Testing new drugs, vaccines and surgical techniques on live animals

of medications, check the safety of products destined for human use, and other biomedical, commercial, and health care uses. Research on living animals has been practiced since at least 500 BC.
Proponents of animal testing say that it has enabled the development of many life-saving treatments for both humans and animals, that there is no alternative method for researching a complete living organism, and that strict regulations prevent the mistreatment of animals in laboratories.
Opponents of animal testing say that it is cruel and inhumane to experiment on animals, that alternative methods available to researchers can replace animal testing, and that animals are so different from human beings that research on animals often yields irrelevant results.

The California Biomedical Research Association states that nearly every medical breakthrough in the last 100 years has resulted directly from research using animals. Animal research has contributed to major advances in treating conditions such as breast cancer, brain injury, childhood leukemia, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, tuberculosis, and more, and was instrumental in the development of pacemakers, cardiac valve substitutes, and anesthetics.

are safe.
Scientists racing to develop a vaccine for coronavirus during the 2020 global pandemic need to test on genetically modified mice to ensure that the vaccine doesn’t make the virus worse. Nikolai Petrovsky, professor in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in Australia, said testing a coronavirus vaccine on animals is «absolutely essential» and skipping that step would be «fraught with difficulty and danger.»

a living, whole-body system.
Living systems, human beings and animals are extremely complex. Studying cell cultures in a petri dish, while sometimes useful, does not provide the opportunity to study interrelated processes occurring in the central nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system. Evaluating a drug for side effects requires a circulatory system to carry the medicine to different organs. Conditions such as blindness and high blood pressure cannot be studied in tissue cultures. Even the most powerful supercomputers are unable to accurately simulate the workings of the human brain’s 100 billion interconnected nerve cells.

Humane Society International, animals used in experiments are commonly subjected to force feeding, food and water deprivation, the infliction of burns and other wounds to study the healing process, the infliction of pain to study its effects and remedies, and «killing by carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck-breaking, decapitation, or other means.» The US Department of Agriculture reported in January 2020 that research facilities used over 300,000 animals in activities involving pain in just one year.

volunteers.
Unlike animals used for research, humans are able to give consent to be used in testing and are a viable option when the need arises. The COVID-19 global pandemic demonstrated that researchers can skip animal testing and go straight to observing how vaccines work in humans. One company working on a COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna Therapeutics, worked on developing a vaccine using new technology: instead of being based on a weakened form of the virus, it was developed using a synthetic copy of the COVID-19 genetic code. Because the company didn’t take the traditional path of isolating live samples of a virus, it was able to fast-track the development process.