Question

do you think we should be testing on animal and using them for research?

Answer 1

Yes.

Animal testing, also known as animal experimentation, animal research and in vivo testing, is the use of non-human animals in experiments that seek to control the variables that affect the behavior or biological system under study. This approach can be contrasted with field studies in which animals are observed in their natural environments. Experimental research with animals is usually conducted in universities, medical schools, pharmaceutical companies, defense establishments and commercial facilities that provide animal-testing services to industry.^[1]The focus of animal testing varies on a continuum from pure research, focusing on developing fundamental knowledge of an organism, to applied research, which may focus on answering some question of great practical importance, such as finding a cure for a disease.

Antibiotics, insulin, vaccines for polio and cervical cancer, organ transplantation, HIV treatments, heart-bypass surgery - it reads like an A to Z of medical progress. But these major advances have something in common: they were all developed and tested using animals.

Animal experimentation is a contentious issue, but it boils down to two essential questions: does it work, and is it ethical?

The first is easy to answer: it works. Some would have you believe there are alternatives for all animal research, or that animal testing is always misleading and unsafe. These are fallacies.

Where there are reliable alternatives, of course, we use them - that's what the law demands. Magnetic resonance imaging, computer models and work on isolated tissues and cell cultures can be useful; but they cannot provide the answers that animal research can.

NO ONE chooses to use animals where there is no need. It gives no one any pleasure, and it is time consuming, expensive and - quite rightly - subject to layers of regulation. Yet it is still the best way of finding out what causes disease, and of knowing whether new treatments will be safe and effective.

Biologically, we are similar to species such as mice and rats, because we have practically the same set of genes. Their bodies respond to disease and treatments much as ours do. If a genetically modified "purple tomato" can fight cancer in mice, as announced yesterday, it might work for humans, too.

Medical research is an arduous process. By the time a therapy reaches the patient, it is easy to forget just how important animals were in its development. Patients might not know that the powerful new drugs Avastin (for bowel, breast and lung cancer) and Herceptin (for breast cancer) were developed after research on mice.

In fact, animal research has contributed to 70 per cent of Nobel prizes for physiology or medicine. Without it, we would - medically speaking - be stuck in the Dark Ages.