Why Is Animal Testing Ineffective

90% of drugs fail in human trials despite promising results in animal tests. Animal testing is not only cruel, but highly unreliable, even dangerous, and it should not be allowed. The continued use of animals to test the effectiveness of medications and health interventions in humans is comparable to using smoke signals instead of phone calls as a method of communication. In all reality, animal testing has never truly worked because of its ineffectiveness, wasteful tactics, unethical ways, and there are other methods available. Now first of all, animal testing is ineffective. Animals do not get many of the human diseases that people get like major types of heart disease, many types of cancer, HIV, Parkinson’s disease, or schizophrenia. Signs

An example of unethical tactics is the monkey drug trials of 1969. In this experiment, a large group of monkeys and rats were trained to inject themselves with an assortment of drugs, including morphine, alcohol, codeine, cocaine, and amphetamines. Once the animals were capable of self-injecting, they were left to their own devices with a large supply of each drug. The animals were so disturbed that some tried so hard to escape that they broke their arms in the process. The monkeys taking cocaine suffered convulsions and in some cases tore off their own fingers which could of been from hallucinations, one monkey taking amphetamines tore all of the fur from his arm and abdomen, and in the case of cocaine and morphine combined, death would occur within 2 weeks. The point of the experiment was simply to understand the effects of addiction and drug use; a point which, I think, most rational and ethical people would know did not require such horrendous treatment of animals. Another study concluded that after injecting the monkey everyday with a dose of cocaine, and with the option to choose between cocaine and food, the monkeys chose the food. Obviously today's modern animal tests have improved over time, but that doesn't change the fact that these animals are being treated unfairly and inhumane. Most animals in laboratories are not legally protected. There aren’t nearly enough inspectors to properly inspect research facilities and

These modern methods include tests using human cells and tissues, advanced computer-modeling techniques, and studies with human volunteers. These and other non-animal methods are not totally ineffective, but rather advantageous to human growth, and they usually take less time and money to complete. One example of the state-of-the-art non-animal research methods is in vitro testing. Harvard’s Wyss institute has created “organs-on-chips” that contain human cells grown in a system to mimic the structure and function of human organs and organ systems. Instead of animals in disease research, these chips can be used for drug testing, and toxicity testing and have been shown to replicate human physiology, diseases, and drug responses more accurately than crude animal experiments do. Each chip can represent a different type of organ in the body. In the lung chip there are human airway cells from the air sack and human capillary blood cells divided by a membrane. The whole thing stretches and relaxes like our lung does when we breathe. This method will be more human relevant because they are using human. Not only can this chip detect what's happening to the inside of the body, it can see the reactivity to skin cells too. This chip developed a method to study the potential of a substance to cause a skin allergy in