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Asked by goddess to Charlie, Eoin, Jemma, Julian, Steve on 11 Mar 2011.
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Eoin Lettice answered on 11 Mar 2011:
Hello. Thanks for your question!
No, animal testing is generally not something I need to do as my work is mainly on plants.
Eoin.
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Stephen Moss answered on 11 Mar 2011:
Animal testing isn’t just important, it’s the law! Most (maybe all) new disease treatments can’t be tried on humans until they’ve been shown to work and be safe in animals.
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Julian Rayner answered on 11 Mar 2011:
No, we work routinely with human red blood cells. However, for some parts of malaria research, using animals is unavoidable – transmission to mosquitoes, for example, can never be studied in humans because obviously we can’t deliberately infect people and then let mosquitoes bite them. My colleagues who do this work with animals do it as little as they can, and with very careful checks on animal welfare. However to me, the problem of 1 million children dying each year from malaria makes small scale animal work worth it.
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Jemma Ransom answered on 11 Mar 2011:
Not directly. I use animal cell lines in my research which are originally taken from mice but are immortalised so effectively they will keep dividing forever (well theoretically anyway). This reduces the number of animals used since once the cells are harvested, I can keep growing them indefinitely without the need to use more mice.
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Charlie Ryan answered on 11 Mar 2011:
er no…not for me, funnily enough. The only connection i can think of is that in the early days of spaceflight many animals were put onto the rockets going into space. First animal into space? fluit flies in the 40s (do these count as animals??). First animal into orbit? Laika a Russian dog, who died in her capsule after a few hours in space. There was never any plan to return her to earth, which is perhaps ethically wrong.
Do i think animal testing is an ok thing to do? If its for non-life threatening conditions, cosmetics, no. But to produce progress in cancer treatment, or other similar life-endangering diseases, then i think it may be ok.
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