Covance Laboratories has long been one of the Madison's area's premieremployers. The company, which has a worldwide presence, conducts clinialtrials to test new drugs and therapies. A story in the Dec. 2 issue ofIsthmus contains a lighthearted look at a local human clinical trial for anew drug that treats erectile disfunction. Accompanying the story is asidebar that details the company's economic presence and an area of currentcontroversy, it's use of animals as research subjects. Local animal-welfareactivists confess they know little about the company's Madison work in thisarea. But Isthmus was able to obtain a report from the U.S. Department ofAgricultural detailing the number and kinds of animals used in 2004, andsome informatiom about the severity of the research. That document isincluded here, along with the original story.

I am the Chuck Yeager of erectile dysfunction - or at least one of them. For nine days this summer, I was part of a group of 24 men who were dosed with pills, prodded by doctors and poked with needles to test the next generation of blood-flow redirectors.

It happened at the human testing unit at Covance Laboratories in Madison, long a refuge of destitute college students who would sell a kidney if the price were right. I learned of this moneymaking opportunity from an ad in the back pages of The Onion, seeking a few healthy men for a study that included some overnight stays. It seemed as innocuous as a slumber party.

I signed up for the preliminary screening, which took about two hours. Handing me a clipboard full of forms, the heavily pregnant nurse told me I would be testing a new, longer-lasting formulation of Levitra, a drug used to treat erectile dysfunction. After the barrage of paperwork, blood draws and urine samples, the nurse told me to come back on Thursday for the first of five weekend stays.

That evening, I went to Genna's Lounge with some friends - a troupe of lesbian graduate students in anthropology and education. After the third round, I told Lia about my plans.

"Oh, gross," she said. "You know what this means, don't you? For the next month, I won't be able to stop thinking about your penis." Still, she was intrigued. "So is everyone going to have to walk around with some sort of condom-shaped sheath on all day, measuring how hard you get?"

My palms began to sweat as I approached the building, located at 3402 Kinsman Blvd. on Madison's east side. A nurse greeted me at the door. Behind her was a line of men stemming the flow of blood from their arms with matchbook-sized pieces of gauze. Before I could make a break for the door, a nurse signed me in, told me where to drop my bags, and hung a photo ID around my neck.

The main room smelled strongly of antiseptic and latex. There was a pool table, several wide-screen TVs, a foosball table in the corner, computers with Internet access on one wall and dusty bookcases full of Louis L'Amour novels and tattered board games.

Steven just smiled at me, which was fine. It was when he didn't stop smiling and began a monolog about the drive from the research unit to his address three hours away that I started having second thoughts. Unable to get away, I waited until he somehow ended up on the subject of airline tickets. "I sometimes call Southwest's reservation line so that they'll put me on hold and I can listen to the commercials," he said. "I don't even want a ticket. I just like being on hold."

I shot him my best sympathetic smile and looked around desperately. At the far end of the main room, participants from another study on antidepressants were watching Dawn of the Dead on TV. They had either been locked up in the building too long or the drugs were working too well: The entire group stared at the TV with the same blank expression. They barely acknowledged us.

"This is basically a feed-and-bleed study," the nurse replied. "We're trying to find out how long the drug stays in your system. We don't need to know if you have an...um...we don't need to know if the drug is having its desired effect. Only if it's abnormal."

Having never taken Viagra or Levitra before, I wondered what an abnormal erection might be. For some, being hard for three hours with a group of guys watching "SportsCenter" might be run-of-the-mill, but it seemed abnormal to me.

The second common room was bigger than the first; it was called "the fishbowl" because one end of the room attached to the main nurse station, which was sealed with soundproof glass. Nurses could see out and we could see in, but we had to use hand gestures to communicate. The nurses controlled access to the bathrooms from a hidden switchboard.

The couches were populated with the expected contingent of students looking for quick summer cash and more than a few professional lab rats. Most of the pros were in their early 40s. Many had traveled long distances to get here. One unemployed computer programmer told me he'd been doing studies full-time for 12 years.

"I'm probably in the top 20% of income-generating lab rats," he said. "Last year, I cleared $60,000." He was plugged into an underground network that shares information on the best-paying studies from Seattle to Miami.

