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Arguments Against Animal Testing

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Words 784
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Cheyenne Lozano
Ms. Hopper
EH10, R1
10 Mar. 2016

Animal Testing

Many people think that animal testing is cruel and inhumane. Others think that it’s necessary in the medical field and will help advance medicine. It has helped with many medical discoveries, but it does have it’s flaws and hiccups that undermine it’s overall value. Though it still has some strong points, animal testing should be limited because animals are not suitable replacements for human drug testing, animal testing doesn’t produce accurate results, and there are many other reliable alternatives to it. Animals are not suitable replacements for human drug testing. The human body is extremely complex. Humans differ from animals anatomically, genetically, and metabolically …show more content…
There have been many drugs and medicines that, when tested on animals are shown safe, but when tested on humans are shown as hazardous or even harmful. One such drug is the arthritis drug Vioxx. the “arthritis drug Vioxx.. appeared to be safe and even beneficial to the heart in animals, but caused as many as 140,000 heart attacks and strokes in the United States alone” (Haugen 158). Even the animals said to share 98% of our genetic code, mice and rodents bred for research, don’t produce accurate results when compared to human results. According to Pat Dutt and Jonathan Latham in “Animal Testing is Unnecessary”, after conducting two different tests on human and mice each, the results showed that “... the activity of specific biological signaling pathways… were highly divergent between mice and humans” and the second test reads that “... the similarity between mice and humans was low” (Delzer). Though humans are relying upon these animals to guarantee that our medicine is safe, they may not, and in some cases have not given us applicable information or have given us misleading …show more content…
Some alternatives are organic and lab grown variables that can be tested on and produce accurate results compared to animal testing. One of the alternatives are cells that are grown in cultures and reproduce indefinitely. These cells can and are being used today to test chemicals before they need to be tested on animals (Judson 118). There are also synthetic skins, other chemicals, and various parts of fruits and vegetables that are being tested on and that produce accurate results. Other alternatives are computer programs and chips that can simulate human organs and even whole humans. An example of these is a computer chip called organs on a chip. This computer chip is a “computer chip that is lined with human cells that can replicate the mechanical and chemical functions of a living organ (Delzer). Also, according to PETA, there are also computer programs that can simulate human patients. These methods and many others can almost completely replace animals in the laboratory and can produce accurate, applicable results. With these, testing on living organisms isn’t necessary until the final phase of testing on

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