If Strychnine was passed as safe in laboratory animals, would you willingly take it? What about the harmless mushroom? Any reasonably intelligent person would not take a substance solely on the basis that experiments on animals had proved them non-poisonous and therefore, safe.
What then if a substance had been shown to be poisonous to laboratory animals, would it be poisonous to humans? Maybe, maybe not. For instance, almonds are highly poisonous to some animals; Digitalis (the world's most successful heart drug, which has saved countless lives all over the world) was delayed for many years because it was first tested in dogs, in which it dangerously raised blood pressure (the last thing that anybody with heart trouble would want); Penicillin killed every single animal it was administered to (rabbits and cats) before it was given to a terminally ill human patient (who lived, incidentally). Even after this stage Penicillin needed further purification. In those days the guinea-pig was the favourite tool of the animal researcher. However, there were no guinea pigs available in the laboratory (they had all been used up in previous experiments), so mice were used instead. Florey, the man who purified Penicillin, later remarked that it was "most fortunate" that penicillin had not been tested on guinea-pigs: it is a lethal poison.
It has further been demonstrated (through medical historians) that therapeutic disasters, which are steadily on the increase today, did not exist before the imposition of safety tests (toxicity tests) on animals. Take Eraldin (a cardiotonic), for example, which turned out to be highly poisonous to people; causing damage to eyes, digestive tract, and ultimately, death, despite undergoing 7 years of "very intensive" laboratory tests on animals; or Orabilex, again passed safe in toxicity tests on animals, but when administered to people it caused kidney damage and death. Again there a numerous instances where drugs passed safe by animal experiments have proved highly (even fatally) poisonous to people; and drugs classified as dangerously poisonous to laboratory animals have turned out to be of great benefit (even life-saving) to an uncountable number of people. This once again, as far as toxicity testing is concerned, confirms that the results obtained from experiments on animals cannot be applied to people. If a substance or drug was demonstrably poisonous to an animal, it may or may not be poisonous to a person; if a substance or drug was shown to be totally safe to an animal, it may prove (as we have seen) to be highly poisonous to a man, woman, boy, or girl: we simply do not know. It is absolutely impossible to tell if a substance or drug would be dangerous to people, simply by testing it in laboratory animals.
It has been demonstrated that animals are so different from people that it is impossible to assess the effectiveness, side-effects, or level of toxicity of any drug or substance in laboratory animals, and then transfer that onto people.
ALTERNATIVES TO ANIMALS
Those who defend animal experimentation claim that, despite all of their obvious faults, flaws, misleading results, and human tragedies, animal experiments are essential because there are no alternatives to using animals in medical research.
The term "alternatives" is a misleading one. It implies that animal research is a highly plausible option and that any other option is secondary. This of course is nonsense. Animal research is not highly plausible; it's not even remotely plausible and should not even be an option which should be considered. The danger involved in relying on experiments on animals is so obvious to anybody of even the slightest intelligence.
Whichever name you prefer to call it - alternatives to animals; non-animal research; progressive techniques - this is an extremely wide, highly specialised field; much wider than the whole field of animal experimentation. We will briefly take a look at some of these so-called "alternative' methods to demonstrate just what can be done, and what could have been done from the very beginning.
Cell, tissue, and organ cultures: Cultures are available for the study of practically any disease which could be named, and in a far greater quantity than is ever needed. They can be prepared from any part of the body, i.e., heart, kidney, brain, liver, nerves, skin, and are grown in a culture dish and covered with a liquid which "feeds" them (in fact any organ can be kept alive in this way). Drugs and substances can then be tested on the culture with remarkable speed (100s, perhaps 1000s of times quicker than testing the same drug or substance on an animal), and with incredible accuracy (since the culture is a human culture, the results obtained are directly applicable to humans and are therefore extremely reliable).
Cultures are already used widely in medical research to study infections; find out more about how certain drugs work (their effectiveness), and to study the effect of drugs or substances in human bodies (toxicity/possible side-effects). They are of particular value in immunology (immune system of the body) and toxicology (how poisonous a drug or substance is likely to be in a human), as well as cancerology, endocrinology, genetics, pathology (the study of disease), pharmacology (drugs), virology (viruses), radiobiology (effects of radiation), and tetratology (the study of fetus malformation: or "will children be born deformed?").
For an example: research into arthritis is currently being performed by injecting fluid into the joints of laboratory animals (exactly the same procedure as research into Multiple Sclerosis). This is an utterly stupid method as arthritis is not caused by people having fluids injected into their joints. This could be more plausibly studied (with a view to curing it) by the examination of arthritic cartilage (which is normally removed from patients following injury cases that require the joint to be surgically opened so that corrections can be made; or from people who have died in accidents), which can be kept alive in a laboratory for several weeks and its reactions to various drugs or substances can be observed. The growing number of organisations who have used cell, organ, or tissue cultures have found them infinitely more useful, adaptable, and reliable, than animal experiments.
Computer Technology: Computers can be used to test drugs or substances by mimicking the functions of internal organs on disease (i.e., heart, kidney, liver, brain), diagnosis, crash and growth studies. Using combined techniques of spectrometry and chromotography, computers can detect minute traces of drugs and their breakdown in people. This allows us to study how the human body will react to these minute traces and show the potential damage or benefit which the drug or substance would have on a person (these traces are so minute that there is never any danger to the patient). This technique allows us, without error, to study the metabolism of a drug in a man/woman without any damage to him/her, rather than in another species which would give ambiguous, unreliable answers.
Since nearly all new drugs are merely made up of substances found in other drugs, and the effects (whether harmful or beneficial) are already known, cheap and speedy predictions about the consequences any drug to patients can be obtained with the use of computers. The computer will, within seconds, make a statistical prediction on the effects of the drug or substance on a person. This could further be tested on an organ or cell culture, giving researchers and doctors a much better idea of what the effect of the drug or substance would have on a human body than if it was tested on an entirely different species.
Clinical Studies: By far the vast majority of all medical discoveries have been made by clinical observations (studying people). In fact, clinical studies and postmortem examinations account for virtually all of the medical, surgical, and diagnostic breakthroughs that have ever been made. In the last forty years an enormous amount of evidence has been accumulated by doctors studying people. Today we know how four out of five cancers are caused and how most cases of heart disease have developed. Properly used, this knowledge would prevent millions from unnecessary pain, suffering, and death. Simply by observing healthy people and patients carefully, the information gleaned could be used to effectively combat diseases.
Only a handful of "progressive techniques" have been mentioned here, but there are many, many more which could have been. Each is far quicker and far more reliable, accurate, and potentially life-saving than performing experiments on animals. If vivisection had been outlawed from the start (which it should have because it has never been an acceptable option), all of these progressive techniques would have been developed and adopted much sooner, benefiting medical science incalculably. We would also have been spared the countless tragedies of which animal research must be held solely responsible.
WHY ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS CONTUNUE
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