REDNOVA NEWS
It doesn't look anything special. It's just a concrete skeleton of a building, surrounded by hoardings, like any construction site. It could be a new block of flats.

But this half-built concrete shell sits in a street full of science departments at the heart of Oxford University. This is the site of the university's proposed pounds 18m Biomedical Research centre, planned as a world-leading scientific facility which will conduct experiments using laboratory animals. After intense animal- rights campaigns against farms raising cats and guinea pigs for laboratory experiments, and a bitter battle with animal-testing firm Huntingdon Life Sciences, this building is now the latest focus of the furious animal rights debate. An Oxford professor says it will be a "national disaster" if the building is not completed. Anti- vivisection campaigners say it will be a "charnel house" of animal suffering.

From the start, the project has been the centre of controversy. Last year, animal rights activists broke into the headquarters of one of the contractors who were reportedly supplying concrete to the site. Construction vehicles were wrecked. According to anonymous internet postings, the Animal Liberation Front claimed reponsibility. "All electrics and oil lines cut, tyres slashed; fuel and oil tanks contaminated..." the postings read. Estimated cost: pounds 250,000."

The main building contractor, Walter Lilly, pulled out of the project last summer, after shareholders in its parent company, Montpellier Group plc, received forged letters - purporting to be from the company chairman - which advised them to sell their stocks because of threatened reprisals from animal-rights groups. When the letters were made public, Montpellier's share price slumped.

Work stopped last July. As the site has lain idle, Oxford University has been in secret negotiations to find another contractor to complete the work. The university said last week that it remains "totally committed" to the completion of the building and that work will resume "as soon as possible" - but given that it had hoped to restart work in January this year, the suspicion must be that finding a new contractor is not proving an easy task. Last November, the university obtained a wide-ranging injunction against the ALF and other campaigners, preventing them from harassing or contacting its staff, contractors, and students. The injunction limits protests to four hours a week, by up to 50 people only, on a small area of pavement opposite the building, in Oxford's South Parks Road.

Meanwhile, proposed amendments to the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill (which mean that animal-rights activists may face up to five years' jail for inflicting "economic damage" on medical research companies) have been described as "sinister" by campaigners, who fear they could be used to stifle even peaceful protest.

Early last year, plans to build a similar multi-million pound centre at Cambridge University were abandoned after major protests and concerns about the costs of protecting staff. The focus has now moved here, to Oxford. There is passion, and utter conviction, on both sides.

Oxford Professor of Neurosurgery Tipu Aziz - one of Britain's leading brain surgeons, and one of the very few professionals willing to speak out publicly on the need for the centre - says that it must be built.

On the other side is lifelong animal-rights activist Mel Broughton, 44. He and Robert Cogswell founded SPEAC (Stop Primate Experimentation at Cambridge) to protest at the Cambridge labs. Now renamed "Speak - the voice for animals", it is the leading group in the campaign to stop the Oxford centre.

Here, Professor Aziz and Mel Broughton set out their opposing views...

PROFESSOR TIPU AZIZ

In his office in Oxford, piled high with files, books, research papers, computer monitors and more files, all jostling with each other for space and threatening to tip each other on to the floor, Professor Tipu Aziz flips open his laptop, and runs a video.

"This is the sort of people we take on," he says. "This has been an obsession of mine for 20 years."

The video shows an elderly man, sitting in a wheelchair, with constant and uncontrollable shaking in both arms. He has Parkinson's Disease. "His joints are as stiff as wood," Aziz murmurs. "He's totally expressionless and unable to move. But this gentleman, mentally, is absolutely normal. And yet he's locked, so to speak, in this wheelchair."

Since 1991, using brain surgery techniques which he helped to pioneer, Aziz has operated on more than 1,000 people suffering from Parkinson's Disease and other uncontrollable movement disorders. The operation instantly stops the convulsions and unlocks their joints - as if by flicking a switch. The procedure, he says, has transformed their lives. It involves permanently inserting two electrodes deep inside the brain to a precise spot: the sub-thalamic nucleus. Wires are passed under the skin to a pacemaker and battery inserted in the chest. Only the battery needs replacing - about every five years.

