To Test or Not To Test, That Is the Question
From time immemorial, humans used and abused animals in lots of areas.
The next two articles are discussing the question: does animal research beneficial to
medicine?
The first article claims that animal research is vital to medicine, while the other one
claims that this research is wasteful and misleading.
The article "Animal Research Is Vital to Medicine", written by Jack H.Botting and
Adrian R.Morrison, first introduces the significance of animal researches to all areas
of medical research in the past and towards the future.
It begins with the widespread effects of Pastuer's research on domestic animals, which
was carried out in order to identify the offending organism of bacterial and viral
infections, and in addition promoted the development of vaccines.
Then the authors describe how vivisection led also to the development of antibacterial
and antibiotic drugs (for example sulfonamide drugs and antibiotic penicillin).
Nevertheless, they emphasize the fact that infectious disease still considered as a great
threat to humankind, and experiments using animals will be vital to develop
treatments. To strengthen their argument, they continue to list medical treatments that
were develop based on animal researches, such as open heart surgery, treatments for
kidney failure, insulin for diabetes et cetera.
Later, accusations of opponents of animal experiments (considered as misconceptions
by the authors) about the differences between humans and animals, the necessity of
those researches and more, are being refuted.
Does a paging black hole in place of animal researches will delay the progress of
developing medical treatments? The authors convinced it will.
Are there any complete substitutes to animal experiments? They believe that in most
cases there are no absolute alternative procedures that can provide the same benefits,
and therefore they find it difficult to envision progresses in many fields without
experiments using animals.
The second article "Animal Research Is Wasteful and Misleading" written by Neal D.
Barnard and Stephen R. Kaufman introduce the exact opposite approach.
As the time passes and especially in the recent period, organizations that work against
violence toward animal in general, and against the use of animals for research and
studying in particular, become more common.
Those groups take one of the two approaches:
1. Animal welfare, which refers the pain that the animals experience because of
human needs.
2. Animals rights, which claim that we should not refer animals different than
humans.
The authors use several important points in order to support their ideas.
First they claim that animal experiments are not feasible to medicine because they are
poorly suited to addressing the urgent health problems that exist in the real world.
Afterwards, they represent better methods to deal with the researches needs.
Finally, the issue of animal testing as a rhetorical device is discussed.
They describe to the reader the argument that animal tests are not feasible to medicine
by showing several cases in which the effects of medicines on animals were entirely
different from their effects on human beings.
Better methods are being suggested, such as epidemiological studies, autopsy studies
and endoscopic examination and biopsy. Furthermore, the authors give examples of
successful research produced by them, like atherosclerotic heart disease which was
produced by epidemiological studies.
To support the argument that animal testing used as a rhetorical device, the drug
thalidomide example is being pointed out with the claim that animal tests could have
predicted the birth defects caused by this drug.
Towards the end, the authors highlight the fact that they did not broached the ethical
objections to animal experimentation in this article.
In brief, although animal researches have great contribution to progresses in many
fields, they are not essential because there are many other substitutes that could bring
up the same results.