Next to 12 Year sat a man nicknamed Sarge, who spoke entirely in run-on sentences. When not lamenting his failed career as a stand-up comedian or the fact that he hadn't seen his daughter in more than a decade, he spent his time cruising online personal ads and loudly telling the group which of the "babes" he would score with when the study was done. He was the embodiment of every woman's fear of online personals.

After a few hours of listening to the lab-rat lifers, I went back to my room, wondering if I too would be tempted by a life of easy money and blood draws. In my dreams that night, I wandered through a maze of 10-foot-high white walls. After a relentless series of wrong turns and dead ends, I found a holy grail: a jar of Levitra.

At 6:45 on day two, a nurse shook me out of bed. In the cafeteria, another nurse gave us each a tray with coffee cake, a bowl of cornflakes and a carton of milk. We ate in silence and shuffled down the hall to have our blood draw. This would be the first of 19 vials of blood pilfered from my arm that day.

After being drained, I was directed to the pill-popping station. The head nurse who gave us the rules the day before smiled at me. To her right was another nurse ominously holding a flashlight. In front of them on a blue paper towel was a single pill and a glass of water. One nurse took notes as the other instructed me on the proper techniques for swallowing a pill.

"Put the pill on your tongue and drink the whole glass of water. Be sure the pill goes down. Hiding it in your mouth will disqualify you from the study." After I swallowed it, they made me open my mouth and used the flashlight to search for contraband.

The current formulation of Levitra is administered in 2-, 5-, 10- and, for the most severe cases, 20-mg doses. I was taking 30 mg. It should have been enough to give a horse a hard-on. I was expecting the biggest erection of my life.

But a half-hour passed, then an hour, and nothing happened downstairs. The rest of my body, however, began to feel strange. Everything I saw was beginning to take on a yellow tinge, and there was a dull throbbing in my temples.

Over the next hour, I wanted to crawl into bed and cry for my mother. The rest of the inmates were equally down. Even Sarge was silent. My penis had yet to make any "abnormal" movements. I felt more dysfunctional than ever in my life. For the next few hours, I sat on a couch with three other men. To my right, Kyle, who had been heretofore chipper, had his hands pressed against his temples. "You hard yet?" I asked.

"I was earlier," said Jeff, a slight, 32-year-old paralegal. He had his nose stuck in a graphic novel featuring a dozen cartoon heroes in skin-tight jumpsuits. "I don't know what you guys are complaining about. I was up and down for an hour, and my head was fine."

"All right," she said. "Just be sure to keep track of when it peaks and finally goes away." I fell asleep and dreamed that nurses were chasing me down empty corridors, asking how I was feeling. Their clipboards looked dangerous.

I wasn't sure how long I slept, but when I woke up my head wasn't throbbing anymore. The pressure had migrated its way down my body. The blood had rushed away from my head and filled my crotch with all the blood it could find. I felt like a magician's animal balloon in which all of the air was squeezed downwards. There, making a rather impressive tent in my shorts, was my much-anticipated boner.

It was abnormal. I could feel it pressing against the fabric of my pants in a familiar way, but something was wrong. It was boring. My body had certainly responded to the drug, but it had left my libido at the coat check. It was like being impotent, but with a hard-on.

Richard looked like he'd driven pickup trucks all his life. He wasn't the sort of person you would expect to be leveled by a penis pill. But when I found him, he was standing with a nurse begging for an aspirin.

"I know we can't take drugs," he pleaded, "but I feel like my head is splitting in half." The nurse said she would have to talk with a doctor. He would endure three hours of pain before they broke out the Advil.

"Next time I'm going to make it a point to bring in a Playboy," said Jacob, a broad-shouldered college student. "The way I figure, the drug either goes to your brain or to your cock, and the headache shows up when you're anxious about not getting a boner. If I'm looking at porn, I can guarantee I won't be anxious." Maybe that's why porn is not allowed.

I was curious as to how my cohorts were reacting - perhaps too curious. It was when a usually laid-back college student with dreadlocks past his shoulders snapped at me, "What do you care what I'm doing in the bathroom," that I realized I should probably stop asking questions.