Many others whom Aziz has treated in this way have suffered years of constant pain: stroke victims, who may develop hypersensitivity in an area of the body; phantom limb patients (who may "feel" incessant pain in a missing limb after amputation); patients with nerve damage whose constant pain cannot be alleviated by drugs.

"Starting to cry on the operating table - with these patients it actually happens quite often," says Aziz. "Suddenly, after years and years of this terrible pain, when you put an electrode in the brain and turn it on, the pain is gone. They can't believe it."

The operation - which is now estimated to have helped some 30,000 Parkinson's sufferers around the globe - was developed by Aziz and others through experiments on monkeys. It had extraordinary and tragic beginnings.

Aziz recounts how, in the late 1970s, a US psychiatrist was presented with a patient - a man in his twenties - in a catatonic state and totally unable to move. After all other therapies had failed, the psychiatrist prescribed him L-Dopa - the standard drug for Parkinson's Disease. The patient got up and walked.

It emerged that he was a chemistry graduate, who, by modifying pethidine, had tried to create a recreational drug which would circumvent ` the US drug laws, with disastrous results. Soon eight other people - friends or "customers" of the chemist - were hospitalised in a similarly catatonic and paralysed state. When one of them died, his brain was examined and was found to show damage identical to Parkinson's Disease. Here, suddenly, was a rogue drug which could "create" Parkinson's.

"In 1983 it was given to monkeys for the first time by a researcher in San Francisco - and these monkeys developed signs of full-blown Parkinson's," says Aziz. That led to an explosion of studies of these monkeys." The research showed that the sub- thalamic nucleus - which no one had previously considered as an element in Parkinson's - was over-active and the driving force behind the symptoms of the disease.

Aziz runs another video clip on his laptop, of the groundbreaking experiment he did in 1989. It shows a monkey in a cage, utterly immobile after being injected with the "Parkinson drug". Then the monkey makes a tiny trembling movement. "You can see that the monkey is absolutely unable to move, and when he tries to move he has a tremor," says Aziz. "To test the hypothesis that surgically modifying the sub-thalamic nucleus should benefit Parkinson's disease, we did the surgery in this animal. And this is the monkey just a short while after surgery." He then runs a second video clip, where the animal is seen jumping around in its cage. "That's normal behaviour; and it certainly doesn't look distressed," says Aziz.

Aziz and his team at Manchester University published their results in the early 1990s. Then, after further tests on monkeys, researchers in France went on to prove that the same effect might be achieved by the less hazardous method of using permanently- implanted electrodes. This is now the operation that has helped Parkinson's Disease sufferers around the world. Aziz personally performs up to three of the operations a week, either at the Radcliffe Infirmary or at Charing Cross Hospital in London.

"The effects are miraculous; and we have transformed people's lives," he says. " I have no qualms about what I have done, and what I do."

His research continues: into a possible vaccine against Alzheimer's, into multiple sclerosis tremors, and into the theory that the brains of Parkinson's sufferers may be "repairable" using a modified virus. Aziz uses on average two monkeys a year for his research. "Monkey studies are an integral part of my work," he says. "Every time I see one of my patients, that justifies it."

The anti-vivisection campaigners' charge that such animals suffer greatly is, he claims, "complete misinformation".

"We do the same operation on these monkeys as we would do on a human patient," says Aziz "and I know what my patients feel like after surgery. They can tell me whether they're feeling distress or not. And I don't believe that a monkey feels any different, so I'm quite happy with what I do. The experiments we do are not `torturing' these animals. These monkeys will come up to us, let us put the radio control over the pacemaker to alter the rate of stimulation, and then they go off and do their own thing while they're videoed. That's our experiment."

