Henry Spira

It is 1980, and I am a fresh college graduate working in a health food store. I'm skimming through the health magazines as I'm putting them on display, and I open to something disturbing. The cosmetic industry is doing disturbing research on rabbits. I close the page, but over the next 25 years, I never forgot that image. Mostly, I want to know if anything happened as a result of that ad? Who was behind it?

Not until I attend the Hopkins School of Public Health decades later, do I learn that the answer resides within the walls of that school. My interview with Alan Goldberg, a Hopkins toxicologist now in his 80's, tells me the rest of the story. The person behind that ad is Henry Spira. He and Goldberg had their clashes. Here is Part 1 of the rest of the story. Also see Part 2, The Remarkable Leadership of Alan Goldberg.

Henry Spira was a force to be reckoned with. Friend or foe would probably describe him similarly:passionate, outspoken, and never known to back down. No surprise he titled his memoir Fighting to Win.

Spira was, however, passionate about only one thing: preventing the suffering of animals. He was so passionate in fact, that in the prime of his life, he left a comfortable, secure career to devote his life exclusively to animals.

In 1980, in one of his earliest causes, Henry Spira took on the cosmetic industry to protest the Draize test. The Draize test was the standard way back then that industry tested every substance which might get into someone’s eye from shampoo to oven cleaner to lye.

 His memoir graphically describes the test:

"You take each animal and check that the eyes are in good condition. Then, holding the animal firmly, you pull the lower lid away from one eyeball so that it forms a small cup. Into this cup you drop 100 milligrams of whatever it is you want to test. You hold the rabbit's eyes closed for one second and then let it go. A day later you come back and see if the lids are swollen, the iris inflamed, the cornea ulcerated, the rabbit blinded in that eye…It is responsible for the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of rabbits each year."

Scientists friendly to Spira had confided to him that non-animal alternatives to the Draize test were possible, but just not being seriously investigated.

So, Spira was pressing the issue.

Spira’s group approached Revlon first, the industry leader, who was Draize testing thousands of rabbits a year and asked them to contribute funds to develop non-animal alternatives.

Month after month, talks went nowhere, so Spira intensified pressure by running a full-page ad in the New York Times showing a cuddly white rabbit with the headline, “How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty’s sake?” This was the same ad I saw in the health magazine.

With still no response, Spira escalated the protest the following month, by mobilizing hundreds of protesters to demonstrate outside Revlon’s headquarters.

Roger Shelly, Revlon’s vice president, could hardly breathe as he looked out his office window that day seeing hundreds of protestors, Spira with a megaphone, and an army of news organizations.

That night and the following morning in the news, Shelly recalls, “We took a beating up the likes of which no opponent of Muhammad Ali ever took.” This event is captured on the video below, One Man's Way.

International protests followed. By the end of that year, Revlon offered a grant of $750,000 to Rockefeller University to research alternatives to animal testing.

Spira then targeted Avon, the other industry leader.

Avon was aware of Revlon’s bad press, so it didn’t take much for Avon along with the Cosmetic Trade Association to collectively dedicate over a million dollars for alternatives to animal testing and award the grant to Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

With it, Hopkins opened the Center for Alternatives in Animal Testing (CAAT).

Dr. Alan Goldberg, the Director of the Division of Toxicology and already researching in vitro methods, the methods that would be needed to replace animal testing, was selected to head up the Center.

Goldberg, now 85, still shudders remembering the day Henry Spira confronted him in his office, telling him how to run the Center.

“The Center formed on a Friday, and Monday Henry was in my office. I had no knowledge of how to interact with what was going to be a hostile interaction, I just didn’t have enough experience. And the advice I was given by the PR guy at the cosmetic association was ‘Ignore Henry. Just listen to him, and when you finish listening, walk him out the door.’ So, Henry talked, he told me, and I nodded. And then I ended the conversation."

Goldberg pauses. "I can feel it at this moment because I stood up. I said, ‘Henry we are science driven. We will do everything by science. We will publish the work we do. And you can take the publications and use them for your advocacy.’ And I walked him out the door, literally.”

Goldberg later commented that is never good advice.

Spira went away but was not done.

Later that year, the Center hosted a symposium on product safety evaluation. Unbeknownst to Goldberg, prior to the symposium, Spira had circulated a “draft” letter to the Center's board and sponsors suggesting Goldberg was misappropriating funds for person gain. Goldberg, stunned, only learned of the letter from a board member during the morning coffee break at the symposium. Spira had gone behind his back.

When I asked Dr. Goldberg why he didn’t get furious, he replied, “I think I was so shocked by what was being said of me, and that wasn’t me, and I didn’t know how to respond to it.

“That’s when I went to Cherie who was the PR person at Hopkins who was there. She read the letter and said, ‘Is any of this true?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘Is ANY of this true?’ She emphasized ANY.

And I said, ‘Nothing in there is true.’ At which point she grabbed me, and we found Henry, and she said to him, ‘We both know this is not true, so just shut up and let us get the work done that we both want.’”

Ironically, Goldberg had already booked Spira to speak at the symposium.

“I didn’t want to hear what he had to say,” he admits, “but I thought it was important that he speak.”

Goldberg never retaliated or even got defensive -one of Goldberg's traits I truly admire. He realized Spira’s contempt for him was probably because Spira suspected Goldberg of being nothing but window dressing for the cosmetic industry, having no real intention of eliminating animal testing.

Meanwhile, Goldberg continued to focus on doing scientific research and kept Henry in the loop. When Goldberg had meetings in New York, he would visit Spira, sometimes inviting him to meetings.

“I think what built the trust was continual small interactions that occurred until I guess the final part of that sequence was Henry said to me one day when I was up in New York, ‘Let’s go to the Museum of Natural History, I’m paying.’”

If trust developed slowly so did in vitro technology.

Not until the 1990s was the cosmetic industry able to report an 87% decline in Draize testing.

By then, Spira was turning his attention to his ultimate concern: the suffering of farm animals raised in CAFO’s (concentrated animal feeding organizations), commonly called factory farms.

The animals’ living conditions haunted Spira:

“In a factory farm there are hundreds of thousands of chicks in one dark hanger. They step over their own feces, they never have a good day, they can’t see the sunlight, they can’t stretch their wings. You’ve got calves in crates where they cannot turn around. You’ve got hogs in gestational pens where basically they are imprisoned in an iron fence their entire lives.”

Spira envisioned a center that would eliminate the negative effects of CAFO’s, and turned to his now trusted friend, Alan Goldberg, for help. Spira had funding, and Goldberg had the Hopkins connection and colleagues there who shared Henry's vision. Together they helped found The Center for a Livable Future.

Today, Spira has passed away and Goldberg has retired, but two Centers remain, fully functioning under new leadership, as the legacy of two men who learned to trust each other.

The Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, founded in 1981, is the Center that built their friendship. The Center for a Livable Future, founded in 1996, is the Center that their friendship built. 

You may also enjoy the Youtube documentary One Man’s Way. A Peter Singer Documentary Honoring Animal Rights Activist Henry Spira.

Spira H. Fighting to Win. Singer , P (ed). In Defense of Animals. (1985), pp. 194-208.