My wife has been a cancer survivor for almost seven years. My 8-year-old daughter survived a copperhead bite four years ago. My brother's wife had a massive stroke in her brain stem at age 44, but she was saved by an extraordinary kind of brain surgery. My father, 84, has had a small heart attack, a bleeding ulcer and some slowly growing bladder cancers.
I had a couple of ruptured disks four years ago. I don't compare them, or the surgery that corrected them, to the life-threatening illnesses and stunning cures of my loved ones, but I'm certainly happy to have a functioning lower back, and to have put that debilitating pain far behind me.
But none of these happy outcomes would have been possible without medical research on animals. So I don't take kindly to the extremists who would bring such research to a halt. In fact, I see them as a direct, dangerous threat to the lives of people I love most.
You can imagine how it feels to see such people picketing and spreading their distortions and falsehoods on a corner near Emory's medical center, where human lives are saved every day because of judicious, well-planned, needed and humane research on animals.
"My daughter Nancy is alive today because of animal research," says Jean Hetzel-Howe of Sandy Springs. Nancy was born gasping for breath because of an abnormal diaphragm, the sheet of muscle that stretches across the chest and inflates the lungs. "For two months, I was the mother of a deathly-ill infant," Hetzel-Howe says.
But an advanced system for helping infants breathe had been developed through research on animals. Work at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center continues to improve the same technology, says Hetzel-Howe, who coordinates the Atlanta support group for families with infants who need this technology.
Chuck Brown, who serves as a community service manager for the National Kidney Foundation of Georgia says: "Without animal research, I don't feel like I would be here today. Without animal research, dialysis would not have been developed... Now I'm a transplanted person. I received the transplant seven years ago, and I'm healthy again. I'm grateful to scientists and animal research because people like me have been able to live."
There are so many others. But the radicals would end it all.
Gwen Millwood, whose 9-year-old daughter was born with a badly damaged heart and who had a heart operation herself when she was 8, makes a point I have often wondered about. "These people who are so anti-animal research, does this mean that they are not willing to have their children vaccinated? If their child needs a life-saving operation that the doctors learned how to do on animals, would they deny it for their child? I'm certain that they would have it done, because I know what it's like as a parent to have a doctor say, `If we don't do this for your child, your child will die.'"
I also often wonder why we don't see these animal-rights fanatics demonstrating outside Thom McAnn's or Burger King. But I think I know the answer: If they did attack such simple things as penny loafers and cheeseburgers, they would become so unpopular that support for their extremist views would quickly disappear. And in doing so, they would find out what most of us already know: The vast majority of Americans believe that it is not wrong to use animals to serve human needs.
So why do the extremists target the scientists? Because the scientists are vulnerable. Because people do not understand the complex meaning and purpose of research.
If we are willing to use animals to fill our bellies and cover our feet -- either of which we could do in other ways -- then we certainly should be willing to use them to advance the fight against the plagues and accidents of nature that can end human existence or reduce it to relentless pain, humiliation and suffering.
I take this very personally. My wife, sister-in-law and father are still in danger. And in the long run, the only thing that can take them out of danger is medical research, including research on animals.
Their chances are lower today than they might have been, because animal-rights fanatics have slowed the pace of research. They have frightened students and scientists away from research projects. They have forced laboratories and funding agencies to spend small fortunes on security against the fanatics' break-ins and vandalism. They have diverted millions of dollars in vital research funds to questionable regulatory measures that carry animal protection to unreasonable heights.
In other words, threatening the lives of my loved ones is not something they might do in the future. It is something they have already done.
What's more, you and I, and our children and their children, are in danger, too. Each and every one of us will be seriously ill one day. I wish it weren't true, but it is. And when that days comes, we will be grateful beyond measure to the dedicated scientists who persist in their research -- in spite of the opposition of extremists whose efforts impede the progress of knowledge.
Melvin Konner is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and associate professor of psychiatry and neurology.