N. E. Beregoy

By this author

History of the failure of the law regulating vivisection in Russia, 1901-1906

Issue 3 from 01.09.2007

Vivisection is a surgical operation on a living animal conducted for an experimental purpose. The method was widely used in biology and medicine during the nineteenth century. It also attracted the attention of animal protection groups, which appeared in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in Russia in 1865. Animal protectors opposed to using animals in scientific experiments sought prohibition, or at least limitation, of vivisection by law. In Russia, the struggle for legal limitations on vivisections began when Baroness Vera Meyendorf became chairperson of the Russian Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and devoted much energy to promoting an antivivisection law. In 1903, draft legislation arrived at the Ministry of Education, which forwarded it to all medical departments of the universities, of which the Military-Medical Academy was proposed to provide feedback. The following year, materials concerning the issue reached the Academy of Sciences for revision and a final decision. The Academy created a special commission chaired by F.V. Ovsiannikov, with academicians A.S. Famintsyn, V.V. Zalensky, and LP. Borodin as members. In 1906 they rendered their decision, in which they opposed the draft law on the grounds that it would impede Russian science. But another member of the Academy, Prince B.B. Golitsyn, sided with the antivivisec-tionists. Several months of discussions between Golitsyn and Ovsiannikov did not change the commission's verdict, and the commission forwarded its recommendation to the Ministry of Education. Now, a hundred years later, there is still no legal limitation in Russia on the practice of vivisection.

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