Vivisection

Vivisection (from Latin vivus ("alive") + sectio ("cutting")) is defined as surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure. The term is sometimes more broadly defined as any experimentation on live animals; see animal testing. The term is often used by organizations opposed to animal experimentation and is no longer used by practicing scientists.

Animal vivisection
Research requiring vivisection techniques that cannot be met through other means are often subject to an external ethics review in conception and implementation, and in many jurisdictions, use of anaesthesia is legally mandated for any surgery likely to cause pain to any vertebrate. In the U.S., the Animal Welfare Act explicitly requires that any procedure that may cause pain utilize "tranquilizers, analgesics, and anesthetics", with exceptions when "scientifically necessary". The Act does not define "scientific necessity" or regulate specific scientific procedures; instead, approval or rejection of individual techniques in each federally-funded lab is determined on a case-by-case basis by an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which contains at least one veterinarian, one scientist, one non-scientist, and one individual from outside the university.

In the U.K., any experiment involving vivisection must be granted a licence by the Secretary of State for Home Affairs. The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 "expressly directs that, in determining whether to grant a licence for an experimental project, 'the Secretary of State shall weigh the likely adverse effects on the animals concerned against the benefit likely to accrue.'" The Code of Practice in Australia "requires that all experiments must be approved by an Animal Experimentation Ethics Committee" that includes a "person with an interest in animal welfare who is not employed by the institution conducting the experiment, and an additional independent person not involved in animal experimentation."

Human vivisection
Unit 731 (731 部隊), a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II.


 * Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia.
 * Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Scientists performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results. <ref The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants.
 * Vivisections were also performed on pregnant women, sometimes impregnated by doctors, and the fetus removed.
 * Some prisoners' limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen then thawed to study the effects of the resultant untreated gangrene and rotting.
 * Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss.
 * Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines.
 * Parts of the brain, lungs, liver, etc. were removed from some prisoners.

In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to the Japan Times that, "I was afraid during my first vivisection, but the second time around, it was much easier. By the third time, I was willing to do it." He believes at least 1,000 persons, including surgeons, were involved in vivisections throughout mainland China.