ANIMAL TESTING
Animal testing, also known as animal experimentation, animal research and in vivo testing, is the use of non-human animals in experiments for medical purposes that seek to control the variables that affect the behaviour or biological system under study.
VIEW:
Medical and scientific organisations around the world agree that animals are essential for scientific research, for developing medicines and safety testing. We rely on animal research to help us learn more about how the body works. Animal studies are done alongside other types of research such as cell and tissue culture. Computer-modelling, human patients and volunteers are also crucial but some questions can only be answered through research on a living animal.
We could not give human cancer to study it but we can study cancer development in mice, and mice that have been modified by adding human genes are even better models for disease development. Using scanners their tumours can be studied at very early stages before the mice become sick. This is teaching us more and more about how cancers develop and spread, allowing us to develop new methods of detection and treatment. Research using animals is never undertaken lightly and no-one uses them unnecessarily or uncaringly. Many medical advances that we now take for granted such as antibiotics, blood transfusions, vaccines or asthma medication could never have been achieved without animal research. But there is still a great deal of work to be done. Conditions such as Alzheimer’s, cancers and heart failure still cause untold suffering. For now, animals play a small but vital role in research that brings hope to so many.
- Derick Brian Saldanha
- 1BBA ‘C’
COUNTERVIEW:
Pain, fear, natural inclinations are also experienced by an animal. Since humans are considered rational animal let us not take for granted the animal which is also a living being. We rational human beings have to protect them rather than locking them up in a cage and experimenting them because they are needed for our existence. Animals are subjected to pain, suffering, abuse in the laboratory. Don’t you think it is illegal? Is it ethical?
No animal should ever face being genetically engineered to develop cancer, as mice are; being intentionally paralysed from brain damage, as monkeys are; or being force-fed pesticides and other chemicals, as dogs are. In addition to being unethical, animal testing is fundamentally flawed because it studies the wrong species – and that is a scientific problem that can never be overcome. Approximately 90pc of medicines that pass tests on animals fail in people. That’s an enormous waste of money, animal lives, scientific resources and hope. Non- Animal methodologies have to be adapted to accurately predict what happens in human beings.
Why conduct tests on the wrong species when sophisticated computer and mathematical models, human tissue and cell cultures and smarter, more focused clinical and epidemiological studies can show us more accurately what happens to human bodies with diseases? Research institutions should use another alternative instead of an animal. Research Institutions have to change their policies and align themselves with more progressive science.
- OMAR SHARIFF
- 1BBA ‘C’
Animal testing, also known as animal experimentation, animal research and in vivo testing, is the use of non-human animals in experiments for medical purposes that seek to control the variables that affect the behaviour or biological system under study.
VIEW:
Medical and scientific organisations around the world agree that animals are essential for scientific research, for developing medicines and safety testing. We rely on animal research to help us learn more about how the body works. Animal studies are done alongside other types of research such as cell and tissue culture. Computer-modelling, human patients and volunteers are also crucial but some questions can only be answered through research on a living animal.
We could not give human cancer to study it but we can study cancer development in mice, and mice that have been modified by adding human genes are even better models for disease development. Using scanners their tumours can be studied at very early stages before the mice become sick. This is teaching us more and more about how cancers develop and spread, allowing us to develop new methods of detection and treatment. Research using animals is never undertaken lightly and no-one uses them unnecessarily or uncaringly. Many medical advances that we now take for granted such as antibiotics, blood transfusions, vaccines or asthma medication could never have been achieved without animal research. But there is still a great deal of work to be done. Conditions such as Alzheimer’s, cancers and heart failure still cause untold suffering. For now, animals play a small but vital role in research that brings hope to so many.
- Derick Brian Saldanha
- 1BBA ‘C’
COUNTERVIEW:
Pain, fear, natural inclinations are also experienced by an animal. Since humans are considered rational animal let us not take for granted the animal which is also a living being. We rational human beings have to protect them rather than locking them up in a cage and experimenting them because they are needed for our existence. Animals are subjected to pain, suffering, abuse in the laboratory. Don’t you think it is illegal? Is it ethical?
No animal should ever face being genetically engineered to develop cancer, as mice are; being intentionally paralysed from brain damage, as monkeys are; or being force-fed pesticides and other chemicals, as dogs are. In addition to being unethical, animal testing is fundamentally flawed because it studies the wrong species – and that is a scientific problem that can never be overcome. Approximately 90pc of medicines that pass tests on animals fail in people. That’s an enormous waste of money, animal lives, scientific resources and hope. Non- Animal methodologies have to be adapted to accurately predict what happens in human beings.
Why conduct tests on the wrong species when sophisticated computer and mathematical models, human tissue and cell cultures and smarter, more focused clinical and epidemiological studies can show us more accurately what happens to human bodies with diseases? Research institutions should use another alternative instead of an animal. Research Institutions have to change their policies and align themselves with more progressive science.
- OMAR SHARIFF
- 1BBA ‘C’
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