If Dr. Berens switches to preventing human cancer instead of wasting time, money and lives in the laboratory, that will be the day he enters the path to saving the very first human life yet in his entire career. Although I personally would like to see animal experimentation end in my lifetime and I believe that it is wrong to kill animals for human benefit, I do appreciate the other perspective and realistically I know that animal research has benefited my life and the lives of my loved ones. However, I firmly believe that people must be given the facts and left to make their own decisions about what is immoral and what is truly justified. Thank you for writing an article that explained both sides without bias. More so than many, it attempted to give a balanced presentation of the arguments for and against animal experimentation.
Most media are lopsidedly pro-vivisection.
There are some points I wish to take issue with, however. The old argument that the polio vaccine was created through animal models is patently false, even though widely propagated and believed. The Nobel Prize was awarded to Enders, Weller and Robbins, who first cultured the disease in human tissue, and Sabin himself admitted under oath to Congress in 1984 that the animal monkey models delayed understanding of the nature of the disease in humans for decades. This is because animals are biologically and physiologically different from humans, and findings from them are only tenuously applied to us, even in creatures very close to us, like chimpanzees. They will not even consider arguments opposing it made from a growing number of reputable doctors and scientists like Ray Greek and Murray Cohen.