by BARBARA J. KING
My body is a map of medical memories. Each marked place on my embodied landscape recalls to me an experience of pain and healing, worry and hope. That corporeal map signifies something greater to me too, because I feel that on it is inscribed the suffering of animals forced to undergo invasive experiments in biomedical laboratories.
These animals’ experiences don’t map directly on to my own. When my body was invaded and caused to feel pain, it was always with my consent, and with the knowledge that my healthcare team acted with intention to improve my life. The physical and emotional wellbeing of laboratory animals, by contrast, is routinely sacrificed with no benefit to them – and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, to human health either.
Yet my health traumas shed light on animals held captive for research in our labs.
For one thing, I know what it’s like to feel vulnerable in my body. The periodic and painful tightening of my left calf recalls me to the moment in 2019 when a hospital ultrasound technician’s eyes widened as she assessed the images on her screen. The two of us then walked slowly through hall after hall to reach the emergency room. There I encountered none of the ER’s famously long wait times; a massive deep vein thrombosis in my left leg earned me immediate attention and a CAT scan revealing a small pulmonary embolism. For the rest of my life, I will take blood-thinning medication. Because the kind I take now has no effective reversal agent, fatal bleeding remains a risk factor should I experience a car crash or other major accident.
Across my abdomen are holes that mark the day, six years earlier, when my surgeon and his robot assistant pulled out my cancerous uterus, assorted other reproductive organs, and 29 lymph nodes. On my chest is a scar where a port was subsequently placed to aid flow of chemotherapy drugs into my body, and on each hip is a tiny tattoo that guided irradiation of my pelvis. Papillary serous carcinoma is a rare and aggressive variant of uterine cancer, and I remain grateful to have recovered. But ‘recovery’ is a qualified term for some cancer survivors. My feet fire with chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, my digestion is troubled thanks to the effects of radiation, and my mobility is limited as the result of a double-pelvis fracture partly caused by both external and internal radiation.
I could write about my journey from Virginia to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio to probe why I was constantly diagnosed – or, as it turned out, misdiagnosed – with urinary tract infections. I could detail how, after cataract surgery in my 40s, subsequent detachment of my retina and surgical retinal repair, I had to keep my head positioned down for 50 minutes out of every hour for 10 days. And on and on.
I have no doubt that these baboons had wished to live – and that the ‘donor’ pigs had wished not to become vehicles for harvesting organs
The 75,000 monkeys currently held in laboratories just in the United States likely know the feeling of vulnerability, too. Years ago, I spent 14 months observing baboons in Kenya, who roamed free over the savannah of Amboseli National Park, moving in groups anchored by matrilines, or groups of related females. Their lives in no way mirror those of experimental laboratory monkeys.
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