Man or Dog?

Shortly before Election Day, surgeons at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore performed their thousandth "blue baby" operation. The technique, which has saved many more thousands of lives elsewhere, was developed at Johns Hopkins by two famed doctors, Alfred Blalock and Helen Taussig, in a long course of experimenting on dogs. The dogs got the same care, the same anesthesia, as would a human patient. Not all the dogs died--if they had, the experiment would have been a failure. For example, Anna, now a laboratory pet, is as well today as 3^-year-old Gene Haskins Jr. (see cut), whose life the dog helped to save.

Not from Books. Surgery on dogs was no less essential to the perfection of stomach and intestinal operations (see below). And a surgeon must learn his skill by work on dogs*: he could no more learn to open the human chest and remove a lung by reading a textbook than a Rubinstein could become a pianist without touching a keyboard. Millions of men & women now living would have died, or suffered immeasurably more, if insulin and penicillin had not been tested and retested on animals. With some drugs, each batch must be so tested before it can be sold.

In spite of these facts, the voters of Baltimore were invited last week to deny to medical schools the strays in the dog pounds which are doomed to be gassed anyway. The voters were invited also to set up a "humane commission" which, by legal sleight of hand, could have crippled research in the city on any animals.

From the Jails? No issue on the ballot had done more to arouse Baltimoreans. The campaign had boiled for months. At a public hearing, the anti-vivisectionists were challenged to choose between the healthy, happy child (once a blue baby) who was present and a mongrel stray.

Many of the wild-eyed agitators in the audience hissed the child, cheered the cur. Challenged to say how medical science could advance without experiments on animals, anti-vivisectionists had suggested using human beings--starting with waterfront bums, then prisoners in the jails, finally the inmates of insane asylums.

Doctors put on a whizbang campaign. Among scores of groups backing them were the Baltimore Animal Aid Association, the Baltimore Beagle Club and the Lions Club. (Lions are seldom used in research.) At the polls, the people chose to put people ahead of dogs. The vote: 160,264 to 38,445.

In Los Angeles, such shenanigans were an old story. Antivivisectionist campaigns had denied an adequate supply of pound animals to researchers, and work was slowed in some of the most advanced research--much of it (for the Atomic Energy Commission) into the effects of radiation. Dr. Harry Goldblatt, who was shot at in 1948 by a fanatic dog-lover, was also hamstrung in his efforts to develop an artificial heart-lung apparatus.

Last summer, to get the animals they needed, the research advocates drew up a proposition for the ballot. Against them were the usual animal defense crews and such outfits as the Mercy Crusade, Tail-waggers' Foundations and Animal Allies. Fake pictures of torture of animals were stuffed under doors. Grisly tales were circulated that doctors, not content with canine victims, were mangling babies. Handouts denounced medical researchers as fiends, ghouls, sadists, murderers.

Last week Angelenos voted (3-57,393 to 261,699) to allow the use of stray dogs and cats (less than a tenth of those usually destroyed) for medical research.

* Mice, rats, guinea pigs and hamsters are fine for some laboratory tests. For most surgical experiments, dogs are the best suited of all animals (except prohibitively costly monkeys). Reason: they are a convenient size and their organs and tissues closely resemble man's.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.