I gave up animal research more than thirty years ago, and I have not done research with dogs for forty years. I have thought a great deal, however, about when scientific animal research is justified and when it is not. Here is my own history about the ethical dilemma I faced doing learned helplessness experiments in animals.
I arrived at Penn as a graduate student in psychology in 1964, when Richard Solomon's laboratory was doing experiments with electric shocks and dogs. Dogs that received 64 brief inescapable shocks became passive, and this seemed to me a likely model of human helplessness and depression.
As excited as I was by the possibilities of this discovery, I was dejected about something else.
Could I work in a laboratory that gave shocks to perfectly innocent animals? I have always been an animal lover, particularly a dog lover, so the prospect of causing pain - if only minor and temporary pain - was very distasteful. I shared my doubts with one of my philosophy teachers (who went on to become one of the world's leading philosophers), Robert Nozick.
"I've seen something in the lab that might be the beginning of understanding helplessness," I started out. "No one has ever investigated helplessness before, yet I'm not sure I can pursue it, because I don't think it's right to give shocks to dogs. Even if it's not wrong, it's repulsive."
"Marty," Bob asked, "do you have any other way of cracking the problem of helplessness?" It was clear to both of us that case histories of patients were a scientific dead end. It was equally clear that only well controlled experiments could isolate cause and discover cure. Further, there was no way I could ethically give shock to human beings. This seemed to leave only experiments with animals.
"Is it ever justified," I asked, "to inflict pain on any creature?" Bob reminded me that most human beings, as well as household pets, are alive today because animal experiments were carried out. Without them, he asserted, polio would still be rampant and smallpox widespread.
"Let me ask you one thing about what you propose to do," Bob said finally. "Is there a substantial chance that you will eliminate much more pain in the long run than the pain you cause in the short run?"
My answer was "yes."
Some now claim that the learned helplessness experiments were unnecessary. "Couldn't we have figured out all this obvious stuff without inflicting suffering on laboratory animals?
This claim is completely wrong.
Nothing was obvious then. It is enormously ironic to hear all this called "obvious" now, when almost no investigators, except the Penn lab, thought this was helplessness (learned "helplessness" is still found in skeptical quotation marks in some textbooks).
Almost no one thought that it was even remotely related to depression - this only seems obvious in hindsight after many people did the careful science to discover what was going on. Here are the questions that took scores of scientists around the world years to find out.
Does trauma produce passivity or is it the inescapability of the trauma?
Is this inescapability the crux of human depression?
Could this knowledge be used to cure and prevent human depression?
First we found that the identical shocks under the control of the animal did not produce passivity. So the culprit in depression was not trauma, as most people believed, but uncontrollability.
But was this really depression?
That required a decade of research in many laboratories to find out if the symptoms of depression (passivity, cognitive retardation, sadness, loss of appetite) were identical to the symptoms of learned helplessness and then to find out if the brain chemistry of depression in humans was the same as the brain chemistry of learned helplessness. It turned out that it was.
Most importantly, knowing that uncontrollability rather than trauma is the crux of depression has led to the relief of depression (and the prevention of suicide) in hundreds of thousands of human beings.
Treating depression by teaching patients how to better control major events is at the heart of successful behavior therapy. Treating depression by teaching patients to challenge unwarranted beliefs about helplessness is at the heart of successful cognitive therapy. Using the medications that break up learned helplessness in animals is at the heart of the successful biological therapies for depression.
Forty years ago, several dozen dogs got 64 brief shocks that were moderately painful. From the knowledge that was gained, depression was relieved for hundreds of thousands of people. Inflicting pain on animals or humans in medical experiments can only be justified if it is likely that the knowledge gained will eliminate vastly more suffering.
This is what I believed then, and what I still believe today.
Martin Seligman is a professor of psychology and Director of the Positive Pscyhology Center. He is also the father of an SP news editor. His e-mail is seligman@psych.upenn.edu.
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