The next morning, I left Covance. I would spend two more weekends in the lab, producing two more headaches and two more rather unimpressive erections. I ended up being excused from the study's final two weekends, reducing my paycheck to a mere $2,000.

No doubt the worldwide scourge of impotence is of great importance, but is there really a point to funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into research and advertising so 50-year-old men can get it up at night?

And if the researchers were thinking that our group of two dozen men might one day be typical patients, then what might that mean about the future of sex? Do we really want men to be able to procreate until they are 90? I cringe at the thought.

And then all of a sudden it came to me: Levitra was brilliant. It was going to do exactly what it advertised. Maybe even save the world. The pill wasn't about sex, it was about knowing you could still get it up. Taking the pill made me hard, but the headache drove the thought of sex right out of my mind.

For most men, it is enough just to be able to get it up, so they know they are still men. They can look down at their roger and salute it a goodnight. Somehow, just that - and the money - makes it all worthwhile.

Nestled between the airport and MATC, Covance Laboratories is the epicenter for a wide variety of research, from analyzing foodstuffs for nutritional content to animal testing and phase-one clinical trials on humans.

Covance, headquartered in New Jersey, is one of the world's most important clinical test centers, last year posting more than a billion dollars in gross revenues. (In terms of actual profit, the publicly traded company pulls in about $100 million a year.) Covance now runs labs in 17 countries and is aggressively expanding.

The company is also one of Madison's most important employers. Not counting human subjects, Covance employs 1,300 people in Madison, making it one of the county's top 20 employers. It is considered an excellent employer, offering solid benefits, including health coverage to domestic partners.

Last April, the city of Madison approved creation of a tax incremental finance district to support Covance with $1.4 million in street improvements and sidewalks, and another $3.2 million for future improvements. The company has also benefited from $2 million in state loans and grants.

In its perpetual search for human subjects, Covance runs radio and TV ads as well as print ads in this and other papers. Clinical tests vary in length from just a few days to months, generally paying between $1,000 and $5,500. All subjects stay in a dorm-like facility under the observation of medical staff. In any given year, Covance's Madison facility conducts between 30 and 40 studies.

Everyone seems to know someone who has been on a study, and many stories of what happens during human testing escape into the community. Yet Covance remains tightlipped about most of its work - especially that which involves animals.

Lori Nitzel, a lawyer who runs Madison's Alliance for Animals, has had little success learning about what happens inside Covance's multistory animal testing unit.

"We have wanted to focus on them for a long time," she says. "But honestly, we don't know a lot about what goes on in there except for some stray tales that some ex-workers have phoned in." As for what she suspects, "I doubt is it much different than what PETA found in Virginia."

In 2004, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent an undercover agent to work as an animal handler at the Covance facility in Vienna, Va. The video footage, photos and accounts she collected were so disturbing it caused an outcry from individual senators and congressmen and prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate Covance for possible violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

"Besides the choking, hitting and psychological tormenting of animals, the things we saw in Virginia smacked of an almost collusion with the drug companies to never come to a conclusion that a drug was dangerous," says Mary Beth Sweetland, a spokeswoman for PETA. "Sometimes scientists were told not to note specific symptoms" in animal subjects.

Covance responded by promptly suing PETA for fraud, saying the group had engaged in "deceitfully videotaping" and made "unsubstantiated claims." The suit was filed in both the U.S. and England. On June 16, the British suit was thrown out by a judge who said, "The video cries out for an explanation." The judge then ordered Covance to pay PETA's legal costs. The U.S. civil case was settled on Oct. 15, with both sides claiming victory. PETA promised not to infiltrate another Covance facility for five years, and Covance allowed PETA to keep the footage and notes it had already collected.

An 2004 annual report obtained by Isthmus from the USDA revealed that besides lab rats, which do not need to be reported, there were 7,223 animals inside the Madison facility - mostly dogs and nonhuman primates. Of those, 1,309 experienced enough pain to merit being tranquilized or given an anesthetic.

The company declines to comment on specific animal studies. "All of our tests fall in line with federal guidelines," says spokeswoman Laurene Isip. "When those guidelines change and allow us to use fewer animals, we will be the first do so."

This is cache, read story here