Rx Testing

Every day, millions of people buy and use a variety of medications from a variety of sources. In this day and age when society seems so concerned with ethics, it is a wonder that in laboratories throughout the country, innocent animals are being made the unwilling subjects of experiments intended to create these medicines we use so often. I think it would benefit society greatly to explore alternate models than animals for experimentation, as the current experiments are cruel and often fatal to the animal subjects involved, and actually produce surprisingly dismal results in the quest for the advancement of human medicine.

I found an interesting piece of reading that seemed to give weight to my opinion that animal experimentation for the sake of human medicine has been highly ineffective: “A Critical Look at Animal Experimentation”, published by the Medical Research Modernization Committee. The publication was written by Christopher Anderegg, M.D., Ph.D., Kathy Archibald, B.Sc., Jarrod Bailey, Ph.D., Murry J. Cohen, M.D., Stephen R. Kaufman, M.D., and John J. Pippin, M.D., F.A.C.C. These six individuals have written numerous publications on the subject, won multiple awards, attended some of the most highly regarded universities in the country, and many are the heads of organizations directly related to the subject. According to them, “Human data has historically been interpreted in light of laboratory data derived from nonhuman animals. This has resulted in unfortunate medical consequences”. The example is provided that in 1963, scientists had noticed a correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer in humans, but because they were unable to reproduce these results in animals, they discredited this information while many people continued to die from lung cancer. Similar examples, such as the fact that the diabetes drug Vioxx was successful in animals but caused multiple organ failure in humans, further prove that experiments on animals cannot be trusted...