Tuesday, November 7, 2006

From the Wikipedia…

While he was a medical school student in the 1970’s, Bill Frist (now a Republican U.S. Senator from Tennessee and Senate Majority Leader) performed medical experiments on shelter cats while researching the use of drugs on the mitral valve. By his own account, Frist improperly obtained these cats from Boston animal shelters, falsely telling shelter staff he was adopting the cats as pets.[1] In his 1989 book Transplant, Frist admitted that he killed these cats during medical experiments at Harvard Medical School, as part of what he claimed were his studies. [2][3]

In his book, Frist explained that he succumbed to the pressure to succeed in a highly competitive medical school. Frist stated that he “treat[ed] them as pets for a few days” before he “cart[ed] them off to the lab to die.” He went on to say, “And I was totally schizoid about the entire matter. By day, I was little Billy Frist, the boy who lived on Bowling Avenue in Nashville and had decided to become a doctor because of his gentle father and a dog named Scratchy. By night, I was Dr. William Harrison Frist, future cardiothoracic surgeon, who was not going to let a few sentiments about cute, furry little creatures stand in the way of his career. In short, I was going a little crazy.” He went on to describe why he conducted animal experiments: “It can even be beautiful and thrilling work, as I discovered that day in the lab when I first saw the wonderful workings of a dog’s heart . . . I spent days and nights on end in the lab, taking the hearts out of cats, dissecting each heart, suspending a strip of tiny muscle that attaches the mitral valve to the inner wall of the cat heart and recording the effects of various medicines I added to the bath surrounding the muscle.” “I lost my supply of cats. I only had six weeks to complete my project before I resumed my clinical rotations. Desperate, obsessed with my work, I visited the various animal shelters in the Boston suburbs, collecting cats . . . it was a heinous and dishonest thing to do.”

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