”The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by author Ursula K. LeGuin may be the most disturbing short story ever written. The story begins with the opening of the Festival of Summer in Omelas, a shining city on the sea (set in the future? The past? Some alternate reality? We never find out.) The Omelans are dancing, feasting, and laughing as a group of children on horseback line up for the start of a race. An old woman passes out flowers to the crowd, while a small boy plays a tune on his wooden flute. Omelas is portrayed as a kind of Paradise on Earth, a place of peace, prosperity, and harmony, of beauty and sensuality, where life is an unending celebration.
But beneath it all lies a terrible truth.
Somewhere in the city, locked in a closet in a damp basement, there is a tiny child (no one is even sure if it is male or female), starving, terrified, covered with festering sores, squatting in its own excrement. This situation is no secret, nor an accident. This child’s confinement is the price the Omelans pay for their carefree existence, in a terrible pact made with some unnamed entity. The terms of this pact are stark and clear: no one may so much as speak a kind word to this child, else all the Omelans have will crumble into ruin, into chaos and anarchy.
Every Omelan learns about the existence of this child upon coming of age. Predictably, they are shocked, outraged, horrified by the revelation, but, as the author tells us, “It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of that child that they are so gentle with children. They know if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.”
Most of the Omelans come to terms with it. Some never do. Instead they walk away from Omelas and all it has to offer. As to where they go or what happens to them, we are told, no one seems to know.
When I read this story immediately I thought of our pharmaceutical industry.
I’m not even so much concerned with the deaths of untold millions of laboratory animals every year. Every living thing must die. I am more concerned with their existence while they are alive – endless hours imprisoned in tiny cages, morbidly obese and depressed, punctuated with moments of stark terror as they are restrained and jabbed with needles or worse. What does this do to our collective soul? Are these animals the real-life equivalent of that terrified child locked in the closet?
And the fact of the matter is, our shining city on the sea isn’t really all that shiny anyway. While it’s true that life expectancy has increased dramatically in the past century or so, medicine has had very little to do with that. Most of the increase is due to improvements in sanitation, nutrition, hygiene, occupational safety, automotive safety, and the like – not to new medicines.
Still, I would be greatly remiss if I did not acknowledge that medicine has made some contributions. There was a time, within living memory, when a diagnosis of Type I Diabetes was a death sentence. Today, with the aid of an inexpensive drug regimen, individuals with this condition can have decades of productive existence. Certain kinds of cancer – notably testicular cancer, Hodgkin’s’ lymphoma, and certain kinds of leukemia – are now entirely curable by modern medicine. Antibiotics have saved untold millions of lives.
But, I think we’ve already picked all the low-lying fruit. We still grow old and die. That hasn’t changed. Once you get past the age of eighty or so, there will be multiple competing causes of your death, and the best you’ll be able to hope for will be the one that carries you off most gently. And prior to that, probably most of the disease burden in the developed world is due to lifestyle choices – smoking, excessive drinking, and failure to exercise and eat sensibly. Many of these new “medicines” the drug companies are coming out with are nothing more than “me-too” drugs for conditions which are better managed with existing generic drugs (e.g., high blood pressure), or by lifestyle changes (e.g., high cholesterol, depression), or by not regarding them as problems at all (e.g., “restless leg syndrome”).
Nevertheless, the wheels of the medical research establishment grind on, while most people remain blissfully unaware of the involuntary sacrifice made on their behalf. I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse.
Mouse photo from Wikimedia Commons. All others copyright Brian Gunn /IAAPEA
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Dr. Evan Levine
old new lefty
Unbreakable
vilgessuola
mypsyche
Rutilus Extraho
Salon.com
Comments
I am of the same mind as you, in spite of adoring this boy. I can't reconcile this forced sacrifice on innocent living things in OUR name.
Joseph Mengele did experiments during the Holocaust, experiments on humans that in the end benefited science, particularly (I believe) in the area of organ and skin transplants. He let his ideas fly, unfortunately on the nearest set of twins in his special ward.
And even though what he did, the disgusting, horrific, torturous and barbaric things he did were beneficial, no one will acknowledge the benefits of it (out loud) because they were done on humans, often children. What makes us, humans more important, more deserving than animals? I don't know. I only know that when someone raids a lab, inside I cheer. I know it means very little...the industry is immense and so many of these labs are now in other countries...
what is done to these poor creatures is horrific, unconscionable, beyond disturbing.
Cancer is big business in America. Big, big, business. And because it is a business one has to scratch one's head and wonder, if it is a business, why would they want to cure me? There is no profit in a cure, there is only a profit in prolonged treatment. There is no bonus paid to the cancer doctors if they "cure" you. If they happen to squelch your cancer (for the time being) the docs don't get a reward, but they do get to test you constantly, almost hoping that the cancer has come back so they can start charging you 20k a month again.
Although, as I noted, a few forms of cancer are curable -- but maybe we've picked all the low-lying fruit already.
The Animal Welfare Act in the U.S. and the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act in Europe have been in place since the 80s. Do people shirk these? There's always one or two bad apples in the bunch, but a scientist can't publish a paper without holding themselves to a statement of proper animal care. Experiments can't even be carried out without the ok from both an institutional and state review board. AND there are local, state, and federal inspections of facilities every year. It's actually a pain in the ass to conduct animal research, but if it's necessary to advance medicine and health, then it's necessary to deal with the red tape and eyes over your shoulder.
Animals USED to be treated poorly, now they're living better lives than poor people if living in a lab.
rated
To address the topic of cancer treatment that was raised: Google “Gleevec”, a Leukemia drug released in 2001 (The first of a whole class of new treatments called “Tyrosine kinase inhibitors”). Before this ONE drug, the five-year survival rate of CML was 46.7% (meaning that more than half of the people who were diagnosed died). With Gleevec treatment, the five-year survival rate for CML is 89%. Doing the rough math from the number of people who are diagnosed each year, this is about 35,000 people EACH YEAR who are alive because of this one drug. Just one drug. Here is a quick link to get you started:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/58350.php
I find it hard to believe that any parent looking at a future of watching their child slowly die in horrible agony would say “Nope, I don’t agree with animal testing, so no chemo for my toddler”. If you are one of those rare people I encourage you to put your money where your mouth is and email me. I will gladly abandon a rat-centric project I am part of if some humans step up! It won’t hurt, and you won’t need to take any drugs. I just need to control who you mate with for the rest of your life. Oh… and you’d need to have at least 6 kids with a person (or people, depending on which group you end up in) of my choosing. Come on… It will save the rats!
I assume you are tongue-in-cheek when you say that lab animals live better than graduate students. As for the rest of it, well, while lab animals may have clean cages and enough food to eat, I don't think there is anything in the rules that prevents them from being bored out of their skulls, lonely, miserable and fearful in their confinement.
You have a point. But the dirty little secret of the pharmaceutical industry, one that most people never dream of, is that many of these new "medicines" they come out with do NOTHING for MOST of the people who take them. I wonder how a drug like Claritin (which is almost completely ineffective against a condition most people regard as nothing more than a minor annoyance anyway) fits into your argument. Or recreational drugs, like Viagra.
In a previous post, I commented on dogs being trussed up and forced to smoke thirty cigarettes a day, as part of efforts to develop a "safe cigarette." Why don't people just stop smoking cigarettes? Or if they won't do that, why don't they take responsibility for their actions? After all, they have a choice in the matter -- the dogs don't.
As always, thanks to everybody for your comments.