While there are scientific, financial, and regulatory obstacles to replacing animal testing, a comprehensive review of the history of technical and policy developments suggests that there will come a time when animals no longer are used in harmful testing of any kind.

The safety testing of chemicals and consumer products probably accounts for only about 10 to 20 percent of the use of animals in laboratories, or approximately 2 to 4 million animals in the United States. The remaining 80 to 90 percent, or 16 -to 18 million animals, are used in basic and applied research, education, and other arenas. Yet the use of animals in safety testing figures prominently in the animal research controversy. It raises issues such as the ethics and humaneness of deliberately poisoning animals, the propriety of harming

Safety testing grew out of other forms of testing. Initially, tests were developed to standardize new batches of powerful drugs like digitalis and insulin that were prepared from natural products and that varied in potency from batch to batch. These are called biologicals, therapeutically active chemicals that are similar or identical to compounds normally found in the body. Testing for potency was soon extended from biologicals to vaccines against infectious diseases. Gradually, the approaches developed for potency testing came to be applied to the safety assessment of chemicals and products that had been implicated in cases of human poisoning. For example, in 1937, 107 Americans died as a result of poisoning when a sulfanilamide preparation was mixed with the toxic diethylene glycol as a solvent (Parascandola, 1991). Shortly after the Elixir of Sulfanilamide tragedy, Congress passed the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, requiring the safety testing of drugs.

Safety testing is a multifaceted process. It includes testing chemicals to see if they do or do not have adverse effects; for example, can a chemical cause birth defects, cancer, organ failure, or some other problem? This is known as "hazard identification" or "hazar

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