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What is the main reason for testing on animals and how does it benefit society?

Questions answered by the article:
1. In the article it stated that "Our interest isn't in speed, it's getting it right. We want proper animal testing because we don't want harmful chemicals to end up in our food, air and water." So the main reason for animal testing would be for betterment of society and not just experimenting on animals for fun.

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In the past 2 decades has animal experimentation slowed down and if so how?

Questions answered by the article:
In the past 20 years there has been tremendous research done by researchers that has been crucial for improving healthcare and has developed many skin care products. But a lot of that research is now starting to slow down and even cease to exist in some areas! Many corporations and organizations have either promised to be more accurate and caring with the testing of animals. While others have quite literally either banned the use of animal testing or strayed away from it and use other research methods.

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Why aren't a majority of animal experimentation's being done on invasive species?

Questions answered by the article:
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Now that a lot of organizations/company's stopped supporting research for the testing of animals, what other research strategies do they use?

Questions answered by the article:
In the article below it states that "In theory, plenty of basic biological research (which accounts for 40% of animal experiments) can be conducted on cells rather than whole creatures. The explosion of knowledge in molecular biology, and new techniques such as laser fluorimetry (which can measure biological activity in a single cell)". So in theory it suggests that we are actually able to use whole cells instead of an entire animal.

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THE number of laboratory animals used in America and Britain has halved since its peak in the mid-1970s. Several chemical and drug companies are spending plenty of money on finding ways to cut down. A few, such as Avon and Revlon, have announced the closure of their animal-testing laboratories. However, it seems that the decade-long decline in animal experimentation is bottoming out. Why?

The decline itself was caused by a range of factors. Some are economic and have to do with a fall in demand. Research establishments closed during the recession of the early 1980s. The number of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals developed each year has dropped. And rising costs--a monkey can cost more than $2,000 to buy and $100 a week to keep--have led to cutbacks.

Also, now that regulators insist that animals should be treated better, fewer are needed to spot biological effects. Several years ago it took 36 monkeys to determine whether there were any contaminants that might wreck the nervous system in polio vaccine. Nowadays a similar job takes only 22. This drop is attributed solely to the monkeys' well-being.

There have been a few legislative reforms affecting the use of laboratory animals. After years of review, the European Commission decided to abandon the LD50 test, which requires large numbers of animals to be killed to check whether a chemical is dangerous. Tests with smaller, non-lethal doses will now do. Few other reforms are on the agenda, except for replacing the Draize test (in which chemicals are tested for irritancy by dropping them into rabbits' eyes). This may be superseded by a test in which smaller, less irritating doses are placed at the edge of the eye.

What of the alternatives to animals? In theory, plenty of basic biological research (which accounts for 40% of animal experiments) can be conducted on cells rather than whole creatures. The explosion of knowledge in molecular biology, and new techniques such as laser fluorimetry (which can measure biological activity in a single cell) have helped improve the quality of data that can be collected from experiments done on cells in test-tubes (in vitro).

Neuropharmacologists used to study the effect of depressants or tranquillisers in whole animals. Now they study isolated synapses, the junctions between nerve cells, to measure the chemical and electrical signals that pass between them. Although an animal must be killed to extract the synapses, one death provides many of them.

More scientists would like to switch to the test-tube. They are hampered by the availability and expense of cell cultures to work on. Cells are usually cultured in a cocktail of substances. The most effective of these seems to be foetal calf serum, which is costly, and involves the slaughter of calf embryos. Recently there have been worries about contamination with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, an infectious disease first spotted in British cattle in 1986. There are big technical problems, too. Cultured human cells can quickly lose their characteristics and become "undifferentiated".

Over the past decade several "growth factors", which help cells grow in dishes, have been discovered in human serum and other tissues. Synthetic substitutes are also being developed, but progress is slow. Calf serum is a complex mix of ingredients and nobody is sure what all of them are. Scientists think it will be some time before they find a cocktail that supports whole differentiated human cells.

Although computers and in vitro screening are increasingly used to pick out new drugs, animal alternatives have yet to gain wide acceptance. The alternatives account for perhaps 5% of pre-clinical drug testing. Pre-clinical tests, which account for 25-30% of the animal toll, are those conducted before a drug is tested on people.

Regulators have been slow to recognise in vitro tests. Only two have been approved: the Ames test, which uses bacterial cells to determine the cancer-causing potential of a chemical by measuring its ability to cause genetic damage; and the mammalian cell test, which does much the same in Chinese hamster cells. Both have been around for more than a decade and are anyway used only in conjunction with conventional animal tests.

Several new test-tube methods have been developed. Tissue cultures containing the kind of cell found in the skin can screen for drugs that might cause allergies. There are tests which look at dispersed embryonic cells and how they reassociate in the presence of chemicals suspected of causing birth defects. Instead of injecting chemicals into rabbits and taking their temperatures, the potential of a chemical for causing fever can be monitored by looking at how crab's blood coagulates.

None of these tests is foolproof. In a recent international trial, the performance of a range of known and unknown carcinogens was measured by the Ames test and compared with data from animals and people. The Ames test agreed with the human and animal standards only 60% of the time. And in vitro tests for damage to foetuses will not identify trypan blue--a dye used for research on cells--as dangerous because it interferes with the flow of nutrients along the placenta, not with the foetus itself.

Still, several scientific and regulatory hurdles may yet be leaped successfully. Recent work in genetic engineering is providing new ways to develop alternative tests (see box on next page). More immediately, animal suffering could be reduced if regulators changed their ways. They argue that alternatives must be compared to a "gold standard", and that animals are closer to people than a handful of cells in a dish. But, in general, animal tests yield false negatives (hazardous chemicals are passed) and false positives (safe chemicals get turned down) almost as often as test-tube work. And there are countless examples in which chemicals perform differently in animals and people. Practolol, a heart drug, made people--but not any known test animal--go blind. If animal tests are not perfect, why should regulators insist that the alternatives are?

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THE number of laboratory animals used in America and Britain has halved since its peak in the mid-1970s. Several chemical and drug companies are spending plenty of money on finding ways to cut down. A few, such as Avon and Revlon, have announced the closure of their animal-testing laboratories.

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Can we do science without animal testing?

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Can we do science without animal testing?

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Can we do science without animal testing?