LAURIE PYCROFT PROFILE: At the age of 16, Laurie Pycroft founded Pro-Test, a group which supports and promotes animal testing in medical research. It began as an Oxfordbased counter protest to SPEAK, an animal rights group who oppose the building of a research facility there. Since its creation Pro-Test has held marches, had representatives appear before a House of Lords Select Committee and have accumulated hundreds of members throughout the world. In 2006 Laurie won a Great Briton Award for his campaigning. AG: The biomedical research centre in Oxford is soon to be opened and generally the number of violent attacks by antivivisectionists has diminished. Is there still a need for your organisation?
“We’re here to explain to the public that these nutters have their right to free speech but they are liars and they are wrong”
LP: I think there definitely is still a need for Pro-Test. I think it’s fair to say we have won in Oxford. Animals are coming into the lab in a couple of months, the building is completely done and I think the public really accepts that it is a vital medical tool. But there are still a lot of other labs either under construction or planned around the country that could be targeted by the anti-vivisectionists. So, we’re going to stick around to react to any pressure there. Also we have moved into doing more lower scale interaction with the public, such as talks in schools, having debates at universities and that sort of thing. Whilst it doesn’t reach the same scale audience as marching, you get to put the arguments across in a much more reasoned manner. AG: In the past
some animal rights campaigners have shown not only a disdain for democratic procedure but have been prepared to resort to terrorist tactics. How, as a society, do you think we should deal with people like that? LP: I think when it comes to those who threaten to engage in these kinds of attacks, we need as individuals to face them in the arena of debate. We need to go out, march publicly, try to speak with them publicly and tell them why they are absolutely wrong and why it’s never acceptable to use violence or intimidation as part of a political campaign. At the moment if any of them perpetrate any kind of violence against private property or individuals, they need to be locked up. They need to have the full force of the law brought against them. But until that point we need to engage with them and explain why they are wrong, rather than try to stop their right to free speech. In some cases the government has been a bit too eager to silence their demonstrations and to some degree that’s why Pro-Test is here. We’re here to explain to the public that these nutters have their right to free speech but they are liars and they are wrong. AG: Do you think there is any weight to the claims that animal testing is an outmoded way of doing research? LP: In some instances absolutely. That’s why we now have computer models, micro-testing, in vitro tests and so forth. But the thing is, the animal rights lobby are constantly arguing, especially the Europeans for Medical Progress and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, that we can replace all animal tests with these new treatments, these magic bullets, overnight. This simply isn’t true. 26
“We’re nowhere near the stage that we can replicate a whole human body using a computer model. Test tubes, for example, don’t get pregnant” They keep on saying that we need to research these things more, that scientists aren’t pushing enough, which is absolute rubbish. Animal testing is an extremely expensive process. I went around a lab that was using Marmosets, which are very small primates, which cost £2,000 to £4,000 each. For Macaques, not that primates are used very much, it costs about £15,000 per monkey. To pay all the staff, to get licensing, get the building, keep it clean and so on is an incredibly expensive process. If they could do this research with a Petri dish or a computer, they would. The problem is a Petri dish can replicate a few cells or maybe an area of tissue at once. Our best computer models can model the folding of a few proteins together. Of course, each one of your cells has millions of proteins and you have a few trillion cells in your body. We’re nowhere near the stage that we can replicate a whole human body using a computer model. Test tubes, for example, don’t get pregnant. So, how are we going research the likelihood of birth defects when testing a drug using a test tube? They don’t have a circularity system and so on. So, these are techniques that are used as much as possible and they keep on being improved. Every year the companies doing research and the government spend hundreds of millions of pounds replacing animal testing. When you can reduce, replace and refine animal testing it saves money and brings even better results. However we are at least a couple of decades off being able to replace animal testing; probably thirty or forty years. However when that day comes, I will be overjoyed because research will be able to advance quicker and it will be cheaper. We are far off that day and to reach it we need animal testing.