Dr. Gordon Ewy

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Dr. Gordon Ewy is used to the praise and publicity that come with radically improving CPR techniques, saving hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

But to make those breakthroughs, Ewy has had to experiment on pigs, which has made PETA hog-wild.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has named Ewy, the longtime head of the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center, as one of its "vivisector of the month" finalists.

The organization argues that Ewy could have done his experiments on people rather than on pigs.

Members of the animal-protection group say his breakthrough of compression-only cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which the American Heart Association has endorsed as the CPR method of choice, is dubious.

"We take a look at the relevance and the importance of the study. Are there other methods for studying what he is studying?" said Kathy Guillermo, PETA's laboratory investigations director, describing how the organization chooses finalists. "How valuable is this to human beings in the first place?"

Ewy's compression-only CPR, shown to be superior to long-standard mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, is now used by paramedics across the country. A recent study found that in Arizona alone, it has saved more than 200 lives.

"Cardiac arrest is a huge public health problem in the United States," Ewy said. "I suppose it would be very nice if we didn't have to do experiments or research on animals, but practically all the advances in any medicine were tried out with animals first."

The Sarver Heart Center has always disclosed that it does research on pigs, whose hearts are similar to human hearts in size, blood flow and design.

Though the number can vary depending on the type of experiments, the center will do research on 60 to 80 pigs in a given year, Ewy said.

In these experiments, the pigs are anesthetized in the same manner as human patients. Researchers then put a wire through a vein that connects to the heart, electronically triggering a heart attack.

"That's what we do, and then we do the studies to find out the best way to resuscitate them," Ewy said.

The center studies the best resuscitation methods at different intervals after the heart stops — stretching as long as eight minutes, the average response time for paramedics. It also studies how to keep patients alive when their pressure is restored but only for a brief period.

If the pigs survive the experiments, they are then euthanized, because research animals cannot be sold for slaughter.

Whether Ewy "wins" the contest is yet to be decided. People can vote on PETA's Web site through the month. The other "finalist" is Dr. Michael Weed, a researcher with Johns Hopkins University's psychiatry and behavioral sciences department.

Weed has drawn PETA's ire for injecting macaques with the simian immunodeficiency virus, which is more or less the primate equivalent of HIV, and then monitoring them while they were on cocaine.

"Drug addiction of animals is kind of self-evident of not being particularly relevant," Guillermo said. "SIV is not the same as HIV; it is a disease unique to non-human primates."

But in an e-mail interview, Weed said he was investigating whether drug abuse makes HIV infections worse or harder to treat.

"The work is important because a large percentage of HIV infections in the U.S. and worldwide have been acquired in connection with drug abuse," he wrote. "We need to know if drug abusers respond differently to AIDS therapies or produce different mutations of the virus."

Because most drug abusers use more than one drug, and there are often issues with malnutrition and poor health care, working with primates can be a good way to reduce variables and understand how one specific drug affects the virus, Weed said.

Federal law requires all research involving animals to meet certain standards regarding not only the utility of the research, but also the care of the animals. Every research university has a committee that reviews proposed experiments.

"There are a number of different levels of review of all research," said Dr. Susan Wilson-Sanders, a veterinarian who heads the UA's animal-care center. "The researcher has to detail what is going to be done; what are the qualifications? . . . Could it be done by non-animal alternatives?"

The process is not rubber-stamped. The review committee is made up of veterinarians, scientists, non-scientists and community members, and most first-time applications are often required to make changes, Wilson-Sanders said.

At any given time, the UA's animal-care center handles about 16,000 research animals, mostly mice. In the case of pigs, they are kept in individual rooms or in small groups with plenty of space.

They are fed and cared for, and their stay at the center can range from a week to a few months until they are ultimately euthanized.

"I am very familiar with their (Ewy's) research they are doing, and they have done an amazing thing," Wilson-Sanders said.

"I have been a direct beneficiary of it, because about a month ago my husband had a quadruple bypass, and the type of research they did was key for his survival."

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has long had a reputation for making points through outlandish antics, and Guillermo said she realized contests such as the "vivisector of the month" might cut into the group's credibility. But they are needed to raise concerns and awareness about animal research, she said.

For his part, Ewy said he understands and respects PETA's concerns, but he would like to see a future free of heart attacks and strokes, and his research is key to that.

"If we can ever come up with computer techniques of simulation techniques where we can get the answers without doing it (using pigs), why, we would be the first to give it up," he said.

But until then, he said, "we will continue trying to improve resuscitation for this really major public health problem of cardiac arrest."