• Question: how do you feel about animals being used for science

    Asked by Rachiee to Max, Sian, Lizzie, Francis, Ben on 6 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by 727munm33.
    • Photo: Max Jamilly

      Max Jamilly answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      Hey – that’s a TOUGH question but a really good one. Some people in my lab use mice for experiments to help discover new medicines and treatments which could make humans a lot better. It’s always a balance between risking the life of an animal and potentially saving the lives of lots and lots of very sick patients. My personal opinion is that mouse experiments are justified as long as they are very carefully planned and controlled. But it shouldn’t only be scientists making decisions like this. What do you think?

    • Photo: Lizzie Wright

      Lizzie Wright answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      I agree with Max. Animal experiments are needed in certain circumstances. The use of animals in research is very highly regulated – you must have training and have the experiments approved by a council before anything can be conducted and regular inspections of facilities are carried out. There is a concept called the three Rs (reduce, refine, replace) which aims to reduce the number of animals used in research by finding equally good alternatives e.g. computer modelling but its hard to replicate a living animal.

      There are downsides though – animals, such as mice are very different to humans and sometimes drugs that work in mice don’t work in us.

      Without animal research though we would not have many of the drugs we have today and I do think its necessary.

    • Photo: Francis Man

      Francis Man answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      I’d like to highlight something Elizabeth mentioned: it’s really difficult so replicate a complete living being. Animals (I include humans in this), even simple ones, are incredibly complex, made of thousands of types of cells that interact with each other. Re-creating the interactions between each and every type of cell in a lab is impossible at the moment.
      You can test a molecules on 10, 20, 50 types of cells in a lab, it still won’t tell you what happens in the brain when you give a drug that is meant to have an effect on the stomach (just an example). The only way we have to test this at the moment is to use animals.

      Since most of the drugs we make are to treat humans (but remember, vets use drugs to treat animals too), we could argue that we should test everything in humans… But that opens up many more ethical problems.
      It’s a good question you asked and a topic well worth discussing, not just among scientists.

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