Scientific Argument Against Animal Testing

"I have studied the question of vivisection for thirty-five years and am convinced that experiments on living animals are leading medicine further and further from the real cure of the patient. I know of no instance of animal experiment that has been necessary for the advancement of medical science; still less do I know of any animal experiment that could conceivably be necessary to save human life."
-H. Fergie Woods, M.D.

The most commonly held perception regarding animal experimentation is that it is necessary for the development of vaccines, cures and treatments for human illness. Proponents ask the important question, what will happen to research on AIDS, heart disease, and cancer if animal experimentation is completely stopped? Will the progress in cures and treatments for these types of illnesses also come to a halt?

There is a growing movement of healthcare professionals including doctors, scientists, and educated members of the public who are opposed to non-human animal-based experimentation on specifically medical and scientific grounds. They argue that animal research is based on a false premise, that results obtained through animal experimentation can be applied to the human body.

Animals not only react differently than humans to different drugs, vaccines, and experiments, they also react differently from one another. Ignoring this difference has been and continues to be very costly to human health.

The most famous example of the dangers of animal testing is the Thalidomide tragedy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thalidomide, which came out on the German market late in the 1950s, had previously been safety tested on thousands of animals. It was marketed as a wonderful sedative for pregnant or breastfeeding mothers and it supposedly caused no harm to either mother or child. Despite this "safety testing", at least 10,000 children whose mothers had taken Thalidomide were born throughout the world with severe deformities.

Clioquinol is another example of a drug that was safety tested in animals and had a severely negative impact on humans. This drug, manufactured in Japan in the 1970s, was marketed as providing safe relief from diarrhea. Not only did Clioquinol not work in humans, it actually caused diarrhea. As a result of Clioquinol being administered to the public, some 30,000 cases of blindness and/or paralysis and thousands of deaths occurred.

Are these two examples just isolated cases? Even though pharmaceuticals are routinely tested on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 100,000 people every year are killed and more than 2 million are hospitalized as a result of prescription drugs used as prescribed. The British Medical Journal recently reported that 4 out of every 10 patients who take a prescribed drug can expect to suffer severe or noticeable side effects, while numerous clinical observers agree that the incidence of iatrogenesis (medically induced disease) is now so great that approximately 1 in every 10 hospital beds is occupied by a patient who has been made ill by their doctor.

What about all the important breakthroughs, as a result of animal research, that have aided human health? The animal research industry cites many examples of treatments or cures for illness that have been found using animals. They claim that if animal research is discontinued, it will be at the expense of human health and life. Industry groups, such as Americans for Medical Progress credit animal research with advances such as the development of the polio vaccine, anesthesia, and the discovery of insulin. But a close examination of medical history clearly disputes these claims.

"Giving cancer to laboratory animals has not and will not help us to understand the disease or to treat those persons suffering from it."
- Dr. A. Sabin, 1986, developer of the oral polio vaccine

Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, are credited with the development of a vaccine to combat poliomyelitis (polio). Yet in the medical industry itself there remains a dispute as to the means by which the development of the polio vaccine occurred and whether or not the vaccine even played a major role in stopping the virus. Dr. John Enders, Dr.Thomas H. Weller, and Dr. Frederick C. Robbins won the Nobel Prize in 1954 for proving for the first time that it was possible to grow poliovirus in laboratory cultures of non-nervous-system human tissue. This team stopped just short of creating the polio vaccine that would be released to the public. Around the time Enders, Weller, and Robbins won the Nobel Prize, Sabin and Salk began using monkey kidney cells to produce their polio vaccines despite the existence of better alternatives. It was unknown at the time that viruses commonly found in monkey kidney cells are now known to cause cancer in humans.

The claim that the polio vaccine was developed through the use of animal experimentation is misleading. Furthermore, as far as the benefits are concerned, there is ample evidence demonstrating the harmful effects the polio vaccine has had on human health. Deborah Blum, in her 1984 book, The Monkey Wars, wrote, "In the late 1980s, scientists tracking the life histories of 59,000 pregnant women all vaccinated with Salk polio vaccine found that their offspring had a thirteen times higher rate of brain tumors than those who did not receive the vaccine." (pg. 229) Many historians believe that the decline in cases in polio, like many epidemics of the past, must be attributed to factors such as improved hygiene and not solely vaccination.

