Question: How will this benefit the animals in years to come

Michelle Hudson-Shore answered on 14 Jun 2010:

I hope that the work I am doing in my PhD will allow me to put together a timetable and guidlines for replacing or at the very least reducing the number of monkeys used in the two areas of research that I am studying.

The Training Schools that I organise and run will reduce the number of animals used in experiments now and in the future. This is because we are teaching new scientists who are just starting their careers to design their experiments better so that they use the fewest number of animals and find out the most information from them as possible.

In the long term raising awareness about the Three Rs (replacement, reduction and refinement) will reduce the number of animal experiments and improve the welfare of the animals that are used. The charity that I work for (FRAME) also has a laboratory at Nottingham University that does practical research to find alternatives to replace animal experiments in certain areas of science. For example they were involved in developing a cell-based method to test if some types of substance will damage the eye. This will go towards replacing the draize’s eye test which involves putting the substances in live rabbits’ eyes. They also developed a lab grown model of skin that can be used to test whether chemicals will damage the skin and it is estimated that this has replaced about 20,000 animal test per year.

I wasn’t sure which part of my research this question was aimed at but if I haven’t covered what you were interested in please let me know in the live chats or send me another question 🙂