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Animal Testing
Emily Huang

5/23/11

English Language Arts

Mrs. Keoski

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Dedicated to my mom, Kermey, who willingly helped me correct my papers.

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Table of Contents

Title. .Page 1

Dedication Page 2

Table of Contents..Page 3

History..Page 4

Pros and Cons.Page 5

The Future.Page 5

Works Cited.Page 7

Appendix...Page 8

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Emily Huang Mrs. Keoski English Language Arts 23 May 2011 Animal Testing A mouse scuttles across the floor in a dark ally. Suddenly, a mysterious man sneaks up behind the mouse and scoops it up with his gloved hands. He puts the mouse in a cage within a car and drives off to a laboratory where many other people experiment with the animal to find the effects on medicine for human beings. This process is known as animal testing, the use of animals in experiments and development projects to determine the effects of test drugs before releasing it to the public. Sometime in your life, you might have wondered why scientists experiment on animals. Why do they harm living beings? How come they don't find other ways to test drugs? There are many factors that contributed to the continual use of animal testing, but to understand scientists' thinking, you must first know the history, the debate over animal testing, and attempts to end animal testing along with its future.

The start of animal testing was the beginning of many breakthroughs in the medical and psychological fields. In the 3rd and 4th century, evidence suggests that a few people started experimenting on animals because of pure curiosity and convenience. Scientists were curious about the internal organs of living organisms, but it was very hard to find candidates who were willing to be experimented on. Therefore, people started capturing animals as test subjects because they thought animals had no feelings or any soul. Later, in the middle 1800s, Charles Darwins theory of evolution changed animal testing forever. His theory was the fundamental

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start of using animals as test subjects in laboratories. In the late nineteenth and early-to-midtwentieth century, the U.S. developed many vaccines, including the diphtheria vaccine, the cholera vaccine, vaccines for the plague, a vaccine for typhoid fever, and many others. Some animals used as subjects were dogs, cats, birds, guinea pigs, hamsters, rabbits, sheep, rats, and mice. An estimate of the number of animals used for medical and psychological research is about 20 million animals per year. In the amount of animals used, 90% of them are birds and rodents, but statistics show that animals used for testing have decreased by 40% since 1968. For centuries people have debated on the use of animals as test subjects. Some people may say that it is inhumane to perform surgery and other practices on animals, as they have feelings and a soul. Animals rights advocates state that they deserve to be treated with value and should never be experimented on. Some earnest anti-animal testing campaigners think that few breakthroughs have resulted from animal testing and some animals experimented have almost nothing in common with the human being. The people who are for animal testing argue that scientists do not do an experiment on animals unless it is absolutely necessary. They believe that humans come first, and animals come second, so if experimenting on animals might cure humans of diseases, then it is acceptable. They also keep animal suffering to an absolute minimum. They state that the medical and psychological advances outweigh the cost of experiment. Over the next few decades, some people, such as Jane Goodall, Peter Singer, and Dion Fossey, tried to end animals testing. Research by Jane and Dion showed that animals were capable of emotions and had a soul. Australian philosopher Peter Singer tried to end animal testing by publishing the 1975 book, Animal Liberation. Today, scientists look into the use of nanotechnology as a cure for any possible problems caused by animal testing. A virtual human designed to react exactly like a real human is now under construction, and some scientists are

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now using in vitro tests in place of rats and other rodents. However, the process of eliminating animal testing is being delayed, partly because of the people who do animal testing for a living and have made a name for themselves. The future of animal testing is still unclear, but scientists hope that after a century, animal testing will be completely ridden. As you can see, there are many reasons for the use of animal testing. Many cures for diseases have been found because of animal testing, and people today understand how our inner organs function. The issue of animal testing for scientific purpose is still not solved. Debate of animal testing wont stop until a new way of experiment will replace it.

