• Question: Are you for or against animal testing

    Asked by 683cbsf22 to Thomas, Rupesh, Hazel, Elliot, Ellen on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Elliot Jokl

      Elliot Jokl answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Thanks for the question!

      This is an important one to me, because I do perform experiments on animals. So maybe it is obvious that I am for it, but I would like to explain why and answer any questions you have about it! This is going to be a bit of a long one, but please bear with me!

      So as to why I think animal testing is important – I think there is lots of valuable information we can get by using animals in our experiments. This information is vital in helping us to understand how diseases work and to help us develop cures for diseases.

      Animal testing is also very important when developing medicines. When a new medicine is made, it can be difficult to know the right amount to give to a human patient. Animal testing helps us make sure that the medicines we give to people are safe. There have been some sad recent examples in the news where the first people to try out a new drug got very, very ill. If we were not allowed to test medicines on animals, this would happen a lot more often than it does now and developing new medicines would be a lot riskier and a lot more expensive.

      In the UK we have some of the strictest rules about how animals are used. Scientists are not allowed to be cruel to animals, and they have to make sure they are well looked after and happy. In my university there are several full time members of staff whose job it is to keep the animals safe and healthy. Before you are allowed to do an experiment, it has to be approved by a group of people who think about whether the information you will get from an experiment is important enough to justify using animals for experiments. For example, throughout the whole of Europe you are not allowed to use animals to test cosmetics.

      You also have to get special training before you are allowed to do experiments on animals to make sure you know what you are doing and can make sure the animals are well taken care of.

      So even though it is a little bit sad that we use animals for our research, we get vital information from these experiments that help people with diseases and helps us develop new medicines. Without this, we wouldn’t be able to do this anywhere near as quickly and safely as we are doing now.

      If you have any more questions about this, feel free to comment. I think this is a very important issue and so I welcome a bit of conversation and comments about it. I’m very curious about what you all think about it and if you think there are any alternatives.

    • Photo: Hazel Garvie-Cook

      Hazel Garvie-Cook answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      It depends on what the testing is for. As Elliot says, animal testing is very important in developing new medicines quickly and effectively. In the UK, testing on animals is very carefully controlled and the welfare of the animals is taken very seriously.

    • Photo: Thomas Biggans

      Thomas Biggans answered on 16 Jun 2016:

      Its good to hear from Elliot who uses animals in his work and I think his answer covers the main points.

      For me personally I help scientists like Elliot carry out their experiments on animals using non-invasive technologies so the animals can be studied without harming them in any way. Even so these experiments still have to have a good reason to do them such as making a new kind of medicine and the decision whether or not the experiment should be allowed is taken by an independent group of experts.

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