Question: Your thoughts on Animal Testing? Is it needed for science?

Claire Shooter answered on 16 Jun 2014:

Right now, animal testing is absolutely needed for science. No one likes doing it – believe me – but it’s true. There are lots of different kinds of animal research. All of them are highly regulated: in order to be able to carry out any animal research you must apply to do so, stating why what you are doing justifies the use of animals, and what you will be doing to make sure they suffer as little as possible. I’m going to talk about why animal research is necessary in the specific context of developing drugs to cure diseases:

Animals are a better model of human disease than computers:
-We can use computer programs for lots of aspects of drug development: say a disease has a genetic basis but we don’t know what it is. We can use a computer to compare genetic data from lots of people with the disease, and lots of people without the disease. By doing this we might find one or several genes look a bit different between the two groups. Now, some of these may be to do with the disease and some may be coincidence. One of them might be in a gene where a protein is being made incorrectly and causing the disease. Computer models can help us predict which genes are involved, but they only go so far: computers only really know as much about the human body as we do and that is a long way away off everything. To confirm which gene the computer model suggests is responsible for the disease we try replicating the mutations in these genes in different animals, like mice, to see if they get the disease. If they do get it, we have what we call an ‘animal model’ of the disease. Doing this is not practical in humans.

Animals are better than cell cultures:
Once we have worked out that a particular gene is causing our disease we need to work out how to treat it. We go back to the computer and work out what might work – can we replace a protein that isn’t being made correctly? Can we design something that stops an incorrectly made protein having harmful effects on cells? Once we have some ideas we can test the drugs we come up with on cells in a dish. This is useful because it’s simple: does the drug make these cells function better? Does it just kill them all? We can work out here which drugs have some potential to be useful. The next problem is knowing how they will interact on a large scale: maybe they’re toxic to liver cells? Maybe they will trigger an autoimmune response? To answer those questions you need animals again.

Animals are better than humans:
We could test the drugs that seemed ok in cell culture at humans on this point, but it is not only unethical due to the potential risks, but also pretty pointless: The good thing about animals is you can collect a large number of them and keep them under controlled conditions, whereas no two humans will ever be the same in terms of age, diet, health and immunity. Furthermore, because we live for ages it could take almost 100 years to check your drug didn’t cause pregnancy complications or health issues in old age. We can check these things in only a few years using shorter-lived rats and mice. Once we have established if the drug is reasonably safe and tolerable in animal models, we can move on to human testing.
I hope from this you can see that it’s still necessary. No one likes it – I’ve done some in my time, but right now there is no better option. As bioinformatics improves, our knowledge of the human body improves, and our use of artificial tissues grown from stem cells improves, we will gradually reduce the amount of animal testing that is necessary. Unfortunately, the day when we can stop completely is a long, long way off. As a massive animal lover, I justify animal research to myself in the following way:
If my mother was sick, would I kill 100 mice if it would save her? My answer is yes I would. If I could save everyone else’s mother from the same disease by killing 1,000 rats, would I? I think I would do it then, too.

If you still believe animal testing should be banned, then the quickest way you can achieve that goal is to become a bioinformatician or cell biologist and help us develop viable alternatives.