Barry Sessle
![[Barry Sessle]](../images/sessle2.gif)
Salary: $175,968.02
Birthday: May 28, 1941
Webpages at the University of Toronto
- at the Faculty of Dentistry
- at the Division of Neuroscience
- at the Department of Physiology
- Primate/Subprimate Orofacial Research Laboratories
Barry Sessle's research has sparked controversy and protest since the 1980s. As Tita Zierer wrote in 1989,
...one horrible series of experiments on cats, dogs and monkeys purports to study pain and pain pathways in the brain. In many cases, as the intention of the experiment is to investigate pain, no anesthetic is used.
The animals may instead be subjected to various surgical brain manipulations. One, called decerebration, involves severing the connections between one part of the brain and the rest, conveniently rendering the animals incapable of voluntary movement...
The surgically helpless animals are, intentionally, still sensitve to pain: they are then subjected to a variety of painful stimuli while researchers record the electrical activity of brain cells.
Current Research
Sessle's most recently published research includes brain research on fully conscious macaque monkeys (conducted with numerous graduate students, including Chiung-Shing Huang, Li-Deh Lin, Ekram Mahmoud Moustafa, Gregory M. Murray, and Dongyuan Yao), pain research on incompletely anesthetized rats, and pain research on baby and adult rats.
Barry Sessle's research is funded by Canadian and United States taxpayers. The Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR, formerly the Medical Research Council (MRC)) allocated the following amounts of Canadian tax dollars to Sessle's research:
| Years | Tax Dollars Allocated |
|---|---|
| 1973-1993 | $1,256,239 |
| 1993-1994 | $131,462 |
| 1994-1995 | $96,265 |
| 1995-1996 | $92,972 |
| 1996-1997 | $92,972 |
| 1999-2000 | $160,353 |
| 2000-2001 | $220,417 |
| 2001-2002 | $320,417 |
(Click here to access the CIHR database.)
Interestingly, and unlike some other animal researchers, Sessle acknowledges that animals do feel pain, and that pain research usually violates existing ethical guidelines for animal research. In "Animal Pain Research" (Laboratory Animal Science, Special Issue 1987 Jan.: 75-77), he wrote,
Animals lack the ability to communicate their pain in words, and there is no all-encompassing objective measure of their pain experience. Animals do nonetheless manifest most of the other reactions to a noxious stimulous that occur in humans. From these reactions we can infer that an animal is in pain. [...]...As Dubner has pointed out, pain research usually necessitates the production of the very sensations and behaviors that ethical guidelines for animal experimentation dictate must be eliminated or minimized.
See Barry J. Sessle on the Ethics of Pain Research in Nonhumans by David Sztybel, Ph.D. (ethics) for a detailed accounting of the logical and ethical problems with Sessle's article.
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