Dogtown

A group of experiments involving dogs is increasing public pressure on UCSF.

By Tali Woodward

SAN FRANCISCO WRITER Lee Paiva is not your average animal rightsnik. She's been known to wear leather, and she doesn't stop her kids from eating meat at home. Until last year, she didn't spend much time thinking about the use of animals in biomedical research.

"I thought it was unethical, but maybe a necessary evil," she told the Bay Guardian, expressing the kind of conflicted feelings many people have about animal experimentation.

But when local animal activist Bob O'Brien told her, in August 2004, that the University of California San Francisco was in the middle of several experiments that involve hundreds of dogs, Paiva was appalled.

Paiva and her husband, pediatrician Jake Sinclair, learned that the two main projects are headed up by Dr. Jeffrey Olgin, who is chief of cardiac electrophysiology at UCSF.

According to protocols approved in April and June of 2004, Olgin is hoping to figure out the how cardiac arrhythmias – specifically, atrial fibrillation – lead to chronic heart disease. It's a goal many people would find laudable. But Olgin's research also involves the deaths of roughly 750 dogs over three years. Many of the dog have one or two pacemakers implanted. The pacemakers are then used to speed up the dogs' heart rates until their hearts basically wear out. Another group of 150 dogs undergo a surgical procedure in which their hearts' mitral valves are torn with a small hook so that some of the blood flows backward.

After 2 to 24 weeks in the study, each dog is subjected to an eight-hour "terminal study," during which researchers deeply anesthetize the animal and then open its heart cavity to poke around and take measurements. At the end of the study, the dog is euthanized.

Paiva and Sinclair contacted the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an activist group that seeks to shift research away from animals, to get its take on the experiments.

In a July letter to UCSF chancellor J. Michael Bishop, PCRM cardiologist Dr. John J. Pippin wrote, "Other researchers have conducted similar canine studies and we find Dr. Olgin's research to be duplicative and wasteful.... Instead of pouring money into studies with canine models, which present one or several features concocted to "approximate" the human condition, research funding should be directed towards clinical, epidemiological, cellular, and genetic research for the prevention and treatment of cardiac disease."

Pippin told us, "Dogs don't get congestive heart failure naturally. So whatever they're getting in dogs does not correlate with humans at all. This is what you would call blue sky research – research for its own sake."

Olgin's projects have prompted the farthest-reaching public outcry over any animal experiment at UCSF in many years. Critics of the research have written letters and circulated petitions, and last April they held a "100-Dog March" at UCSF's Mission Bay campus.

UCSF defends the experiments. Vice Chancellor Ara Tahmassian told us, "Dr. Olgin's research is funded by the [National Institutes of Health], which means that it has gone through scientific review, that people have looked at it, scientists and peers have looked at it, and verified that what he is trying to do is scientifically sound, that the model he's proposing is the right model.

"What we have to do, we do with the best science and animal welfare and ethical standards."

But in the past several months Paiva and Sinclair have read everything they've been able to dredge up on Olgin and his projects, and they're not convinced that the dog experiments are justified.

"His goal is something that we already know," Sinclair told us. "We know that atrial fibrillation causes congestive heart failure. We know that from studying humans."

The couple would like to talk to UCSF scientists about the research, but they say it's been difficult to start any sort of dialogue. They have been writing letters to UCSF administrators since February, asking for a meeting, but have only gotten form letters in reply. More recently they have asked elected officials to help set up a meeting, but they're still unsure if they'll ever get the opportunity to discuss these experiments.

"I want to know why they won't let anyone with a different idea of how to do this even approach them," Sinclair said.

TW