Animal Testing Pros And Cons

Research for the medical field has been an extremely large industry around the world for centuries. This research is used to find cures for diseases and illnesses which is necessary for the human population, but it costs millions if not billions of dollars annually and is a long process that can take up to 10 years to finish one medical trial. All drugs and treatments have to pass a model organism trial before being tested on humans in a clinical trial due to ethics in medicine. Model organisms are usually mammals, reptiles, or amphibians. Due to their many pros as lab animals rats and mice have become very popular in the medical testing industry. In his article “The Mouse Trap: The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease”, Daniel …show more content…
When mice and rats began to be the main lab animals there were many drugs that were released for treatment from their trials, which led to an increase in the use of them as lab animals. Lab rats and mice account for roughly four-fifths of the 12 million lab animals used in total (Engber). Other animals that make up the other one-fifth are fish, birds, guinea pigs, rabbits, hamster, horses, monkeys, pigs, dogs, and more (Engber). Over 88 million rats and mice are used during experiments annually (Engber). Having over half of the percentage of animals being tested on be rats and mice restricts the possibilities of finding more cures to a variety of diseases. If more scientists conducted experiments on different species then the chances would increase of finding cures to diseases. Since 1965 the number of papers involving mice and rats has more than quadrupled and almost half of all journal pages that were published from 2000-2004 were experiments conducted on rats and mice (Engber). Due to just the sheer amount of numbers it is obvious to see that mice and rats are used for a majority of the medical trials on organisms. As their popularity grows they have become the main focus on all experiments. If all experiments are using mice and rats then are the …show more content…
Mattson believes that if laboratories focus on one organism, mice and rats, they may be limiting their knowledge of other diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and tuberculosis (Engber). I agree with Mattson’s view on this because if so many cures have came out of mice then why couldn’t a whole new sector of cures that haven’t even passed the model organism stage be found in new species. Clif Barry, the government’s top researcher on tuberculosis, says in Engber’s article, “The truth is that for some questions, mice give you a very nice and easy model system for understanding what’s happening in humans, but mice are mice, and people are people. If we look to the mouse to model every aspect of the disease for man, and to model cures, we’re just wasting our time.” I agree with this quote because no matter how many genes that are mutated, added, or deleted, mice will never be humans so why are we explicitly testing on them? Barry is well known for his research on tuberculosis and it is a leading cause of death in the United States, and the same medicine from 1972 is being used for it (Engber). There hasn’t been a new medication released since then because a new drug/treatment needs to be passed through the three M’s (Engber). The first step is to grow the drug in a petri dish to see if it will slow the growth of the bacteria (Engber). If the drug/treatment passes that step then they