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Animal experiments

If you have ever had a serious illness, it is more than likely that your treatment was developed using animals. Vaccinations, organ transplants and the use of penicillin would never have been discovered if medical researchers had not been allowed to carry out controversial - and often painful – tests.

So this is a debate which asks fundamental questions about how much power humans should allow themselves. Yet the most important issues are perhaps technical, rather than moral: nine out of every ten successful animal tests fail when they’re trialled on humans; aspirin would never have made it to pharmacy shelves if it had first been tested on a cat. And modern science is now coming up with viable alternatives – in vitro testing, ‘microdosing’, and even computer modelling.

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