• Question: What is the point in animal testing?

    Asked by emma13 to Laura, Asif, Lena, Sean, Viv on 13 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by macklev2, yasemin, hattie, mimmiex, winsernat0r, halestone, lewdude.
    • Photo: Laura Waters

      Laura Waters answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Good question. Those that think it is a good idea say it helps predict how things work in the body. I’d disagree with that and say we are so different to animals it doesn’t help us predict anything. It would be better to use human volunteers or computer simulations rather than animals.

    • Photo: Sean Murphy

      Sean Murphy answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Animal testing is not perfect, as Laura mentioned. However at the moment animals are the best way to predict how a new treatment will perform when administered to humans. Biology is very complicated and computer models and cell lines do not yet adequately mimic what we see in animals.

      I had an experience once where we had an opportunity to treat a very sick baby with an experimental cell therapy. After a lot of thought, we decided that we did not know enough about the new treatment to risk giving it to the baby. Over the next few months we tested the treatment on mice and found that if we had given the therapy to the baby we most likely would have caused her to become even more sick, possibly even killing her. While computer models and cell lines can predict the effects of drugs, it would be impossible to test this type of treatment. In the end I was glad we performed the mouse experiments because in my opinion the life of a human baby is worth the sacrifice of the mice we used.

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