• Question: whuy do u love science so much and why do they test on poor inisent animals

    Asked by ellacragg2011 to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 14 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Benjamin Hall

      Benjamin Hall answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      I love science because it’s a great tool for helping us understand the world in which we live. We get to find out about how things work in great detail and then transfer our findings into useful, every day things (in my case crops that are resistant to disease).

      People carry out tests on animals for a variety of reasons. The main one being is that it’s illegal to test a new medical drug on humans before it is proven safe in animals. It’s sad, but if we want new medicines to cure diseases like cancer then we have to accept that tests need to be done on animals. The animals used for testing are well looked after and there are very strict laws in place to keep them from suffering as much as possible.

      One of the reasons I work on plants is because I’d feel bad about testing animals, from a personal point of view. I still think it needs to be done, just not by me.

    • Photo: David Briggs

      David Briggs answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      I love science because it is the best way of finding our more about the world around us.

      Animal testing is a difficult and complicated issue, and it’s a great question.
      I personally don’t do it, but I understand why it is done and how it benefits science and society in general.
      First and foremost, animal testing and animal experimentation is pretty rare – not a huge amount goes on. It is only done if it is absolutely necessary, and when it is done, scientists have to get ethical approval.

      All scientists doing animal experiments have to have lots and lots of training, and all experiments are done to minimise any suffering that the animals might under go.

      However, it is done because sometimes we cannot predict what might happen when we scale up our experiments done on cells or molecules to whole animals, and this is the only way to answer certain questions.

      It is generally only done to answer medical questions – so ultimately new treatments and drugs might be developed through animal experiments.

    • Photo: Sam Horrell

      Sam Horrell answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      I love science because there is no better way to look at the world. The scientific method is so simple; you make an observation, form a hypothesis, perform an experiment, analyse the data, report your finding and then invite others to reproduce it. Through this we can be certain, within a sensible limit, that our finding are correct.

      Animal testing is always a tricky issue, the important thing to realise is that these animals a bred specifically for this purpose and are treated with respect and kindness by the scientists involved. There are strict guidelines with respect to the use of animals and how they are treated during the scientific process and scientists are always looking for alternatives to using animals.

      The reason it is performed is because it is the best way of understanding so many key areas of biology. Many animals, particularly rats and mice, have such similar biology to us they provide a perfect testing ground for treatment and understanding disease.

    • Photo: Susana Teixeira

      Susana Teixeira answered on 16 Jun 2013:

      I love Science because it helps me answer questions I am curious about, it makes me feel important when I realise those answers can help others (people or animals!) in some way.
      There is a lot of Science that does not involve animal testing, and many scientists are against it altogether – this is an important thing to keep in mind. Animal testing is done because even the most sophisticated experiments cannot simulate the enormous complexity of a complete animal, including humans, so it is unpredictable what happens when we for example give a person a new medicine. Tests on animals help understand how the animal itself reacts, and by comparison how a human might too. So animal tests can save the lives of many other animals, and people too, and this is what makes the issue of animal testing very complicated. Do the advantages outweight the disadvantages? It is a question we need to keep asking to make sure this is never taken lightly.

    • Photo: Ed Lowe

      Ed Lowe answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I love science because it gives us a wonderfully powerful toolbox for investigating the world around us.

      Animal testing is a very difficult topic and something anyone involved in medical research has to wrestle with their conscience over, so it’s a great question.

      I would hate to do animal work myself, but I do sadly realise that at the moment there is no alternative for some essential medical research, not least for the legal reasons Ben already mentioned.

      That said, I also feel it’s important to bear in mind that scientists do everything they can to do as little animal testing as possible. When I started in science (many, many years ago!) almost the first step in developing a new drug was to try it out on animals used to model a disease and see what happened. Now we have a huge range of possibilities to test new drugs in computer simulations, individual cells or individual molecules (which is what I do, using crystallography) and in most cases a drug only gets tested on an animal if scientists are already confident that it can do something useful. It’s worth repeating here what Dave said, that permission is given to do animal experiments only if the scientist can demonstrate both that the experiment needs to be done and that there is no other way to do it.

      Sadly, none of these simple test systems are good at predicting side effects in something as complex as a whole living creature which is why animal testing is, at the moment, still needed although we all hope there will be alternatives in the future.

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