The Science Behind Breast Cancer Treatment
Breast cancer is currently treated in three main ways: with surgery, with chemotherapy, and with radiation therapy. To justify their current use of animals, biomedical interest groups claim that animal research was indispensable to the development of all three of these innovations, but that claim is demonstrably false.
Surgical Treatment
Are animal experiments responsible for teaching us how to cut out cancerous human tissue? No, the removal of tissue from the human body is a technique that has existed for as long as medicine has existed. Surgery has been the primary treatment for breast cancer for more than 2,000 years, and doctors have performed modern mastectomies to treat breast cancer for more than a century.23 The traditional treatment, radical mastectomy, involves removing the entire breast, the chest wall muscles beneath the breast, the lymph nodes in the armpit, and much of the skin over the breast. Beginning with the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project in the 1970s, doctors have refined their methods through randomized clinical trials, removing less and less surrounding tissue. These clinical studies have developed techniques that allow nearly half of all women with breast cancer to undergo breast-conserving lumpectomies and constitute the single most important improvement in breast cancer treatment.24 Like the original concept of mastectomy, modern surgeries owe nothing to animal experiments.
Chemotherapy
Yes, animals are part of the contemporary drug development process. They don’t need to be, but they are. Where did the concept of chemotherapy come from, and what led to the most important chemotherapeutic discoveries in history? The answer is human observation. Doctors treating World War I veterans noticed that nitrogen mustard (mustard gas) used in chemical warfare killed white blood cells, which proliferate in some cancers. This discovery prompted clinical investigations that, combined with a World War II incident involving the exposure of a large number of American soldiers to mustard gas, further developed the theory that nitrogen mustard could be used to treat cancer. In 1942, British scientists ran successful clinical trials confirming that childhood leukemia could be treated with nitrogen mustard. These trials owed nothing to animal experiments. As with nitrogen mustard, clinical observation also led to the discovery of the other first five anti-cancer drugs. According to medical statistician Dr. Irwin D.J. Bross, all the animal testing in the “war on cancer” has failed to produce any drugs significantly better than the original eight chemotherapeutic agents produced primarily from clinical observation.25
Today’s breast cancer drugs were discovered by similar non-animal methods. Possible tumor-suppressing drugs are typically discovered by doctors’ observations of human patients and their subsequent testing of potentially beneficial substances on breast cancer cells in vitro. The substances that successfully inhibit cancer growth then proceed to clinical studies. Animals play only a minor, replaceable role in measuring potency and toxicity as drugs move from the test tube to human clinical trials. In today’s drug development process, animals are needed neither to discover nor to confirm the value of new drugs.
Radiation Therapy
The discovery of radiation is attributed to Pierre and Marie Curie at the end of the 19th century. The pair purified radioactive elements, such as uranium and radium, and studied their radioactive properties. In one experiment, Pierre Curie bound radium salts to his arm for 10 hours and then observed the resulting wound for 52 days. He postulated that precisely placed radioactive materials could be used to treat cancer. This theory would eventually be put into practice in cancer treatment, including breast cancer treatment.26 As with chemotherapy, radiation therapy was a conceptual breakthrough that had nothing to do with animal tests.
Hormones and Steroids
Hormonal and steroidal treatments of cancer are two emerging therapies that are becoming more prominent. Both of these promising technologies can be traced to clinical observation of patients suffering from hormonal or steroidal imbalances. Neither stems from animal-based discoveries.
Animal Studies Mislead Researchers >>
23. Steven D. Heys and Shailesh Chaturvedi, “Primary Chemotherapy in Breast Cancer: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning for the Surgical Oncologist?” World Journal of Surgical Oncology 1 (2003): 14.
24. National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project, 23 Nov. 2005 <http://www.nsabp.pitt.edu/>.
25. Brandon Reines, “Cancer Research on Animals: Impact and Alternatives,” NAVS (1986): 1-13.
26. Nanny Fröman, “Marie and Pierre Curie and the Discovery of Polonium and Radium,” Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden, 28 Feb. 1996 <http://nobelprize.org/physics/articles/curie/>.
