Gutfreund Yoram
Department of Neurobiology, Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3100000, Israel.
Animals (Basel). 2020 Feb 12;10(2):291. doi: 10.3390/ani10020291.
Using animals in scientific research is commonly justified on the utilitarian basis that the benefits of scientific progress to human health and society exceed by far the harm inflicted on animals. In an attempt to ensure that this is indeed the case for every research project, legislation and guidelines increasingly demand the application of harm-benefit analysis (HBA) as part of the approval process of animal research protocols. The ethical principle of HBA asserts that the costs of an action should be weighed against the expected benefits. Any action that may inflict harm can only be approved if it is associated with a greater benefit. This principle is intuitively appealing but how to use it as a practical rule for ethical decisions is a difficult question. The main difficulty is that the future benefits of most scientific research are unmeasurable, unpredictable and are not manifested at the level of the individual project. Applying HBA in such cases may impede scientific progress by inducing a bias against basic research. Moreover, it can lead to the toleration of unnecessary harm to animals in research. Given these caveats of HBA, I call policy-makers to reconsider the place of HBA in animal research. Instead, I support an alternative guideline which is based on replacing the HBA principle (that the expected benefits of the research must exceed the harms caused to the animals) with two independent but mutually necessary principles: (1) any research using an animal must carry a benefit for society and (2) the harm inflicted to an animal in an experiment must be minimal and scientifically justified. I argue that rigorous harm-analysis, which is not weighted against obscure benefits, can increase the over-all benefits of research while reducing the harms to animals.
在科学研究中使用动物通常基于功利主义的理由，即科学进步给人类健康和社会带来的益处远远超过对动物造成的伤害。为了确保每个研究项目确实如此，立法和指导方针越来越要求将危害-利益分析（HBA）作为动物研究方案审批过程的一部分加以应用。HBA的伦理原则主张，应将一项行动的成本与预期收益进行权衡。任何可能造成伤害的行动，只有在其带来更大利益时才能被批准。这一原则直观上很有吸引力，但如何将其用作伦理决策的实际规则却是个难题。主要困难在于，大多数科学研究的未来收益是无法衡量、不可预测的，而且不会在单个项目层面体现出来。在这种情况下应用HBA可能会因引发对基础研究的偏见而阻碍科学进步。此外，它还可能导致在研究中容忍对动物的不必要伤害。鉴于HBA存在这些问题，我呼吁政策制定者重新考虑HBA在动物研究中的地位。相反，我支持一项替代指导方针，该方针基于用两个独立但相互必要的原则取代HBA原则（即研究的预期收益必须超过对动物造成的伤害）：（1）任何使用动物的研究都必须对社会有益；（2）在实验中对动物造成的伤害必须最小化且有科学依据。我认为，严格的危害分析，不与模糊的利益进行权衡，可以在减少对动物伤害的同时增加研究的总体收益。
