For more than half a century, Barbara Sutherland (76) has given barely a thought to the animals subjected to experiments in order to keep her healthy all these years.
‘‘Until this week, I hadn't really thought about how insulin began,'' says Mrs Sutherland, who has Type 1 diabetes and has used insulin since the mid-1960s.
• Testing our ethics
• Shared concern for animal welfare
She is certainly not alone. How many of the 240,000 people in New Zealand diagnosed with diabetes are aware that the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of insulin in 1920 is rated one of the most significant contributions of animal research to medical progress?
Of those few who do know the connection, it would be a tiny proportion who would know the details; that it was injecting pancreatic cell extracts into dogs and then refining the process through tests on rabbits that gave the world this life-transforming treatment, enabling millions of people to avoid stroke, circulation problems and damage to kidneys and eyes.
And what about the now routinely inserted cardiac pacemaker? Of the 600,000 people worldwide who have pacemakers implanted each year, very few would know to credit 1940s Canadian electrical engineer John Hopps' experiments on dogs for the device that keeps their hearts beating properly.
Dozens of medical advances, which tens of millions of people benefit from and take for granted, have their genesis in animal research laboratories. Confronting the reality, how would they feel about it? For Mrs Sutherland it is, at first, a difficult tension.
Her body's inability to produce enough insulin was not pinpointed as the cause of her troubling symptoms until she was in her mid-20s. But ever since she began injecting insulin, the symptoms, which could have led to major health problems, have been kept at bay.
It is a treatment for which she is grateful.
In the past, she has ‘‘just shut my mind off to animal research''.
At the same time, Mrs Sutherland calls herself ‘‘quite a pet lover''.
With her late-husband she farmed sheep, cattle and goats near Dunback, East Otago, and always had cats and dogs as family pets.‘‘I'd hate to think that they [research animals] were in pain while things were being done,'' she says.
Testing on rats and mice would not worry her greatly, she adds.‘‘But when it got up to dogs and cats, maybe ... '' Her voice trails off.
And then a decision.‘‘If it's going to help the human race, then it's a small sacrifice really. ‘‘If it's going to benefit us, I go along with it.''
