Resolved: An alternative for animal testing should be found.

Thank you Blah. You are no mean debater, and I look forward to the challenge. I will be dedicating this round for my constructive case and will make formal rebuttals in later rounds. Brief Appeal to AuthorityA 2011 poll of nearly 1000 biomedical scientists showed that “more than 90% of the poll’s respondents agreed that the use of animals in research is essential”[1]Stefan Treue, head of the German Primate Centre in Göttingen says that, “after lay-people have visited his laboratory and seen how work is conducted and why, "something like 98% understand and accept that this is a small but important and irreplaceable part of biomedical science”[1] The same source goes on to note a percentage of scientists had mixed feelings on the issue of animal testing.“[A]lthough researchers overwhelmingly feel free to discuss these concerns with colleagues, many seem less at ease with doing so in public. More than 70% said that the polarized nature of the debate makes it difficult to voice a nuanced opinion on the subject, and little more than one-quarter said that their institutions offer training and assistance in communicating broadly about the importance of animal research.”[1] We do not test on animals because of some twisted sadistic pleasure in it. Scientists and even the ‘lay people’ who are given an overview of what these tests are about generally agree that the tests are irreplaceably significant. There is simply no substitute for animal testing. Mice and chimpanzees, for example, share 98-99% of a human’s genetic makeup. Animals are the only subjects other than human beings with similar enough systemic constitutions to give us our best comparative data. We shouldn’t be seeking an alternative because there is no alternative. The Importance of Animal Testing - an Anecdote The first stages to the discovery of life-saving diabetes treatment was made by Charles Best and Frederick Banting[2] by conducting tests, such as organ harvesting, on a number of dogs. One of the dogs had its pancreas cut out, and its living progress recorded over time. Banting and Best then diced up the pancreas and created a pancreatic solution which they injected into the dog. The result of these experiments and numerous trials afterward was the discovery that a certain mixture of pancreatic material, produced after numerous counts of trial and error, countered the effect of diabetes. This material, a.k.a. insulin, is a monumental discovery in biomedical science. Diabetes was known as a cureless disease with a 100% mortality that can only be delayed for 1-2 years. It is estimated that there are currently 29.1 million people in the United States who have diabetes[3]. The lives and organs of tens of dogs and hundreds of cattle in the early decades of the 20th century and the result of their sacrifice are still effectively impacting the lives of millions of people. While not all animal testing will achieve such amazing results, this anecdote serves as an example among many of the indispensability of animal test subjects. We can stare at things in petri dishes all day, but such measures simply cannot duplicate the results of testing on fully functioning living systems. If Banting and Best did not harvest the dogs’ organs, they could not possibly have found the pancreas’ essential correlations to diabetes nor would they have discovered the insulin that keeps over 20 million people living in the United States alive. Who Benefits? “Without animal research, millions of dogs, cats, birds, and farm animals would be dead from more than 200 diseases, including anthrax, distemper, rabies, feline leukemia, and canine parvo virus, according to Americans for Medical Progress (AMP), a nonprofit group that supports the responsible and humane use of animals in biomedical research. Today, those diseases are largely preventable, thanks to vaccines and treatments developed in animal research. In human terms, research with animals has led to vaccinations against smallpox, measles, mumps, diphtheria, and tetanus; development of anesthesia, antibiotics, and insulin; use of cardiac pacemakers and heart bypass surgery; surgical advancements for organ transplants, hip replacements, and cataract surgery; and treatments for a host of diseases, including diabetes, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, and children’s leukemia.”[4] Of course, unless you preferred we tested hip replacements, organ transplants, anasthesia etc. on humans, non-animal alternatives such as cultured petri-dish cells aren’t going to help you find out the after-effects and survivability of animals after such operations. There’s just no practical way we can replace the functionalities of a live animal. An Alternative to Animal Testing? In order to monitor results of testing on a living system, a living system must be tested on. Only living things have living systems. Our only option, in order to duplicate results obtained from animal testing, is to test on some other living thing. But here we stumble upon a contradictory problem: all living things are animals. We test on rats and other mammals because these mammals are the closest things to the homo sapien sapien other than the homo sapien sapiens themselves. The only other alternative we have to replace animals, who already replace human beings, is to artificially create some living thing which replicates mammalian living functions; to genetically engineer another living thing. Again, we happen upon the same problem. This genetically engineered living mammal would necessarily be an animal. Testing on this animal would mean animal abuse, bringing us all the way back to the perceived problem of animal testing. I assert that any alternative method to duplicating the results of animal testing can only be animal testing. I hate to ask my opponent to present an alternative, but we simply cannot invest in a pointless venture to find an alternative if no feasible direction toward which we should go toward this alternative is presented. I assert that looking for alternatives to animal testing is a waste of valuable time and resources. Such a venture is only reasonable if we had a practical idea as to where we were going with the invested capital, but we don’t. Some Other Facts about Animal Testing. It is often suggested that since the majority of products from animal tests fail, animal tests are bad models for humans. Many of these statistics are taken out of context. Animal rights activists, when citing such statistics, often neglect other relevant data. For example, my opponent elicits an oft-cited statistic which states that 9 out of 10 or 90% of the drugs tested on animals fail in clinical studies. Many products are experimental. Of course they’re going to fail. Conductors of animal-testing experiments aren’t going to succeed with everything they try. That they so rigorously maintain a healthy skepticism on the effectiveness and safety of the majority of trial products shows is actually a good thing. Consider the following chart: 94% of all drugs that pass the animal trials fail the human trials from phase 1-3 with 86% failing after the phase trials. Note that even human trials fail at just as large a ratio as animal trials. Is this grounds to claim that human tests are bad models for humans? That’s ridiculous. These are trials. They are bound to fail, that’s what experiments are: trial and error until the desired result is attained. Living animals are the next best alternative to living humans. That’s all there is to it. “Here is where it is important to understand a little about the drug development process.Before the preclinical animal tests there are a large number of pre-preclinical non-animal tests done on all manner of research tools including computer models, automatic screening, cell cultures, microbial studies and more. These methods are used to (relatively) cheaply remove many potentially toxic, or obviously non-starting drugs from reaching the more expensive animal testing stage – greatly reducing the amount of animal research required for a drug to reach market. So contrary to animal rights claims of alternative methods being better, the truth is that 94% of drugs that pass animal AND non-animal preclinical tests will fail in human tests.So rather than damn just the animal tests, have animal rights activists managed to damn all of preclinical research? In short, no.”[5] Conclusion Animals' systems are analogous to human systems and are the closest things we have (other than humans) to test on.We simply don’t have an alternative to replace what animal testing provides.Animal testing is necessary to saving lives and alleviating pain and suffering of a larger demographic. While most of us can agree that premature death and suffering are loathsome, the reality is that these things cannot be avoided. SOURCES[1] http://www.nature.com...[2] http://www.nobelprize.org...[3] http://www.cdc.gov...[4] http://cvma.net...[5]http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk...