Gill Langley

Dr Gillian Rose Langley (b. 1952) is a British scientist and writer who specialises in alternatives to animal testing, animal rights and animal protection issues in relation to the use of animals in research. She is the science director of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, the UK's leading non-animal medical research charity, and one of the world's foremost experts on non-animal replacements. She is a former member of the British government's Animal Procedures Committee, and a current member of the Replacement Advisory Group of the British National Centre for the Three Rs, founded by Lord Sainsbury, and has worked as a consultant for the European Commission as well as animal protection organizations in Europe and the United States.

Langley is the author of Next of Kin (2006), a report on primate experimentation published by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection with a foreword by primatologist Jane Goodall; Vegan Nutrition (1995); and editor of Animal Experimentation: The Consensus Changes (1990), a collection of essays on animal research by leading scientists and philosophers, including Mary Midgley.

Education
Langley studied physiology, cell biology and zoology for her bachelor's degree at Cambridge University's Department of Zoology, then gained her Ph.D in neurochemistry, also from Cambridge. She took up a position as a research fellow at Nottingham University, specializing in neurophysiology in cell culture.

Involvement in animal protection
Described in the book Organ Farms as "not what some would regard as a typical animal rights campaigner," Langley was an in vitro researcher who decided to change tack and campaign professionally against animal experiments. She is the Science Director of the Dr Hadwen Trust and has provided expert advice for the government as well as a range of animal protection organisations. She was a member of the Animal Procedures Committee for eight years, which advises the British Home Office on issues related to animal testing, and has acted as an advisor to the government on the introduction of the new European Union Chemicals legislation, REACH. She has served as a specialist consultant for the European Commission and for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). She was called as an expert witness in 2001 by the House of Lords Select Committee on Animals In Scientific Procedures during its inquiry into animal experimentation in the UK.

In April 2006, she was a member of the panel at the Oxford Union that debated whether "This house would not test on animals." Opposing the motion were Laurie Pycroft &mdash; who founded Pro-Test, which organized the debate &mdash; Sir Colin Blakemore, Professor John Stein and Professor Lord Robert Winston. Supporting the motion, along with Langley, were Dr Andrew Knight, Uri Geller and BUAV campaigns director Alistair Currie. The motion was defeated by 273 to 48.

Position on animal research
Langley is an anti-vivisectionist and vegan. She told The Guardian that she "would never claim that all animal experiments are without scientific value," and this position is sometimes wrongly interpreted as partial support for animal experimentation. It is not. Her view is that a combination of the many scientific flaws in animal experimentation and the ethical case against it constitute a case for its immediate abolition. She also argues that the legislation supposed to protect the 2.7 million animals currently used each year in the UK is inadequate, and that more money should be invested in developing alternatives, such as in-vitro and clinical studies. She told the BBC: "When you know that other animals can feel pain and distress in the same ways that humans do, it is unethical to experiment on them." She argues that because the British government's budget for alternatives is subdivided into different areas, what each area receives is "barely enough to fund one research project."

She is particularly opposed to the use of non-human primates in xenotransplantation, where pig organs are grafted onto the necks of primates to test anti-rejection drugs. She told medical journalists Jenny Bryan and John Clare that the primates used in xenotransplantation research are subjected to a large number of traumatic procedures and their effects, such as major surgery; internal haemorrhages; isolation in small cages; repeated blood sampling; wound infections; nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea because of immunosuppressant drugs; kidney or heart failure; and eventually death. She said: "It's not just the suffering they endure in the laboratories and research establishments. Just getting there can be torture. Studies of primates show them to have complex mental abilities which may increase their capacity to suffer. Supplying the laboratories in the UK imposes huge suffering on the animals... They're then contained in small, single cages, and transported for very long distances causing deaths, distress and suffering."

Next of Kin
Langley's report, Next of Kin (2006), was published simultaneously with the publication by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust in favor of primate experimentation. She argues that monkeys suffer essentially the same kind of pain, anxiety and anticipation as human beings would if placed in the same situations. In the press release accompanying the publication David Morton, professor of Biomedical Science & Ethics at the University of Birmingham, calls it a "wake-up call to some scientists to raise their game in their justification and ways they use non-human primates in research."

Langley told New Scientist: "It’s not that they are so much like us they shouldn’t be experimented on. It comes down to pain and suffering. Like humans, they know the pain is coming, they remember pain and are susceptible to non-physical pain, suffering anxiety if they’re isolated socially from other monkeys." Langley says that there is "no halfway house": "We can argue about the science forever, but what I’ve never heard is any clear scientific explanation for moral discrimination." The New Scientist states that her report cites studies suggesting that macaques and other small monkeys are more conscious of themselves and others than was previously believed, giving them a moral status equivalent to that of great apes &mdash; currently not used in experiments in the UK.

Publications

 * , British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection and European Coalition to End Animal Experiments (ECEAE), 2006.
 * Vegan Nutrition. The Vegan Society, 1995. ISBN 0-907337-18-X
 * Animal Experimentation: The Consensus Changes. MacMillan, 1989. ISBN 0-412-02411-X
 * "Plea for a Sensitive Science" in Animal Experimentation: The Consensus Changes. MacMillan, 1989
 * , ECEAE, 2005.
 * , Green Party, 2004.
 * , ECEAE, 2004.
 * ,, ECEAE, 2004.
 * The case against the use of animals in medical experiments in Levinson, Ralph and Reiss, Michael J. (eds.) Key Issues in Bioethics: A Guide for Teachers, pp.167-174. Taylor & Francis Group 2004 ISBN 0-203-47286-1 (e-Book).

Audio

 * Interview with Gill Langley, Today, BBC Radio Four, September 7, 2004, retrieved July 16, 2006.