Plans have been set in motion to build a $15 million animal research facility in downtown Phoenix’s medical campus that has drawn criticism from animal rights activists at ASU.
The research grant, funded primarily by federal stimulus money, from the National Institute of Health will cover construction costs for a 22,000-square-foot facility, according to Al Bravo, spokesman for the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine⎯Phoenix in partnership with ASU.
Students and faculty from every medical program at the campus will have access to the facility, which will be used primarily for cardiovascular disease, cancer, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and neurological research.
“We know that this kind of research is many times the best kind of research you can do to find the chemical and biological answers to a lot of questions that are going to save a lot of lives,” Bravo said.
Currently, animals used for this type of research at the downtown Phoenix’s medical campus are housed at the Tempe campus. Bravo said storing animals at the new facility will provide greater ease and accessibility for research.
“These medical students are of course going to be practicing medicine for the next 30 years or more, and medicine is changing,” Bravo said. “We want to make sure we’re staying on the cutting edge.”
Not everyone supports the facility, however. Stephanie Miller, an ASU music therapy junior and the president of Students Taking Action for Animal Rights, an ASU student organization actively involved in promoting animal rights, said she has moral objections to animal experimentation.
“We’re so different from animals that a lot of the research ends up going nowhere and thousands of lives are wasted through trying to go through the animal route of finding a cure,” Miller said.
Tyler McAneny, an ASU philosophy sophomore and another member of Students Taking Action for Animal Rights, said he agreed.
“It’s kind of deplorable that the money is going to education but it’s also going to institutions that will torture and exploit animals because they don’t believe they are as… relevant as humans,” McAneny said.
While some have concerns about the facility’s treatment of animals in its research, Ron Hammer, a professor of basic medical sciences at the downtown Phoenix medical campus, said the downtown Phoenix medical campus will work hard to strike a balance between biomedical research and ethical behavior by monitoring the facility’s practices toward animals.
Biomedical research sometimes “uses experimental animals in the process, and when we do that, those subjects, those experimental subjects, are extremely well treated in terms of our humane use of those animals,” Hammer said.
The downtown Phoenix medical campus, the National Institute of Health and the U.S. Agriculture Department will watch the work done at the new facility closely when it comes to animals, Hammer said.
“It’s a difficult process because very often animals die,” he said. “Those are the technical issues of using animals in our research.”
Hammer said the animal research facility is expected to be complete by 2013.
Also, a new Health Sciences Education building is in the works for the campus, which currently comprises about 120 students. Hammer said the new building is expected to draw more students, including ASU nursing students and health students from Northern Arizona University.
“This is part of a much larger research investment that the state of Arizona is making,” Hammer said. ”It’s an investment for both education and research.”
Contact the reporter at vpelham@asu.edu
