Tag: Ethics

Animal welfare activism – Doris Day

It was during the making of The Man Who Knew Too Much, when she saw how camels, goats, and other “animal extras” in a marketplace scene were being treated, that Day began actively preventing animal abuse. She was so appalled at the conditions the animals used in filming were kept in that she refused to work unless they were properly fed and cared for. The production company had to set up “feeding stations” for the various goats, sheep, camels, etc., and feed them every day before Day would agree to go back to work. 

In 1971, she co-founded Actors and Others for Animals, and appeared in a series of newspaper advertisements denouncing the wearing of fur, alongside Mary Tyler Moore, Angie Dickinson, and Jayne Meadows.[116]

In 1978, Day founded the Doris Day Pet Foundation, now the Doris Day Animal Foundation (DDAF).[117] A non-profit 501(c)(3) grant-giving public charity, DDAF funds other non-profit causes throughout the US that share DDAF’s mission of helping animals and the people who love them. The DDAF continues to operate independently.[118]

To complement the Doris Day Animal Foundation, Day formed the Doris Day Animal League (DDAL) in 1987, a national non-profit citizens’ lobbying organization whose mission is to reduce pain and suffering, and protect animals through legislative initiatives.[119] Day actively lobbied the United States Congress in support of legislation designed to safeguard animal welfare on a number of occasions, and in 1995 she originated the annual Spay Day USA.[120] The DDAL merged into The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) in 2006.[121]The HSUS now manages World Spay Day, the annual one-day spay/neuter event that Day originated.[122]

A facility bearing her name, the Doris Day Horse Rescue and Adoption Center, which helps abused and neglected horses, opened in 2011 in Murchison, Texas, on the grounds of an animal sanctuary started by her late friend, author Cleveland Amory.[123] Day contributed $250,000 toward the founding of the center.[124]

A posthumous auction of 1,100 of Day’s possessions in April 2020 generated $3 million for the Doris Day Animal Foundation.[125]

Modernizing the Models and Tools Used to Develop and Test New Drugs

Till recently, there hasn’t been a clear way for nonanimal methods to gain the FDA’s stamp of approval, a concept for which the Physicians Committee has advocated for years. This changed when the FDA launched its Innovative Science and Technology Approaches for New Drugs (ISTAND) pilot program in December 2020. ISTAND provides a pathway for companies and the FDA to work together to qualify nonanimal methods. Importantly, methods qualified under ISTAND will be communicated to sponsors via agency guidance indicating that the method can be used for its qualified purpose without the usual need for companies to do extensive validation work to use a new method. In the program’s first year, multiple companies have contacted the agency seeking to begin the process.

Despite all the inertia pushing for business as usual, revolutionary advances have been made in human-specific approaches that can reduce and replace animal use. When policies and funding shift to favor human-specific nonanimal approaches over animal experiments, the American public can expect safer and more effective drugs to be developed faster and at a lower cost—financially and morally.

Brain death, states of impaired consciousness, and physician-assisted death for end-of-life organ donation and transplantation

In 1968, the Harvard criteria equated irreversible coma and apnea (i.e., brain death) with human death and later, the Uniform Determination of Death Act was enacted permitting organ procurement from heart-beating donors. Since then, clinical studies have defined a spectrum of states of impaired consciousness in human beings: coma, akinetic mutism (locked-in syndrome), minimally conscious state, vegetative state and brain death. In this article, we argue against the validity of the Harvard criteria for equating brain death with human death. (1) Brain death does not disrupt somatic integrative unity and coordinated biological functioning of a living organism. (2) Neurological criteria of human death fail to determine the precise moment of an organism’s death when death is established by circulatory criterion in other states of impaired consciousness for organ procurement with non-heart-beating donation protocols. The criterion of circulatory arrest 75 s to 5 min is too short for irreversible cessation of whole brain functions and respiration controlled by the brain stem. (3) Brain-based criteria for determining death with a beating heart exclude relevant anthropologic, psychosocial, cultural, and religious aspects of death and dying in society. (4) Clinical guidelines for determining brain death are not consistently validated by the presence of irreversible brain stem ischemic injury or necrosis on autopsy; therefore, they do not completely exclude reversible loss of integrated neurological functions in donors. The questionable reliability and varying compliance with these guidelines among institutions amplify the risk of determining reversible states of impaired consciousness as irreversible brain death. (5) The scientific uncertainty of defining and determining states of impaired consciousness including brain death have been neither disclosed to the general public nor broadly debated by the medical community or by legal and religious scholars. Heart-beating or non-heart-beating organ procurement from patients with impaired consciousness is de facto a concealed practice of physician-assisted death, and therefore, violates both criminal law and the central tenet of medicine not to do harm to patients. Society must decide if physician-assisted death is permissible and desirable to resolve the conflict about procuring organs from patients with impaired consciousness within the context of the perceived need to enhance the supply of transplantable organs.

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