Dan Lyons | |
|---|---|
| Born | Daniel Louis Lyons |
| Education | Social and political studies,University of Sheffield, 1990–1993 PhD, politics, University of Sheffield, 2006 |
| Occupation(s) | CEO,Centre for Animals and Social Justice |
| Awards | Political Studies Association's Walter Bagehot Prize for Government and Public Administration, 2007 |
| Website | Dan Lyons University of Sheffield. |
Daniel Louis Lyons is the chief executive officer of theCentre for Animals and Social Justice, a British animal protection charity. He is an honorary research fellow at theUniversity of Sheffield and the author ofThe Politics of Animal Experimentation (2013).[1]
Lyons specializes in the study ofanimal research, the philosophy ofanimal rights, and the political representation of animals' interests.[1] He is the former campaigns director ofUncaged Campaigns (1993–2012), a group that opposed animal experiments in the UK, in particularxenotransplantation. During his time with Uncaged, Lyons became known as the author ofDiaries of Despair (2000), a report that reproduced and analysed leaked documents about pig-to-primate organ transplants.[2]
Lyons studied social and political studies as an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield from 1990 to 1993 and in 2006 obtained his PhD for a thesis entitledProtecting Animals Versus the Pursuit of Knowledge: The Evolution of the British Animal Research Policy Network.[1]
His work won the Department of Politics' Andrew Gamble Prize for the outstanding thesis of 2006–2007, and the Walter Bagehot Prize for Government and Public Administration, awarded by thePolitical Studies Association.[3] The thesis developed into a book,The Politics of Animal Experimentation, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013, with a foreword byWyn Grant, Professor of Politics at theUniversity of Warwick.[4]
After graduating from Sheffield in 1993, Lyons became campaigns director ofUncaged Campaigns, a group in the UK that opposed animal experimentation. He was the author in 2000 of a 157-page Uncaged Campaigns report into xenotransplantation,Diaries of Despair: The Secret History of Pig-to-Primate Organ Transplant.[2] The report analysed 1,274 leaked pages about research into transplants from pigs to nonhuman primates, conducted between 1994 and 2000 byHuntingdon Life Sciences on behalf of Imutran Ltd, a subsidiary of the Swiss pharmaceutical companyNovartis Pharma AG.[5] According to anRSPCA report, the research involved transplanting pigs' hearts, kidneys,pancreatic islets or bone into wild-caughtbaboons orcynomolgous macaques, or transplanting the macaques' hearts into the baboons.[6]
Material from theDiaries appeared in September 2000 in theDaily Express in the UK[7] before Imutran obtained an injunction preventing further publication.[5] Novartis closed Imutran shortly afterwards, but said it was unrelated to the leaks.[8] TheExpress journalists won aGenesis Award for the story.[9]
A key point of Lyons' report was that the animals' suffering was severe, but most of the procedures had been classed as "moderate" by the researchers.[10] The RSPCA obtained a court order in October 2000 to allow it to review the report, and published its own report in 2002.[11] Home SecretaryJack Straw asked the Home Office Chief Inspector to examine the evidence.[12] In 2003 Lyons obtained a court order allowing him to publish most of theDiaries, and theObserver was able to publish a summary of it.[2] Lyons subsequently used the leaked material to study animal research policy in the UK, an area not examined often by academics because of the difficulty of obtaining primary-source material. This formed the basis of his PhD thesis and subsequent book.[13]
In 2011 Lyons became a founding member of theCentre for Animals and Social Justice, along with political scientistsRobert Garner of theUniversity of Leicester, andAlasdair Cochrane of the University of Sheffield. Lyons was appointed as the centre's chief executive officer. The aim of the group is to develop expertise about the access of nonhuman animals to social and political justice, and to "embed animal protection as a core goal of public policy" in the UK.[14]
Lyons served from 2007 to 2011 as aGreen Party councillor on Stocksbridge Town Council, Sheffield.[15] He stood unsuccessfully as a Green Party candidate forSheffield City Council in the2011 and2012 elections.[16]