Born in the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) into a family with a long history in medicine - his father was a specialist in tropical diseases and discovered a cure for river blindness - Aziz spent his early childhood in the US, then returned to Bangladesh when his parents separated. After 10 years without schooling - because of the turmoil caused by the war of independence with Pakistan - he came to England in 1973 to complete his education. He arrived, aged 17, with just three O-Levels.

After completing A Levels , he studied physiology at University College London and then medicine at King's College London. This was followed by a Fellowship at the Royal College of Surgeons, and a doctorate at Manchester University (where his groundbreaking animal research was carried out). Coming to Oxford in the early 1990s, he is now Professor of Neurosurgery, and combines teaching and research with his work as a neurosurgeon at the Radcliffe Infirmary and Charing Cross Hospital. He has little time for anything but his work.

"I'm usually in my office or my labs at 6.30am, and leave for home at 8-9pm. I'm here seven days a week," he says. "Years ago I used to microlight - but it's hard to find the time to do things like that now. This work is my life."

Aziz expects to be one of those working in the new Biomedical Research Centre. "Britain has always been at the forefront of both clinical and basic research, and is a world leader. If this centre isn't built it will be a national disaster. For Cambridge not to have gone ahead was one disaster, and this will just be the straw that breaks the camel's back of British bio-medical science. And it's not that the campaigners will achieve anything by preventing its completion, because this research will go abroad. If that happens, we'll lose our best brains - they will follow the laboratories and facilities."

In the past, Aziz has been a target for hate mail. "We got quite a lot at the beginning," he says. Nonetheless, he feels the centre is so vital that - unlike most others - he is prepared to speak publicly about it. He says he's "not particularly" concerned for his safety, but adds he does take some (unspecified) precautions. "There are certain things that one does," he says. "You keep an eye on who's around. Especially round the laboratories, one is very conscious of who's walking in and out, and passing by." He describes some campaigners as "terrorists".

"There are people who have attacked the homes of scientists in the past, and even workers on the construction site. These are ordinary people earning a day's wages, and they're having their houses attacked. Is that the act of a protester, or is that the act of a terrorist? They have attacked people economically by bombarding shareholders with threats of what will happen if they don't sell their shares. That is economic terrorism. And they have used bombs. I don't see any difference in their practice from that of a political terrorist. The dangers to the country are no less: harm to people, harm to property, harm to the economy, and a big threat to people's future health. So they are terrorists and they should be treated as such."

He claims that many of the arguments of the campaigners are flawed. One of their key assertions is that animal research is now an obsolete science which could be more reliably carried out by new scientific methods such as DNA techniques and computer modelling.

"That is pure ignorance," counters Aziz. "We can only use computer modelling in a limited way, because we can put into computers only what we know. We cannot put in what we don't know. To test a hypothesis in a biological system one has to go back to the whole functioning model in an animal, prior to man. As a surgeon, the conclusions that one draws from a primate are directly transferable to man, and that is the pursuit of my research."

Campaigners also say that animal research often gives misleading results which can then prove dangerous to humans. "That is selective misinformation," claims Aziz. "In that case you have to deny the benefits of penicillin, of general anaesthesia, of cardiac surgery and neurosurgery. All of that has its provenance in animal research. What worries me is that a lot of these protesters are youngsters; they don't realise how much they've benefited from animal research."

MEL BROUGHTON

The police are filming us from across the street. Two process servers in fluorescent jackets are waiting to hand out injunctions to anyone who steps out of line. Steve, 59, is struggling to keep aloft a massive banner. "BORN TO DIE" it reads, with a picture of a monkey in a cage, holding its head in its hand, covering its eyes.

"There's tea and sandwiches over there. Help yourself," says Steve cheerily, nodding towards a pile of bags on the pavement. "We're not these terrorists that people make us out to be. We've got this Draconian injunction against us, but we're just ordinary folks. I'm a family man, self-employed van driver, I live in Oxford, I know everybody here - they're peace-loving people who don't like cruelty and needless experiments on animals."

