Animal Testing In Medical Research

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The debate about animal testing in medical research is an endless battle and up to now one of the most controversial moral and social issues. Many scientists believe that animal testing is the only way to test on a new medicine that can save people’s lives. However, animal advocates believe that medical research on animals causes pain, distress, and self-mutilation, that animal testing yields different results which do not scale to humans and that medical advances can still be made possible with alternative methods.
The History
Since at least 500 BC during the ancient times of the Greeks and Romans, vivisection was practiced up to the late Middle Ages and The Renaissance. Because of the prohibitions in dissecting humans, physicians in ancient Greece used animals for anatomical studies. Vivisection is the term used to describe the cutting or dissecting live animals for experimentation. Physicians and biologists use vivisection to study human anatomy to come up with theories relating to the causes, effects and possible cure of a disease. Most experiments in the early 18th century were conducted without anesthetics so animals suffered severe pain during the process. An anesthetic is a drug used to numb the …show more content…

Alternatives are less expensive and can produce more reliable results than animal experimentation. This method supported the replacement objective in the 3Rs. One of these is Vitro studies, the study uses blood cells, cancer cells, and liver cells to examine the properties of a drug in a petri dish. Human cells are placed in a dish mixed with a dye and other substance. Different colors indicate whether all cells are alive(red), all cells are dead(clear), and some cells are dead (pink). These colors are analyzed using a computer program that computes how likely the substance can kill human’s

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