"There are no alternatives to animal experimentation, for one can only talk of alternatives if these replace something of the same worth; and there is nothing quite as useless, misleading and harmful as animal experimentation."
-Prof. Pietro Croce, M.D.

Surgical anesthesia was discovered in the mid nineteenth century when Crawford Williamson Long observed the effects of ether on humans during "ether parties", a popular form of entertainment involving ether inhalation. Long observed that while etherized, people appeared impervious to pain. He transformed this observation into a more practical use in surgery. The discovery of anesthesia, like many other medical discoveries, came from the critical observation of humans.

At one time, due to the animal research based conclusions of Claude Bernard, diabetes was believed to be cause by liver damage. However, Thomas Crawley, in 1788 established the relationship between pancreatic damage and diabetes by performing autopsies on diabetic cadavers. Later on, Dr. M. Barron came to the conclusion that damage to the Islets of Langerhams causes diabetes in humans after studying the human pancreas. He concluded that insulin could be derived from an extract of the Islets of Langerhans. Then in 1920, Frederick Banting, using this knowledge, created the first extract that contained insulin.

"Indeed, while conflicting animal tests have often delayed and hampered advances on the war on cancer, they have never produced a single substantial advance either in the prevention or treatment of human cancer."
-Dr. Irwin Bros, director of Roswell Park Memorial

Animal research is not aiding the fight against cancer. In fact, it is diverting resources from effective research and from the most obvious solution which is prevention. According to the National Cancer Institute, 80% of all cancers are preventable. Clinical observation and epidemiological studies have shown us that high fat diets, smoking, environmental pollutants, and other lifestyle factors are the main causes of cancer.

Moneim A. Fadali, M.D., in his book, Animal Experimentation: A Harvest of Shame, reports:

"Despite screening over half a million compounds as anti-cancer agents on laboratory animals between 1970-1985, only 80 compounds moved into clinical trials on humans. Of these, a mere 24 had any anti-cancer activity and only 12 appeared to have a 'substantial clinical role.' Actually, these so-called 'new' active agents were not so new: they are analogs of chemotherapeutic agents already known to work in humans." (pg.25)

With billions of dollars, countless animals, and well over 30 years spent on the war on cancer, concrete results should have been seen if animal research was actually working. On the contrary, the incidence of cancer continues to rise. A March 22, 2004 article in Fortune Magazine, "Why We're Losing the War on Cancer", explains that animal-based cancer research is failing because "The models of cancer stink."

Animals are not good models for human cancer for 2 fundamental reasons: 
Animals and humans do not get the same diseases.  As a result, animal research focuses on artificially inducing symptoms of human cancer and attempting to treat those symptoms.
Experimental drugs and treatments that have been found effective on animal models will not  necessarily work in people.  

The progress that has been made in the study of AIDS has come from human clinical investigation and in vitro (cell and tissue culture) research. Animal models continue to be used even though they do not develop the human AIDS virus. The development of life saving protease inhibitors was delayed by misleading monkey data. Referring to efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine, leading AIDS researcher Dr. Mark Feinberg stated: "What good does it do you to test something in a monkey? You find five or six years from now that it works in the monkey, and then you test it in humans and you realize that humans behave totally differently from monkeys, so you've wasted five years".

Clearly, if we are going to make medical progress, a new approach is needed. Human medicine can no longer be based on veterinary medicine. It is fraudulent and dangerous to apply data from one species to another. There are endless examples of the differences between humans and non-human animals.

PCP is a sedative for chimps
Penicillin kills cats and guinea pigs but has saved many human lives.
Arsenic is not poisonous to rats, mice, or sheep.
Morphine is a sedative for humans but is a stimulant for cats, goats, and horses.
Digitalis while dangerously raising blood pressure in dogs continues to save countless cardiac patients by lowering heart rate.

The National Institutes of Health alone pours well over five billion dollars annually into superfluous animal experimentation. Abolishing animal research will mean these resources could be redirected into prevention and the types of research which actually have a chance of advancing human medicine and human health.

"Animal experiments confuse the issues and their results will never have scientific precision. There is absolutely no connection between vivisection and human health. The general belief in the value of animal experimentation is the result of brainwashing that the public has been submitted to for a long time. Behind it are the pharmaceutical industries, which spend fortunes on publicity and finance the research institutes and the universities."
-Arie Brecher, M.D.