It would be hard to argue with Steve about the "ordinary folks" bit. Today, the group of about 25 protesters includes Sheila 61, a PA in a surveyor's office; Lyn, 37, a midwife; Rachel, 34, a marketing consultant; Christine, 39, an admin supervisor; Angela, 59, a retired librarian; Max, 60, a senior officer with a local authority in the Midlands. As they're chatting and drinking tea, Mel Broughton picks up a megaphone. He aims it towards the half-built lab. What follows is a succinct manifesto of what he and the protesters believe.

"We have learnt," his voice booms out, "that a professor recently applied for a licence to conduct brain experiments on primates. We've seen the licence application. Monkeys will have electrodes fitted into their brains, and will be deprived of food and water. They will be strapped into a chair for up to 18 hours a day.

"The reason given for this research is to study obesity and hunger in human beings. But we know why people get fat. We know why we feel hungry. Why do this to sentient creatures when you already know the answers?"

His amplified voice ricochets off the buildings around us. "This university," he continues, "is telling the world that this building will be a monument to scientific research into curing diseases in human beings. This is not the case. But the benefit to the researchers, the pharmaceutical industry and the vivisection industry is massive. The technology already exists to carry out safe, beneficial research which will help people suffering from disease, and does not involve inflicting pain on animals who have no choice and are completely at your mercy.

"Oxford University," Broughton shouts in conclusion, "you should be ashamed of yourselves for relying on this pointless, cruel and callous treatment of sentient beings, and conning people into believing it's for their benefit. Because we've seen the research papers - and we know it's not." He puts the megaphone down. The police are still filming.

Broughton doesn't want to be seen as any kind of messianic leader, but people on the pavement here say he has been an inspiration to them. As a co-founder of Speak, he makes the trip to Oxford from his flat in Northampton every Thursday, the only day the injunction permits him and the other protesters to be here.

"There's this view of animal-rights campaigners that the only people who get involved are either complete lunatics or bunny huggers," he says. "The vivisection industry continually tells the public that we don't know what we're talking about and that we're just `misguided animal lovers'. I think that's a deliberate move on their part to try to portray us as people who don't have an intelligent argument."

Broughton's passionate conviction - shared, it should be said, by a section of the scientific and medical professions - is that animal experimentation is outmoded, 19th-century science. He and other campaigners - such as Europeans for Medical Progress - say that advances in DNA techniques, computer modelling, tissue culture, and stem-cell research are far more reliable methods of testing drugs and finding cures for diseases. They cite a long list of supposed "wonder drugs" which tested safe on animals - and were later withdrawn after proving harmful to humans. Animals, they say, have repeatedly proved to be unreliable models for results in humans. "We're not anti-science," Broughton insists. "I'd be more than happy to see this lab built - but to find cures for human disease using safe, scientific methods. This is about human health as well as about animal suffering."

Broughton has been a committed animal rights campaigner for nearly three decades. Over a mug of black coffee - no milk, he's vegan - he explains how he got here.

"People ask me why I feel like I do, and it's difficult to answer," he says. "But even when I was a kid I felt the same. I was always looking after injured birds and things. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew I would look after them - other kids used to bring them round to the house. I didn't always save them, but I tried. I was maybe 12, 13..."

His father, now 71, was a painter and decorator; his mother a care assistant in an old people's home. (They, too, are committed campaigners, and are both here on the demonstration today. "We got into this through Mel," says his father, Peter. "I'm very proud of him".)

Aged just 15, he set off for Scotland to work with Operation Osprey. "It was something I'd always wanted to do, and it was fantastic: out in the middle of nowhere, in a tent, with binoculars, doing shifts guarding the osprey nests," he recalls. Later, he worked in animal sanctuaries, and at a country park. Mainly, though, he has combined animal-rights campaigning with his work as a gardener, doing landscaping and garden maintenance for local authorities and private customers.

He has campaigned against zoos, circuses, factory farming, and live animal exports. In the late 1980s he was arrested at an amusement park in Morecambe while trying to release a dolphin. A decade later, he was in jail.

