Im a Buddhist in Big Pharma — is that cool?
Dear Cary, I work for a biotech research company focused on developing pharmaceutical treatments for neurological diseases. I’m also a lay Buddhist who believes in the principle of right livelihood (i.e., work that brings true benefit to oneself and/or others). While I’m proud of working to develop treatments that could ease suffering for many people, I am also troubled by the enormous amount of material waste and animal experimentation needed to conduct this research. Every day in the lab I generate trash cans full of plastic waste as well as chemical and biological waste that gets sent to incinerators (polluting the air) and to landfills (not being recycled). I also have to sacrifice mice and rats on a weekly basis to test the efficacy of potential drugs before administering them to humans in clinical trials. Thus my dilemma: Do the ends justify the means? Is the human suffering I will potentially alleviate worth the present environmental damage and animal sacrifice? I’m still fairly
