• Question: What is your opinion on animal testing?

    Asked by Brodie_Bum to Cristiane, Nicki, Nikolai, Richard, Samuel on 11 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Nikolai Adamski

      Nikolai Adamski answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      It’s a difficult question. Ideally, we shouldn’t do any animal tests. Scientists have to follow very strict regulations when it comes to animal tests. They are required to justify these tests extensively and keep the number of animals in a study as low as possible.
      Unfortunately, in my opinion, we don’t have any feasible alternatives at the moment that could replace animal tests. Tests on cultured cells usually don’t give you reliable results and tests on humans are probably out of the question entirely (apart from some small scalre volunteer studies).
      There is resaerch going on that focuses on finding alternatives to animal tests and hopefully sooner rather than later we will see a breakthrough there.

    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      It is unpleasant at times but sadly necessary right now. In a lot of cases there is no other way of investigating certain areas of science, especially things related to the body and disease.

      But it is the responsibility of all scientists to use the most appropriate methods they can, which means that if there is an alternative to animal testing for your research you should use it. Animal testing is also highly controlled, so you cannot do anything that would be too cruel, and you have to make sure the animals are as happy and well looked after as possible.

      A lot of very important work has relied on animal testing, but hopefully as we develop new ways of doing experiments we will need to use animals less and less. I’m quite glad I don’t have to use animals in my current research, it is much nicer working with flasks of cells 🙂

    • Photo: Nicki Whitehouse

      Nicki Whitehouse answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      I don’t like it, but appreciate that sometimes its necessary. Sometimes I have to kill insects as part of my work and I realised quickly that I did not like this at all and I largely avoid it now. Luckily, I deal with fossils so I deal with material that has been long dead and I use other people’s collections of insects to help the identification process.

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