Kansas City Strip

Now that Bob Dole has licked E.D. (is it any coincidence that his dysfunction bears the same initials as Elizabeth Dole?), the former Kansas senator is on a new crusade — one that should endear him to Britney Spears, a former Mouseketeer whose Pepsi commercials apparently give Dole the same lift he gets from Viagra.

Dole helped write the Animal Welfare Act years ago, and now he wants to clarify it by adding mice, rats, birds and other lab animals to USDA protections. “When Congress stated that the AWA applied to ‘all warm-blooded animals,’ we certainly did not intend to exclude 95 percent of the animals used in biomedical research laboratories,” Dole wrote in a letter to John McArdle of the Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, which opposes animal testing in medical research. The organization ran Dole’s letter as a full-page ad in Washington’s Roll Call.

So researchers at Pfizer, which just donated $100,000 to the KU Endowment Association to help erect the Robert J. Dole Institute for Public Service and Public Policy in Lawrence, must be dumbfounded. (Last week, KU announced that presidential historian Richard Norton Smith had been named the institute’s first director; the Doles are scheduled to attend its groundbreaking ceremony on October 5). Among other things, the institute hopes to “foster new thinking on major policy issues.” But we’re confused: Dole’s highest-profile work since leaving the senate has been stumping for Pfizer’s sexiest drug — so why is he making policy pronouncements that bite the hand that’s given him a job?

“There is not a drug on the market you can get over the counter or by prescription that wasn’t first tested on animals,” says Frankie Trull, president of the National Association for Biomedical Research. “There is not a person in the country who is not a recipient of the results of animal research. If you’ve had any vaccination for anything, if you’ve taken a single medication in your whole life, it’s been tested on animals.” Besides, she adds, the expensive, genetically-engineered little critters are already protected by plenty of bureaucratic safeguards. And, Trull notes, Dole “was just operated on for an aortic aneurysm — a technique that was developed in animal models.”

We can’t help wondering: Has all that Viagra gone to Bob Dole’s head?