Is Animal Experimentation Ethical

Is animal experimentation ethical? Is there a point in time during the experimentation where the animal testing becomes extremely unethical? Animal experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to test the safety of other products. "Experimenting with animals before testing on people is a crucial human rights protection required by the famous Nuremberg Code"(Smith). Many of these experiments cause pain to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other ways. The growing criticism of painful experimentation on animals is matched by a growing concern over the threat restrictions on the use of animals would pose to scientific progress. Whether such experiments should be allowed to continue has become a matter for public

Morality is a creation of social processes in which animals do not participate. Moral rights and moral principles apply only to those who are part of the moral community created by these social processes. Since animals are not part of this moral community, we have no obligations toward them. But we do have moral obligations to our fellow human beings, which include the duty to reduce and prevent needless human suffering and untimely deaths, which, in turn, may require the painful experimentation on animals. Scientists say that banning animal experiments would mean either an end to testing new drugs or using human beings for all safety tests. Animal experiments are not used to show that drugs are safe and effective in human beings - they cannot do that. Instead, they are used to help decide whether a particular drug should be tested on people. Animal experiments eliminate some potential drugs as either ineffective or too dangerous to use on human beings. If a drug passes the animal test it 's then tested on a small human group before large scale clinical

Some believe there is no adequate alternative to testing on a living, whole-body system. Living systems like human beings and animals are extremely complex. Studying cell cultures in a petri dish, while sometimes useful, does not provide the opportunity to study interrelated processes occurring in the central nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system. Evaluating a drug for side effects requires a circulatory system to carry the medicine to different organs. Also, conditions such as blindness and high blood pressure cannot be studied in tissue cultures. While others think there is an alternative testing methods now exist that can replace the need for animals. In vitro testing, such as studying cell cultures in a petri dish, can produce more relevant results than animal testing because human cells can be used. Microdosing, the administering of doses too small to cause adverse reactions, can be used in human volunteers, whose blood is then analyzed. Artificial human skin is made from sheets of human skin cells grown in test tubes or plastic wells and can produce more useful results than testing chemicals on animal skin. Computer models, such as virtual reconstructions of human molecular structures, can predict the toxicity of substances without invasive experiments on