• Question: What are your views on animal testing?

    Asked by niamh2 to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Steve Roser

      Steve Roser answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I used to be very strongly against animal testing, especially when it was used for cosmetics and for psychological experiments. I don’t believe that most of the experiments are justified even today, but there are clearly some medical conditions that need research on small mammals, altho that number should be going down as we get better at modelling what is going on.

    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I try to avoid products around the house that have been tested on animals as much as possible, makeup too. However I think it is important in some areas of medical research, but I think unless it is absolutely essential it should be avoided.

    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I think animal testing during the development of new drugs or medical treatments is necessary and justified. As a method it has its limitations since animals do not ‘work’ in quite the same way as humans but, at present it is the best we can do. It is not possible to reproduce the complex interactions between organs and the digestive (stomach) and circulatory (blood) systems by growing cells in a test tube.

      Are they necessary for experiments where one is doing more fundamental research? That is a tougher judgement but I think in most cases it is still justified because at the end of the day advances in medicine depend on our understanding of biology.

      It is certainly important to make sure that as few animals as possible are used in this kind of work and that any suffering is minimised (through use of pain killers).

    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I think animal testing is justified when it is used to insure the safety of medicines and in medical research where it contributes to the development of new treatments which can save lives or ease people’s pain. I completely understand that not everyone agrees with this, and I think it is easy to make a case against animal testing – it depends a bit on how we judge the relative importance of animals and humans, and there doesn’t seem a correct answer to this – it is a matter of opinion. In general I tend to think people and animals are not as different as some people would like to believe so I think the other point of view is quite reasonable. However, I know I wouldn’t want to live in a world without the medicines and treatments that have been developed through animal testing and I certainly wouldn’t want to deny these to my loved ones.

      A tougher problem is whether animals should be used in experiments that advance scientific knowledge without contributing directly to human health. I know a lot about this kind of research because in fact most of what we know about the brain and especially about the function of individual brain cells comes from studying animal’s brains. Again I think this is justified, because we have little chance of dealing with problems like Alzheimer’s Disease without understanding the mechanisms that are going wrong. I am more interested in the human brain, and in some ways the techniques I use (MRI and computer modelling) can be seen as alternatives to animal testing because they each allow us to understand something about the brain without animal experiments. Unfortunately these methods don’t tell the full story (for example fMRI cannot tell us what individual nerve cells do), so our understanding of the brain depends heavily on animal experiments at the moment. A an example of what will be achievable here is a video about the use of neural prosthetics in paraplegia; this work is based very heavily on research originally conducted with animals in the 1980s.

      What do you think of animal experimentation – is it justified for medical research?

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