Originally Posted by Livia
“The reason we use animal tests is because we have a comfort level with the process . . . not because it is the correct process, not because it gives us any real new information we need to make decisions.”
Melvin E. Andersen, director, computational systems biology, Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, USA
"Despite claims by the research industry, chimpanzees have proven to be a poor model for human cancer research" states a recent study. Chimpanzee tumours are extremely rare and biologically different from human cancers. The study concludes: "It would be unscientific to claim that chimpanzees are vital to cancer research and reasonable to conclude that cancer research would not suffer if the use of chimpanzees were prohibited..."
ATLA 37, 399-41
“The predictive value of the non-human SHIV-challenge model [primate model of AIDS] is not supported by this experience.”
British Medical Journal 19 November 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a2571
“... the only scientific analyses made to date have been critiques that have revealed nonhuman primate models to be of little relevance to human medicine.”
Nature Medicine 14, 1011-1012 (1 October 2008)
A research group headed by Professor Ian Roberts, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has called for an end to animal experiments following an investigation. Their findings, published in the British Medical Journal (28th Feb 2004), show that experiments are not justified and can’t be applied to humans.
"The reason why I am against animal research is because it doesn't work, it has no scientific value and every good scientist knows that."
Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., 1986, Head of the Licensing Board for the State of Illinois.
"Results from animal tests are not transferable between species, and therefore cannot guarantee product safety for humans...
In reality these tests do not provide protection for consumers from unsafe products, but rather they are used to protect corporations from legal liability."
Herbert Gundersheimer, M.D., Baltimore, Maryland, 1988.
"Animal experimentation is fallacious, useless, expensive, and furthermore, cruel."
G. Tamino, Congressman and researcher at the University of Padua, Italy.
"Vivisection is barbaric, useless, and a hindrance to scientific progress. …There are, in fact, only two categories of doctors and scientists who are not opposed to vivisection: those who don't know enough about it, and those who make money from it."
Dr. Werner Hartinger, 1988/89, surgeon of thirty years, West Germany
"I agree that for the benefit of medical science, vivisection has to be stopped. There are lots of reasons: the most important is that it is simply misleading, and both the past and present testify to that."
Professor Salvatore Rocca Rossetti, surgeon and professor of urology at the University of Turin, cit. Ray and Jean Greek, Specious Science (New York/London: Continuum, 2002), p.169.
"The assumption that an animal species can stand as a reliable model for human biological reactions amounts to playing Russian Roulette with the patient's life."
Dr Claude Reiss, DLRM Newsletter, No.9, Autumn 2002.
"It is impossible to evaluate the safety of using animal studies to predict the safety of drugs and chemicals in man."
D. V. Parke, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry, University of Surrey, 1 May 1996.
"My own conviction is that the study of human physiology by way of experimenting on animals is the most grotesque and fantastic error ever committed in the whole range of human intellectual activity."
Dr. G. F. Walker, 1933.
"Why am I against vivisection? The most important reason is because it's bad science, producing a lot of misleading and confusing data which pose hazards to human health."
Dr. Roy Kupsinel, M.D., 1988, medical magazine editor, USA.
"Conclusions drawn from animal research, when applied to human beings, are likely to delay progress, mislead, and do harm to the patient. Vivisection, or animal experimentation, should be abolished."
Dr. Moneim Fadali, M.D., 1987, F.A.C.S., Diplomat American Board of Surgery and American Board of Thoracic Surgery, UCLA faculty, Royal College of Surgeons of Cardiology, Canada.
"Not one single animal experiment has ever succeeded in prolonging or improving, let alone saving, the life of even one single person."
Paper published by Dr. med. Heide Evers, D-7800 Freiburg, 1982.
“What good does it do you to test something in a monkey? You find five or six years from now that it works in the monkey, and then you test it in humans and you realize that humans behave differently from monkeys, so you’ve wasted five years”
Dr Mark Feinberg, leading AIDS researcher.
"The lack of correlation between toxicity data in animals and adverse effects in humans is well known."
A. Gorman, et al., Comparative Endocrinology (New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1983), p.33
"Nobody has become a surgeon because of having operated on animals. He has only learnt wrongly through animals.”
Professor Salvatore Rocca Rossetti, surgeon and professor of urology at the University of Turin, cit. Ray and Jean Greek, Specious Science (New York/London: Continuum, 2002) p.169
"What is the value of routine tests in animals for prediction of chemical teratogens? The correlation between known effects in laboratory animals and clinical adverse effects in very low".
Dr. A. P. Fland, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol.71, 1978, pp.693-6
"Some findings in colon cancer mice, which were very good models, actually led to clinical trials in humans which resulted in an increase in cancer."
Dr. Bjorn Ekwall, Chairman of the Cytotoxicology Laboratory, Toxicolog In vitro, Aug-Oct 1999
"The extensive animal reproductive studies to which all new drugs are now subjected are more in the nature of a public relations exercise than a serious contribution to drug safety."
Dr. J. E. Green of the National Cancer Institute Laboratory, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2001, 93:976
"For the great majority of disease entities, the animal models either do not exist or are really very poor. The chance is of overlooking useful drugs because they do not give a response to the animal models commonly used."
Dr. C. Dollery, in Risk-Benefit Analysis in Drug Research, p.87
|