by John F. McArdle

About the author: John F. McArdle is a scientific adviser for the American Anti-Vivisection Society, an animal rights organization.

Throughout medical history charlatans have preyed upon the anxieties and fears of terminally ill patients, their families and friends by promoting a general retreat from rationality and substituting a variety of miraculous “cures.” The modern incarnation of such quackery appears to be well represented by xenotransplant researchers and surgeons.

Having failed to successfully scare the general population with dire predictions of death and devastation from such complex diseases as cancer and AIDS (both largely preventable and thus avoidable) and needing to justify inflated animal-based research budgets, the biomedical research/health care complex has prepared another threatening scenario, the so-called shortage of organs for use in transplantation. They also have a high technology solution...