How Should We Improve How Medical and Veterinary Students Learn About Human and Nonhuman Animals?

This article presents 5 general points that every clinician should know about animals, health, and the environment, focusing on why animals matter for their own sakes, why animals matter for health and environmental threats, why health and environmental threats matter for animals, and how the medical and veterinary industries interact with animals. This article then offers practical advice about how to address these issues.

Human, Nonhuman, and Chimeric Research: Considering Old Issues with New Research.

Human-nonhuman chimeric research-research on nonhuman animals who contain human cells-is being used to understand human disease and development and to create potential human treatments such as transplantable organs. A proposed advantage of chimeric models is that they can approximate human biology and therefore allow scientists to learn about and improve human health without risking harms to humans. Among the emerging ethical issues being explored is the question of at what point chimeras are "human enough" to have human rights and thus be owed higher standards of research protection than that currently afforded to nonhuman animals. However, this question and other related questions assume that the ethics of experimenting on nonhuman animals have been settled, which they have not. In this essay, we argue that it is imperative to give adequate attention to familiar questions about nonhuman animal research as well as new questions about chimera research and that failure to do so will result in a distorted understanding of the ethics of chimera research.

Clarifying the Ethics and Oversight of Chimeric Research.

This article is the lead piece in a special report that presents the results of a bioethical investigation into chimeric research, which involves the insertion of human cells into nonhuman animals and nonhuman animal embryos, including into their brains. Rapid scientific developments in this field may advance knowledge and could lead to new therapies for humans. They also reveal the conceptual, ethical, and procedural limitations of existing ethics guidance for human-nonhuman chimeric research. Led by bioethics researchers working closely with an interdisciplinary work group, the investigation focused on generating conceptual clarity and identifying improvements to governance approaches, with the goal of helping scholars, funders, scientists, institutional leaders, and oversight bodies (embryonic stem cell research oversight [ESCRO] committees and institutional animal care and use committees [IACUCs]) deliver principled and trustworthy oversight of this area of science. The article, which focuses on human-nonhuman animal chimeric research that is stem cell based, identifies key ethical issues in and offers ten recommendations regarding the ethics and oversight of this research. Turning from bioethics' previous focus on human-centered questions about the ethics of "humanization" and this research's potential impact on concepts like human dignity, this article emphasizes the importance of nonhuman animal welfare concerns in chimeric research and argues for less-siloed governance and oversight and more-comprehensive public communication.

One Health, COVID-19, and a Right to Health for Human and Nonhuman Animals.

COVID-19 is a reminder that human, nonhuman, and environmental health are linked, and so efforts to improve human, nonhuman, and environmental health should be linked as well. But current efforts to link these issues fall short by not doing enough for humans, not doing enough for nonhumans, and focusing narrowly on health instead of expansively on health, welfare, and rights. This paper surveys the case for respecting and promoting human and nonhuman welfare, health, and rights simultaneously. It then surveys the impacts of COVID-19 on human and nonhuman populations and proposes steps that humans can take to respect and promote human and nonhuman health, welfare, and rights ethically and effectively in this context.

Can Knowledge Itself Justify Harmful Research?

In our paper, we argue for three necessary conditions for morally permissible animal research: (1) an assertion (or expectation) of sufficient net benefit, (2) a worthwhile-life condition, and (3) a no-unnecessary-harm/qualified-basic-needs condition.1 We argue that these conditions are necessary, without taking a position on whether they are jointly sufficient. In their excellent commentary on our paper, Matthias Eggel, Carolyn Neuhaus, and Herwig Grimm (hereafter, the authors) argue for a friendly amendment to one of our three conditions.2 In particular, they argue for replacing the first condition-expectation of sufficient net benefit (ESNB)-with an expectation of knowledge production (EKP).3 In this reply, we will explain why we are open to this proposed amendment, but not yet convinced.

Necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research.

In this article, we present three necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research that we believe people on both sides of this debate can accept. Specifically, we argue that, even if human beings have higher moral status than nonhuman animals, animal research is morally permissible only if it satisfies (1) an expectation of sufficient net benefit, (2) a worthwhile-life condition, and (3) a no-unnecessary-harm/qualified-basic-needs condition. We then claim that, whether or not these necessary conditions are jointly sufficient for justified animal research, they are relatively demanding, with the consequence that many animal experiments may fail to satisfy them.