Travelling to an animal-rights action, he was stopped by police. "Incendiary devices" were found in the car. Sentenced to four years for conspiracy to cause explosions, he was released in June 2002 after serving two years, eight months.

"I've always been very upfront about this," he says. "Though I didn't actually do anything - because I was caught - I don't regret the fact that I was on course to take that kind of action. I've served my sentence, and I don't regret anything. I'm also very clear that I'm not involved in illegal actions now, and will not be in the future. But I'm not apologising." He explains this by saying that history shows that most campaigns for major change have had to go through a stage of direct action, before moving on to legal methods to achieve their aims. That, he insists, is what he's now doing.

He says he coped well during his jail term. "I took the chance to educate myself; do things I never did at school. I took Open University courses in social science and philosophy, read a lot of books. I found a lot of sympathy inside - but a lot of the general prisoners found it very difficult to understand that I was inside for something I'd done for no personal gain. And it is something you do ponder," he smiles.

He lives alone in Northampton, with his rescue-dog Bella. Most of his time is devoted to the campaign, run by him and Robert Cogswell with other supporters.

"This was always my life, but now it takes up so much of my life that it's very difficult," says Broughton. "In fact survival is very, very hard. My flat's nothing special - two rooms - and I live as frugally as I possibly can to make sure I can campaign. I'm not trying to make myself out to be a martyr because this is my choice." One feature of his flat is an entire shelving system, full of injunctions and files from the High Court. "There are just thousands of pages," says Broughton. "I've been named on all kinds of injunctions for things I've got nothing to do with. They just stick your name on.

Oxford University's claim that 98 per cent of the animals to be housed in the new facility will be rodents cuts no ice with Broughton. He thinks this is just to make it sound better.

"I think it's extremely cynical, and it's an argument I've heard many times. The idea, I assume, is that most people view rats as vermin, and so they cannot expect much sympathy when they're experimented on. But whether it's a dog, cat, monkey, fish, amphibian or rodent, the point remains that that animal has an ability to suffer. Rodents are sociable, intelligent creatures, and they have the ability to suffer pain."

"I have no qualms in saying that the idea of this lab makes me very, very angry. Change has to come, and we have a very large role in that, by creating a platform that allows others to speak out against what's happening. I do absolutely believe that we are going to change the way society views this issue. And we are in the process of doing that. How quickly that happens is in part down to what we do, and in part down to people who are involved in science. But it is going to happen - make no mistake about that. And I personally won't give up until it does. Ultimately it has to be banned, with legislation to stop it. It will come." n

Oxford University: www.admin.ox.ac.uk/biomed/; Europeans for Medical Progress: www.curedisease. net; Speak: www.speakcampaigns.org.uk

LIFE INSIDE THE LABORATORY

Nearly three million animals are used annually in experiments in Britain. Of these, nearly 4,000 are monkeys. Campaigners have unearthed chilling details of experiments conducted in British laboratories, such as kittens which had one eye sewn shut and part of their brain exposed to research squints; and monkeys which had the tops of their skulls sawn off. A stroke had been induced, and, according to evidence presented at a High Court hearing earlier this year, the animals were then

left unattended for up to 15 hours. Some were found dead

the morning after the operation, others were in a "poor condition".

The Government last year set up a national centre for the "replacement, refinement and reduction" of animals in research. And Oxford University says that its new Biomedical Research facility will be "one of the best in the country, in terms of animal welfare. The University of Oxford uses animals only in research programmes of the highest quality and only where there are no alternatives," it says. "All such work is carried out under licences issued by the Home Secretary after weighing its potential benefits against the effects on the animals concerned. The University is committed to the principles of reduction, refinement and replacement; on each project it ensures that the number of animals used is minimised and that procedures, care routines and husbandry are refined to maximise welfare. The University is committed to the highest standards of husbandry and housing...

"We expect that 98 per cent of the animals housed there will be rodents. Depending on other Home Office licences held, there may also be some amphibia, ferrets, fish and primates."
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Published: 2005/04/10 09:00:00 CDT

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