cassaday 2015).…”

“…On the one hand, all examples described below are problematic from an ethical point of view, starting from a basic conflictual assumption: an animal is similar enough to humans to justify its experimental use for human medical needs, but is sufficiently different in sentience and capacity for suffering for allowing the necessary experimental procedures (Cassaday 2015). On the other hand, it may be argued that all these applications of biotechnologies comply with the ethical guidelines on medical research arising from the 1947 Nuremberg Code, requiring that experiments be based on results of animal experiments to minimise unnecessary human suffering (Cassaday 2015). The need for a balance between these ethical conflicts seems to point in favour of animal medical research, as suggested by public surveys reporting that applications of genetic engineering to animals are generally better perceived and judged as more morally acceptable when their purpose concerns biomedical research rather than other fields, for example, food production (Schuppli and Weary 2010).…”

“…Furthermore, when we study neurobehavioural disorders we create negative experiences in the model animals, and we should consider the possibility that they may be even more overwhelmed by these states than us (Bovenkerk and Kaldewaij 2015). While many of these considerations may apply to other areas of biomedical research, these issues seem to become particularly relevant when sentience is the direct object of study, as in the case of neurobehavioural research on animal models (Cassaday 2015). This problem is exacerbated in the case of disorders that might have been avoided, as such situations are accompanied by the so-called human culpability factor, that is, a specific ethical concern affecting the use of animal research to alleviate human suffering that could have been avoided through behavioural change.…”

“…Nonetheless, these genetically induced deleterious phenotypes often include conditions of emotional sufferance, and/or behavioural alterations, as it typically occurs in the case of animal models of neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders. These studies are, therefore, characterised by the specific ethical dilemma of being based on the assumption that the animals can model human mental sufferance (e.g., depression, anxiety, drug addiction) by sharing similar highly developed neuronal functions and dysfunctions (Cassaday 2015), and concomitantly harming these human-like functions for research purposes.…”