ANIMAL RESEARCH
Claire Foster ©
2006
For medicine to develop
and improve, doctors and other healthcare professionals have to conduct
research. Otherwise all medicine would
be guesswork and no one would be certain whether treatments were definitely
worth giving. Good medicine is evidence-based medicine.
This means that
someone or something has to be the subject of the research. In the UK, the law requires that all new
medical treatments are tested on animals before they are tested on humans.
Different animals are
used for different tests. The place where
the research is done, and the people who do the research, have to be licensed
before the research can happen. Animal
ethics committees have to approve the work.
There has been a law
governing research on animals for more than 100 years. The first law governing research on humans
was passed in 2004.
Is it right to use animals solely for the good
of humans?
If the research is important (for humans) does
that make a difference?
If the animals are not made to suffer in any
way during the research, does that make a difference?
Some people argue that
animals are not good models for humans, and that the research is of limited
value. This may be true in some sorts
of genetic research.
Imagine taking a new
drug that has been developed in a laboratory and giving it to a human being
without having tried it on an animal first.
You would have no idea what the drug did when it entered a living
body. Would any human agree to such a
thing? Is it then right to do it to
animals who can’t express their views?
How else could medicine be developed?