– The guest writer for Advocacy for Animals this week, Kara Rogers, is Britannica’s life sciences editor. She holds a Ph.D. University of Arizona, where her research centered on understanding the role of antioxidants in mitochondria. Rogers has written for various magazines on topics ranging from current medical research and eugenics to parasitic and vector-borne diseases.
The use of animals to better understand human anatomy and human disease is a centuries-old practice. Animal research has provided valuable information about many physiological procedures that are relevant to humans and has been fundamental in the development of many drugs, including vaccines, anesthetics, and antibiotics. Animals and humans are similar in many ways. However, how animals and humans react to their environments, both physiologically and behaviorally, can be drastically different, and the conditions under which laboratory animals are kept can influence and alter experimental results. The husbandry and treatment of lab animals have been and is still a major topic of ethical debate.
Alternatives to animal testing is mainly predicated on biochemical assays, on tests in cells that are completed in vitro (“within the glass”), and on computational algorithms and models. Traditional toxicity tests performed on animals have become outmoded. These tests lead to the deaths of many animals and produce data that are irrelevant to humans often. The recognition of the inadequacy of animal toxicity testing has led to the introduction of better techniques that can produce comparable toxicity values of chemicals that are applicable to humans.
Another example of a toxicity test performed on animals that often produce inaccurate results is the Draize test, in which a chemical, like an aesthetic or pharmaceutical agent, is put on the eye or skin of a rabbit. The results are likely to indicate how toxic a chemical is to human skin. The inaccuracy of the Draize test has been recognized for quite some time, but its replacement has not been a straightforward matter, and the development of better in vitro techniques has taken a decade nearly.
- Prayer and contemplation
- Choosing the right care product
- It softens the skin
- Packing makeup samples or paper makeup
- 7000- 3200 BC
The European Union recently approved a replacement for the Draize test called the EpiSkin test, which can be an in vitro method that uses test-tube-sized models of human epidermis. The acceptance of EpiSkin, which was created by L’Oreal and IMEDEX, a small research-and-development company, is a milestone in the improvement toward discovering reliable alternatives to animal testing and serves as a model for the introduction of other alternate techniques. What sort of medication behaves in the body is mainly determined by its chemical substance properties, such as size, chemical constituents, and solubility.
Discovering that a medication has different results on humans than it does on animals effectively negates the value of the pet experiments performed in its development, on which a huge amount of money may have been spent. Understanding the effects of the drug on the basis of its chemical structure appears to be a highly effective and useful way to determine whether animal studies are even necessary. However, the risk-to-benefit proportion must be weighed before drugs are accelerated into medical trials.
In addition, there is certainly little motivation or inspiration for scientists to go entirely to in vitro techniques if the techniques cannot be validated in the laboratory or cannot produce reliable or reproducible results. Many in vitro assays are developed in a few laboratories, which have a pastime in or grounds for developing alternatives to pet testing.
Because they may be difficult to reproduce or not applicable to the areas of research, these techniques may not be adopted by other laboratories. Although it is difficult to gauge the intrinsic value of alternatives to animal testing, the message that pursuing and buying these technologies sends is positive and really should encourage and inspire innovative thought and research.
Supporters and opponents of animal screening sometimes have the same goals; however, a fantastic amount of energy is lost both on poorly executed-animal screening and on poorly conceived efforts to avoid animal testing. Because of the enormous effort necessary to change decades of research and product development that has crucially depended on pet testing, the unification of organizations that bring supporters of animal welfare and supporters of science is necessary together.
This unification is occurring, and fascination with and support for these organizations is growing. What Will We Do If We Don’t Experiment On Animals? Generally in most honest debates about pet experimentation, the question at issue is if the benefits that humans eventually are based on such research is worth the suffering and fatalities of the animals involved. In EXACTLY WHAT WILL We Do if We Don’t Experiment on Animals? “Frequently asked question” elevated in response with their earlier work.