Frequently Asked Questions

Through the years, we have been assured that using animals in biomedical research is critical to our understanding and advancement of human medical knowledge. The reality is very different, as the answers to the following questions will reveal.

• Would drugs be safe for us without first being tested on animals?
• If we don't use animals, what will we use?
• Technically humans are animals, so what's the big difference?
• What about the argument that animal experimentation is indispensable as our only model of intact metabolic systems?
• How can we know that medicines will not cause birth defects without testing them on animals?
• Didn't the polio vaccine come from animal experimentation?
• Didn't penicillin come from animal experimentation?
• Weren't lab animals responsible for the discovery of diabetes and development of insulin?
• How will we combat AIDS without animal experimentation?
• If not with animals, how can we ever hope to cure cancer?
• Didn't all Nobel Prize winners in Medicine and Physiology experiment on animals?
• Don't all doctors support the concept of animal experimentation?
• Don't surgeons train on animals before operating on humans?
• How did animal experimentation become so established to begin with?
• Why does animal experimentation continue?
• Aren't the 3Rs ("Reduce, Refine and Replace") the best way to phase out animal experiments?
• Could the thalidomide tragedy have been averted by more extensive animal testing?
• Do primates, being more closely related to us, make the best animal 'models'?