Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

COLLEAGUES SUBORNED MARK M. RAVITCH* Any grade school teacher knows the way to get discipline is to involve the students, make the biggest boy a monitor. It is no secret that student councils impose harsher penalties on student offenders than faculty would dare to do. The authority of the governing body is only indirectly threatened by any insurrection when its will is imposed through an instrument . At the same time, the instruments, though chosen from the regulated group, presently identify with the ruling group. In the obscene, if all too understandable, example of the Kapos in the Nazi concentration camps, or the tragic example of the ghetto elders who chose who should be shipped out and who might stay yet awhile, there was also the double element of self-protection and of the argument that "we will do it more compassionately." Another force that operates with suborned or co-opted representatives of a group is the need to prove purity, and freedom from whatever guilt or taint is currently being attributed to the group. Harry Truman instituted loyalty oaths to blunt the force of McCarthy's attacks on the federal establishment. The result far exceeded anything McCarthy had been able to do by way of paralyzing officeholders, and others, with fear and intimidation. We see a remarkably similar mechanism in federal animal care and laboratory standards regulations. In any case, set up a governing structure, allocate authority, and it will be surprising if the exercise of authority does not become a pleasurable end in itself. The anti-intellectual anti-elitist trend of recent years, combined with the antivivisection forces, themselves heavily imbued with that trend, forced legislation designed "to assure humane treatment" of experimental animals, an eminently desirable end. The law as it stands is onerous and costly enough, and less unreasonable than the original proposals. But the regulations and procedures laid down by the enforcing agencies seem deliberately to be made as stringent as they can be. Research is hampered, costs rise, and, finally, *The Montefiore Hospital and University of Pittsburgh, 3459 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213.© 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1 -5982/82/2503-0287$0 1 .00 404 Mark M. Ravitch ¦ Colleagues Suborned the prime intention of the antivivisectionists and others, to hamper or prevent investigation, is being achieved, and the federal departments who should be helping us, are proving their purity—in the always vain hope of appeasment—by being overzealous enforcers. Even more ridiculous is the situation with Human Use, or Human Experimentation, Committees. It is an absurd situation that those who openly experiment, with numerous colleagues and participants, in the hope of publishing their work, are subjected to close scrutiny, while those who go their happy way with an attitude of let's try this or let's try that, having no protocol, no experimental design, and under very little observation, do as they please. Now, granted, something has crept into the "game" of research which causes things to be done that have raised valid questions about ethics and morality, as well as scientific integrity. And perhaps such things can be prevented by committee procedures. And these procedures are in the hands of committees of our own colleagues, investigators themselves. But like all the other examples of suborned, coopted enforcers, our colleagues on these committees—and I hear this over the country, and it gets into newspapers when a university squabble becomes unmanageable—become overzealous, righteous, bureaucratic. Forms multiply, hearings are held on phases of the proposed study which have nothing to do with any aspect of protection of the human subjects, and, finally, one begins to sense a negative, almost hostile, atmosphere . Once more, as in the animal care matter, the occult intentions of the prime movers in the human rights agitation—to prevent or at least hinder investigation—are being facilitated by the instruments, our fellow clinical scientists, chosen from the group being regulated. The dynamics of the situation take over. The monitors are tougher on the students than the teacher would have dared to be. At times, the absurdity of it all brings a certain comic relief, as when a tissue committee ruled that portions...