Animals to the Rescue

Into Boston's Gardner Auditorium last week marched an oddly assorted procession of scientists, politicians and dogs. The occasion: a legislative committee hearing on a bill to make stray animals, unclaimed after 20 days in the pound, available to medical-research laboratories. For Massachusetts, though boasting in the Boston area one of the nation's most productive medical-research centers, is bound by a law which requires that stray animals be gassed. As a result, medical researchers are forced to buy animals which may be stolen pets, or to import them from other states, at considerable cost and at the risk of getting specimens too old or too sick to be of use.

Testified famed Cardiologist Paul Dudley White: "Massachusetts has become a laughingstock because of its resistance to the removal of this handicap which threatens to stifle further advance in medicine and surgery.'' Nobelman John F. Enders spoke up for the bill. State Senator Philip G. ("Bow-wow") Bowker, 57, of Brookline declaimed: "It's a disgrace to tie the hands of medical researchers. I have two incurable diseases/- in my body, but they are controlled because of animal experimentation. If it were not for that, I would be six feet underground."

An eloquent though silent witness for the bill was "Airplane," research hero of 1956 (TIME, Dec. 3), who frisked about to show that an animal can be well and happy after major surgery on his heart.

/-Diabetes and pernicious anemia.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.