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Works Cited Dixon, Thomas. Arguments. Animal Experimentation. 7 April 2009. International Debate Education Association. Web. 12 May 2011. Harding, Lauri. History. Animal Experimentation - History, Current trends. 2001. Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology. Web. 3 May 2011. Hester, Ronald and Roy Harrison. Alternatives to Animal Testing. Cambridge, UK: The Royal Society of Chemistry. Print. Judson, Karen. Animal Testing. New York: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, 2006. Print. Weiss, Rachel. History of Nonhuman Animal Research. Laboratory Primate Advocacy Group. 2005. Rachel Weiss. Web. 3 May 2011.

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Appendix

A monkey in a cage, waiting to be experimented on.

A group of animals who have been experimented on.

How Much Does Animal Testing Tell Us? Not a week goes by without news of a lab breakthrough using rats or mice. But of all the promising medical interventions that make it to animal trials, only a fraction seem to translate into major breakthroughs for humans. Frankie Trull, president of the non-profit Foundation for Biomedical Research (a promoter of responsible animal testing), explains the promise and the pitfalls of pre-clinical trials. Q: What do animal trials really tell us about humans? A: Animals are surrogates for humans. The basic reason for animal trials is to determine two issues before any new compound is introduced into a human: safety and efficacy, whether a

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compound is safe for human ingestion and also whether or not a product works for its intended purpose. Really that process begins way before we get to animals. But at some point in the process it is critical to understand how a compound, let's say, a hypertension medication, works in a whole living system. You can't just determine how it works on blood pressure or the heart. You need to know how it would affect all the organs. That really is the whole purpose of using a complex biological system known as an animal. There is no question that, despite the excellent results that come out of lots of preclinical trials, the human is the ultimate animal model and sometimes a potential downside to a new compound is not identified until it gets to a human. We often hear you can't give aspirin to cats because it's toxic to them, or you shouldn't give chocolate to dogs. Chocolate, which is very safe in humans, is not safe in dogs. But when you go back and look at how many compounds fail before they ever get to humans, [it's clear] animals do play a really important role in at least giving early signals and it's a constantly evolving science. Over the past 60 years, scientists have figured out what works best in what models. The vast majority of animal testing [today] is in rodents, either rats or mice. Rodents, particularly mice, have very short life spans, so you can see how a compound would react in a young animal, then in the same geriatric animal, and then in the next-generation animal, all in a time frame that is reasonable. Then if a product or a compound is determined to be safe in a rodent, another species is used. For example, if it's a neurological compound, oftentimes the cat is the preferred model because the neurological system of the cat more closely mimics that of a human. If it's a cardiovascular study, it might be a dog (although dogs are not used as frequently as they might have been a decade ago, since scientists have determined that pigs also serve as excellent models for some cardiovascular work). Scientists really do try to go that extra mile to find the species that will most accurately mimic how the compound would work in a human. We're focusing right now in one of our programs on the horse. It has very similar osteoarthritis conditions to humans, but it shows them in a much more compressed period of time. Many, many species [are used in trials]. Of course, science is always making progress. You read a lot about these very special rodents, animals we call "transgenic animals." [That means] if you're studying diabetes, the mice have diabetes, so you can go right to specific disease targets in a much more expeditious way that you could in the old days. In the old days you just hoped they got diabetes. Also, as the scientific community understands more and more about the genome, whether it's the human genome or the fruit fly genome, they're better able to identify gene markers, to target them and start developing compounds that point to those specific diseases. Increasingly scientists are also looking at non-animal models to provide more and more answers. That's not only going to decrease the number of animals used in certain experiments but, more important for many, speed up the [drug approval] process. It's everybody's hope [that one day we could replace animal trials entirely with computer modeling]. But I don't think it'll happen during my lifetime. People in the research community will be the first to tell you they still don't know enough about how the complex living organism works in order to duplicate it. Animals are not perfect. They're definitely not a perfect mimic of a human, but they're [still] as close as we're going to get without using a human.