Animal Experimentation:does it really work? by Evelin Solis
Animal experimentation is a process also known as vivisection, that means "killed while it was alive", it attempts to "recreate human diseases in animals in order to study them" (Levin, 1995). According to many scientists who practice animal experimentation, it is a scientific process that gives answers to the human needs in the world. Between the uses of the animal experimentation are the treatments for cancer, Alzheimer's disease, AIDS, heart diseases, also the discovery of vaccines, and antibiotics and many more. Pro - vivisection scientists assure that if "human beings had chosen to stop using animals in scientific and biomedical research, the world would be a very different place today"; besides, they defend themselves by saying that there are a lot of diseases that have been controlled through the knowledge obtained from vivisection; however, there has been an "enormous damage to the human health" caused by vivisection along with a lot of false claims (Klepacz, 2002). Consequently, animal experimentation does not apply to humans, has hidden side effects and has extremely high costs. The results of AIDS, cancer and heart disease test done on animals do not apply to the human beings for many reasons. First, it is know
n that researchers have been "infecting chimps with the HIV virus since 1984", but there are a lot of "dramatic" differences between "the chimpanzees and the human immune system" that points the "impracticality of using these animals as a model of human AIDS. Also some authors have noted that the stress associated with captivity can alter enzyme levels, thus invalidating experimental data" (PCRM, 2002). Second, rats are being used to test the causes of cancer in humans although they differ in many ways. In fact, rats are "poor predictors" of the human cancer risk because they are susceptible to different types of cancer from those affecting humans. For example, spontaneous colon tumors are rare in rats, but they are the second leading cause of cancer death in people in the United States". In fact, the results of "tests done on rats and mice" would not apply very often in humans (PCRM, 2002). Third, the Physicians Committee for Research and Medicine (2002) found that"rats are very different from humans in the ways their bodies process fat and cholesterol", for this reason, the tests on rats related to heart diseases (leading cause of death in the United Sates) are invalid for humans. Also, according to the Boston's Tuff University, "the rat is not an appropriate human model for studies on lipids". Another researcher also mentioned that "it is not possible to extrapolate directly from rat to human studies because of their differences in plasma lipoprotein metabolism between the species." In other words, according to Levin (1995), the "biological variations between species make the results of experiments done in one specie inapplicable to any other species, including humans". In addition to this, she pointed out that "animals can never have human diseases
Some common words found in the essay are:
Tuff University, , Medical Advancement, Research Medicine, animal experimentation, United Sates, answers human, cause death, heart diseases, research methods, animal tests, pcrm 2002, using animal, animal research, liver failure,
Approximate Word count = 1197
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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