I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I cannot help marvelling at the timing of this discovery. It coincides with a period when the country needs to get its floundering drug research act together -- both in the public and the private sectors -- to be able to survive in the new intellectualproperty rights regime mandated by the World Trade Organisation (it has to be in place by March 1999, which gives us very little time). Already, the handful of original drug researchers we have are snowed under by bureaucratic controls and an apathetic homegrown pharmaceuticals sector always looking for imported alternatives to the more expensive business of supporting swadeshi molecules. The last thing our researchers need in this environment is aggravation, that too from self-styled guardian angels of animals. And as usual, like all extremists, animal-rights activists have an overgrown conscience that wears blinkers and subsists on a diet of half-truths.

For decades, scientists have used animals to test the efficacy and possible toxic effects of new-generation molecules -- that's how the term `guinea pig' gained currency. No drug, in fact, can be tested on humans unless the people sitting in judgment are convinced of its efficacy and safety, which can only be demonstrated on laboratory animals made illfor that very purpose. That's the international practice, written into our Drugs and Cosmetics Act, and till the time the international research community isn't convinced that we can live without animal testing, we have to go along with it.

Yes, clinical pharmacology has developed to the extent that a year or two of animal trials can be done away with, which, incidentally, is the logic propelling the fast-track approach to the development of an antidote to HIV/AIDS, but the practice cannot be dispensed with altogether. Beagles and monkeys, moreover, will have to be used as long as our experience shows that drugs that work on mice don't necessarily do so on humans. That was the cautionary note sounded recently when the American press went into a frenzy, sending pharmaceutical-company stocks soaring, over what is being touted as the miracle drug for cancer. To stem the tide of hype for his own good, the scientist working on the drug for over 25 years made it clear that the new discovery could flounder whenstudies are carried out on dogs.

What, then, is the problem? Well, the flag-waving moral minority insists Indian laboratories are engaged in projects farmed out by MNCs. Imagine, swadeshi animals being used for videshi moneybags! Now that may sound sexy and saffron, but the truth is that the scientific world, unlike the animal rights lobby, is not expected to be insular. So we have mechanisms like collaborating centres (New Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences, for instance, is a partner in WHO's efforts to create an injectable male contraceptive) and joint research programmes, which benefit our scientists as much as the principals, besides clearing the way for some hard currency to come their way. And contrary to what the animal-rights brigade believes, the Eighth Amendment to the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945, exempts drugs developed abroad, especially those with "special relevance to the health problems of India," from Phase I and II clinical trials, when animals come into the picture. MNCs,therefore, can live happily without Indian animals. Anyway, most of the animals we employ in our laboratories are imported!

Love for animals, moreover, isn't the prerogative of Maneka Gandhi and the denizens of her Ark. Scientists, too, have a heart -- after all, they are in the business of saving lives. Ethical guidelines followed by our research institutions make it mandatory for scientists to anaesthesise laboratory animals before using them to simulate a disease. This little exercise ensures the animals don't feel the pain. Scientists also refrain from testing on pregnant animals and use only adult animals in the last two or three years of their life. That's a fair bargain, isn't it?

It is also becoming painfully evident that the defenders of animal rights are seeing ghosts where none exists. The number of animals employed by a premier institution like AIIMS, for instance, is laughably insignificant compared to the benefits likely to accrue from the work being done there. A member of the Pharmacologyfaculty of AIIMS once gave me a simple formula to compute the number of animals being employed at his institute. Of the 500-odd projects that AIIMS takes up in a year, just about 10 involve animal testing. Usually, four or five groups work on a project and each uses an average of five animals -- these could be mice, rabbits, dogs or monkeys. Add these numbers up and you arrive at the figure of 250. Extremism, as you can see, subsists on illogic, and I would rather have 250 dead mice, or dogs, or monkeys, than hundreds of thousands of humans dying before their time.