• Question: Do you agree with animal testing?

    Asked by emily_issy_xoxo to Andy, Chris, Harriet, Jess, Nikki on 10 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: andy chapman

      andy chapman answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      Yes – for potentially life saving medical advances

      No – cosmetics that are not necessery

    • Photo: Harriet Reid

      Harriet Reid answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      Hi Emily and Issy,
      Animal testing for new medicines is really important. Although scientists test potential new medicines on human cells in a dish first. There is no way of knowing what will happen in the body until we test them on animals and even then sometimes medicines behave differently in humans. There are a lot of rules to make sure that animals are not unnecessarily harmed or used in experiments. There is a lot of work going on to try and improve other techniques to reduce the amount of animal testing.

      I am totally against animal testing for cosmetics and laws have been passed in the UK to ban it.

    • Photo: Christopher Blanford

      Christopher Blanford answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      Hi Emily_Issy_xoxo (gossip girl)

      Yes, until we can find something better. NC3Rs is a UK organisation looking into reducing the use of animals in science and finding alternatives that work as well: https://www.nc3rs.org.uk/the-3rs

      Chris

    • Photo: Nikki D'Arcy

      Nikki D'Arcy answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      Hi, thanks for the question. That’s always a hard one for most scientists. We still do need to test on animals for new drugs and vaccines. Whether it is the best way or not, at the moment, it is the only way. I do not like it and I personally do not take a job where I physically have to work with animals. However, as a part of research in general it happens and I understand that but I second Andy, absolutely not for cosmetics etc… we have enough of those already and there is no need to test on animals for new ones

    • Photo: Jessica Groppi

      Jessica Groppi answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Hi!

      Although I don’t enjoy the idea of animal testing, it is necessary because the alternative would be testing drugs directly on humans, which, in my opinion is way worse than animal testing.

      Jess.

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