• Question: do you test on animals do get your medicines? do u agree with animal testing for sience?

    Asked by socka5 to Probash, Melanie, Mark, Luna, David on 20 Mar 2011 in Categories: . This question was also asked by spotcam11, jaidespence, janetandlucy, one23, rckingdom, afrakhan, wolves12, collyflowerbeanbag269, talbot1997.
    • Photo: Probash Chowdhury

      Probash Chowdhury answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Animal testing is a necessary evil unfortunately. It is used as a small part of the testing of medicines along side using chemistry, cells, isolated organs and humans! Because the body (human or animal) is so complicated and most organs have an effect on another (in normal function and if injured) there is no real alternative – yet – to using whole animals and humans to fully understand the effect a medicine has on the body (both beneficial and side effects).

      A lot of research is being done into finding alternatives to using animals in the long term, but in the short term alternatives into reducing the use of animals is being researched.

    • Photo: Melanie Stefan

      Melanie Stefan answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      I am not using animals for my research. I have used zebrafish in the past, to investigate how the skin develops and what causes skin conditions. But I am quite happy I don’t have to do that anymore.

      I am ok with animal testing only if it’s for medical research, if it’s absolutely necessary and if it is ensured that the animals don’t suffer too much. In other areas, like cosmetics, I am strictly against animal testing.

    • Photo: David Pyle

      David Pyle answered on 19 Mar 2011:

      One for Probash!

      Personally, I think that there are some areas of medicine where the arguments for testing (in terms of needing to see whether a drug which shows great promise to help with a major disease has the desired effect) are quite compelling. What would the alternatives be? Computer simulation (modelling) is unilkely ever to fully account for the complexity of responses in a living biological organism; and the idea of testing new (untested) therapies on humans would have considerable ethical problems.

    • Photo: Luna Munoz

      Luna Munoz answered on 19 Mar 2011:

      I don’t do any research with animals. I do think that while animal testing is not ideal, we rely on it for our scientific advances. I do know that animal research is strictly regulated, and my colleagues that run animal studies need to justify each and every animal that they use. While I might have 675 children in my study just because that is the number I happened to want, my colleagues would have to do complex statistics to show that they need to have 6 and that it can’t possibly be any fewer.

    • Photo: Mark Vesey

      Mark Vesey answered on 20 Mar 2011:

      I think it can be useful and can help develop medicines that save humans lives but it must be done in a humane way and ensure as little distress as possible to the animals.

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