WHY MARK LAUDENSLAGER’S ALCOHOL STUDY SHOULD BE DISCONTINUED
"Some 60 years of offering alcohol to animals has produced no fundamental
insights into the causes of this self-destructive behavior, or even a convincing
analogue of pathological drinking."
Pharmacologist Vincent P. Dole
Laboratory of the Biology of the Addictive Diseases, Rockefeller University,
NY, NY
"In my opinion, the alcohol research could be done
in humans with much more legitimate results. A problem is that humans can't
be observed directly during childhood. This problem is small compared to the
problem in the assumption that animal behavior predicts human behavior, especially
in very complex social matters. This research will benefit the investigators,
the university, and the animal industry but not a single human patient."
Christopher Kuni, M.D., professor of radiology, UCHSC
"The first thing that struck me is that this whole thing is just a replication of investigations that have been carried out in humans over the past 3 or 4 decades. Laudenslager isn't alone in this. I'm always dismayed by the sheer number of 'scientists' that propose to 'validate' findings in humans resulting from elegant clinical research and epidemiology, by doing animal experiments. They tell us nothing we don't already know, simply serving to inform us as to what happens in those particular animals. And how will knowing the effects of maternal separation, low serotonin, and alcohol addiction in bonnet macaques help human medicine?
Many clinical psychologists disregard animal-based literature anyway; a review of 2 clinical psychology journals showed that of 4,500 citations, only 0.75% were to animal-based studies.
It's instinctively wrong, and even bizarre, and of course doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny. We simply can't extrapolate between species in this way. We can't do it pharmacologically or toxicologically, and we certainly can't do it psychologically. Even different types of macaques display different kinds of psychological responses to things!
Reason 1 against this proposed study: it's pointless,
because we can't extrapolate the results to humans. Reason 2: even if we COULD
extrapolate the results, it doesn't matter, because we already know what's going
on in humans from human studies!"
Dr Jarrod Bailey, B.Sc. (HONS), Ph.D.
Senior Research Associate at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England
"Most monkey data that readily generalize to humans
have not uncovered new facts about human
behavior; rather, they have only verified principles that have already been
formulated from
previous human data....A case in point is the development of mother-infant relationships.
To date,
the monkey data have added little to knowledge of human mother-infant interactions."
S.J. Suomi
Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, National Institute of Child Health Human
Development, National Institutes of Health/DHHS
"This proposal exemplifies the phenomenon that 'for a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'. It's obvious that the researchers have monkeys and want money, so they have contrived a study linking poor mothering to increased impulsivity, aggression, and alcohol consumption, while giving it a patina of actual science by proposing to analyze biomarkers of the activity of the serotonergic system (CSF 5HIAA and the prolactin response to fenfluramine). Subjects will be selected on the basis of polymorphism in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter protein gene that modulates serotonergic activity. Since alcoholism in monkeys is of little societal concern, money from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism would be better spend pursuing these hypotheses in humans, where there is no shortage of poor mothering, adolescent delinquency, and alcoholism. The biomarker evaluations proposed in this application can be harmlessly investigated in human subjects directly, which would inevitably follow anyway if the hypotheses in these studies were confirmed. Nothing proposed in this application necessitates the use of animals, and everything hypothesized can be better investigated in clinical based studies."
Lawrence A. Hansen, M.D., Professor, Neurosciences and Pathology
University of California, San Diego