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Asked by cristiano7 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 11 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
Question: Do you experement on animals?
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Anastasia Wass answered on 11 Mar 2014:
I don’t I work on cancer cells, you can take a sample of someone’s tumour and grow it in a dish and then see how it responds to different chemicals.
Some people do need to work on animals though, this is when we’ve done all the tests we can on cells in a dish and we think we’ve got a treatment that might work, at this point we need to see it actually kills the cancer and not the patient!
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Andrea Hanvey answered on 11 Mar 2014:
No im a scientist in a hospital so i work with patient samples diagnosing cancer
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Matthew Lam answered on 11 Mar 2014:
Like Anastasia, I did all my lab work on cancer cells in a dish and did not use animals.
The research that my charity funds does do work on animals and I see this as a necessary part of medical research. If we didn’t test on animals then we would not know if a new cancer drug would be safe for humans or if it could kill them. We don’t currently have a better way to do this testing without using animals.
There are groups that fund research, such as the NC3R’s, who research ways to reduce the number of animals being used in medical research and to find ways to replace animal testing altogether.
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Amar Joshi answered on 11 Mar 2014:
I don’t do any work on animals myself. My situation is very much like Matthew’s. At the moment we need to use animal because we can’t test on humans but people are researching on how to replace the animals.
Comments
rabbitonfire commented on :
What’s wrong with testing on humans? After all, we are severely over populated.
Amar commented on :
The ethics behind it are very complicated. In some experiments, you have to give animals a disease and then see how well the drug works. Sometimes the drugs aren’t effective and the animals die. I’m not sure many people would volunteer for that. But animals are not used solely for that. One importnat think when looking at drugs is how they interact with the bodies systems, how they are metabolised and how long they are effective for which can all be done using animals.
There are some experiments where we can use people. When a drug is being tested in clinical trials we have to use people with the disease. Some people are given the drug and some are give a sugar pill. This is the best way we have to see if the drugs work.