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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JBTFD who wrote (69834)	9/20/2006 6:28:31 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

does vivisection qualify? you know, cutting up animals without anesthesia while they're alive? Where do we draw the line on animal experimentation? It is likely that more than a few animal activists came unglued at the admission by Senate majority leader Bill Frist that, during his medical training, when faced with a lack of animals for vivisection projects, he "adopted" cats from animal shelters in the Boston area, then killed them doing medical experiments. "It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do," Frist admitted. "I was going a little crazy." In a Boston Globe article, Frist is described as an animal lover whose "decision to become a doctor was clinched when he helped heal a friend's dog." Certainly, Frist's means of obtaining animals for experiments is deserving of damnation, but are those types of experiments themselves equally heinous? There, friends, lies the dilemma. From "Stealing Cats" to Heart Transplants Bill Frist's medical training continued and after a lengthy residency in Boston, he entered the field of transplants, a longtime goal. Sponsored Links Animal Lab TestingEverything you need to know about Testing Laboratories.TestingLab.Medical-Central.org Reform The March of DimesFind out why. Watch this 2 minute flash video.www.ReformTheMarchOfDimes.org Animal TestingSearch for Testing Resources and Info. Find What You Want Now.www.Simpli.com/Testing At Stanford University in California, he studied under the renowned Dr. Bernard Shumway, then served at a hospital in Nashville, TN, where he performed 200 heart transplants. The question we need to ponder is "How essential was experimentation on cats to subsequent success as a heart transplant surgeon? This is the crux of a long-standing debate between anti-vivisectionists and those who believe animal experimentation is crucial to furthering scientific understanding of the human body and its reaction to disease processes. An extreme example of the latter viewpoint was the controversial series of experiments at OSU by Associate Professor Michael Podell who induced FIV ("feline AIDS") in healthy cats, then administered methamphetamines to them, in an effort to prove that illicit drugs are harmful to AIDS patients. Podell left OSU in June of 2002 following three years of activist protests. Gary L., animal activist and former host at the About Cats forum, wrote his own views about this issue in a guest commentary . The History of Animal Experimentation Vivisection using animals has been around for a long time, as have been groups who protest it. "Success" in animal experimentation may have found its roots in 1908 when Viennese researchers Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper injected material from the spinal cord of a boy who had died of polio into the spinal cords of two monkeys. One monkey became paralyzed and both died. The spinal cords of the affected monkeys exhibited the same damage as those in humans with polio. cats.about.com