Iris Chang

                                                         Should we ban the use of animals for scientific testing?                                                   Live animals, used to test product safety, have long played a fundamental role in the medicine, cosmetic, and household product. Some animal testing is unavoidable and necessary for public health and safety, but more needs to be done to develop and promote alternative methods.

 Animal experimentation has been used on three main aspects and around a long time. First, some of animal testing is in biomedical research. For example, animal testing is an essential part of the process, providing vital information that scientists and doctors need to decide whether a medicine should be use in people, or development of vaccines for man and animals, repair surgery, organ transplantation, and evidence in cancers. Second, many people use animal models to test cosmetic and household product in order to prove no side effect, allergic, or toxic reactions, and they could protect consumers. It is difficult to know the number of animals involved with the greater use of transgenic mice.

A lot of drugs have tested safe in animals but were disastrous in humans. If we have a model that looks like a human condition, but it has a different underlying cause, there is no reason to expect that changing any attribute of that model will tell us what is going to happen in humans. Furthermore, animal models almost have profound differences in the underlying disease mechanism. After all, animal tests are not going to give an answer on whether something is going to be risky for human being.

The use of animals in the research is a moral issue with no exact answer. Most of us want to do the best for people but few animals should possibly be used and they should be treated unnecessary distress. For instance, there are tests are reported to treat painful and stressful to the test animals. Looking at the innocent victims, most of them are bred in captivity, such as guinea pigs, monkeys, rabbits, etc. Animal experiments are still needed, but more could be done to find new method of research and testing which don’t involve animals.

Inevitably, laboratory animals are used in research as part of the drug process from which we hope to find the treatment or cure for specific diseases. However, it is clear that researchers must act ethically and responsibly and treat the animals with moral. I hope scientists keep developing better alternative methods that reduce number of animals used to develop new medicines; finally, the number of animal studies has been declining.