The domination of knowledge by ignorance: politics and regulation of animal research for diagnosis and treatment of disease.

DR. MARY PUTNAM JACOBI began her short and direct commentary at a hearing in the United States Senate on February 21, 1900: "I will speak . . . the fundamental vice of the bill . . . that is its provisions are deliberately planned for the domination of knowledge by ignorance." She was one of nearly a dozen distinguished leaders of American medicine organized to testify against a bill to regulate (and curtail) animal experimentation in the District of Columbia.' The legislation, originally written by the Washington Humane Society, was modeled on the Cruelty to Animals Act passed by Parliament in 1876. The U.S. bill, like the English act, contained provisions for licensing experimentors and their laboratories, restricted the kinds of experiments that could be done by procedure and species, called for inspectors (originally specified as members of the Washington Humane Society), and outlined a system of fines and legal jurisdictions. Dr. Putnam Jacobi and other medical leaders (including the physiologist Henry Bowdich of Harvard, the surgeon William W. Keen of Jefferson Medical College, and the internist William Osler and the pathologist William H. Welch both of Johns Hopkins) all objected to the bill strenuously. They observed that medical researchers had been singled out from others using animals for scrutiny at the whim of and by persons ignorant of biology, medicine, and physiologic experimentation. Osler fumed at the distorted antivivisection propaganda (see figure 1). The bill did not pass and until the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 (USPC 2131 et seq.), no laws affecting the conduct of animal research were on the federal books.