Question: Is what you do considered ethical among all scientists?

Martha Havenith answered on 23 Jun 2015:

Hey ProfessorM,
Well, ‘all scientists’ is a big field… I’m sure there could be an astrophysicist somewhere who thinks that any experiments with animals are absolutely wrong. But the experiments I do are agreed on by a huge group of scientists – and non-scientists. They go through ethical committees of all sorts, and we can only do the experiments if those committees all agree that they are justified, and that we are doing everything we can to use as few animals as possible and to keep them as happy as possible. So funny enough, our animals are generally much better cared for than for example normal farm animals.
The sad truth is that there are quite a lot of things in medical research that we simply cannot understand without looking into the body. So the only way to stop animal experiments would be to say ‘We don’t need to find new cures for diseases.’ That’s a tough call for humanity to make.