Animal Testing

Animals should, and must, be used for research because, animals are the only other living organisms that are closely related enough to humans to be able to test, animals hold the key to understanding scientific discoveries that impact human medical conditions, and the scientific discoveries found by using lab-test animals helps save lives and can improve the quality of life for many people. Humans must test drugs on "something" to see if it will work. That "something" should be a living organism. We can not test drugs in rocks, so we use animals. Some people ask why don"t we test drugs in humans? First, because testing drugs in humans is considered inhumane. The outcomes for drug testing is unpredictable and could have mild to severe side effects. Also, in many cases, the test animals must be monitored and kept in a controlled experiment. This would be hard to do for people with responsibilities to their families and jobs. Second, many drug tests fail, again causing harm or death to the lab animal. What seems more detrimental would be to use humans as test cases. Unfortunately, Nazis used humans as test subjects. That part of world history is atrocious. The inhumanity that the Jewish people endured in the name of science should never happen again. Author James Morcan writes, "The ends justify the means mindset has been the impetus behind many a cruel medical or social experiment" (Goodreads) Using lab test animals is the only way at this point in science to help advance medical knowledge and improve the quality of life for people without having to use people as test subjects. It is true that "More than 90 percent of basic science discoveries from experiments on animals fail to lead to human treatments"(2018, peta). However, the ten percent that does succeed are huge scientific discoveries. One huge discovery, for example, is Ketamine. Ketamine is also known as a brand name called Ketalar. This medication is used as anesthesia at the start of surgery and throughout surgery. Ketalar is a key medicine that allows surgeons to operate because it puts a person in a trance-like state, provides pain relief, sedates people, and creates short-term memory loss of the surgical experience (Wikipedia). When this drug was made it was tested on zebrafish. The scientists that tested this drug had tanks full of zebrafish; furthermore, within each tank, the water had different amount of this drug in it. If too much drug was in the water the fish "mutated." You don"t really want to create mutated humans, do you? Ketamine is now a life saving substance that when tested on animals had its faults, but that doesn't make it any less of a life saver. What would happen if scientists immediately stopped using lab animals as test subjects? Frankie Trull, president of the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR) has an answer for this. She says, "An immediate end to animal research in the U.S. would be a death sentence for millions of people around the world." If you have ever taken a drug for any medical reasons, you can thank the animals that had there life lost or had there life changed through these drug tests. For example, penicillin is an antibiotic medicine that has had a huge impact on society. Penicillin was discovered by research scientist Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928 who tested it on animals first to make sure that it was non-toxic to humans. Then in 1940, Sir Howard Florey tested penicillin on mice infected with bacteria and found out that the mice that were given penicillin survived. Because of what these two scientist discovered through these tests on lab mice, doctors are now able to prescribe this antibiotic to save people"s lives. Without penicillin and other antibiotics, the number of people dying from infections each year would be significantly higher. Drugs used for medical purposes change the lives of others for the better and can save human lives. Without animals to test drugs on we have two options. One, use humans as blatant test dummies. Or two, give humans drugs when necessary and get information off of their suffering. Animals must be used for research to improve our lives and the development of the human race because animals are a necessary test subject, animals are the key to scientific discoveries, and the scientific discoveries found by using lab-test animals helps save lives and improve the quality of life for many people. "The contributions of animal research to medical science and human health are undeniable... When the majority of scientists see the work as scientifically justified, and so do the many professional medical and scientific organizations, the expert views cannot be simply dismissed based on wild claims of ulterior motives, self-interest and conspiracy theories" (2017, Pro-con). We have been teasing animals since the ancient greeks (Wiki), so why stop now?