• Question: In your experiments are animals involved, and if so do you perform dangerous tests on them such as poisining?

    Asked by uchihasasukepat to Emma, Jen, Joseph, Michael, Mona on 13 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by beckyr, jadey1997.
    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      My research involves looking at galaxies in space so I don’t do any experiments on animals. I’m quite glad that I don’t have to use animals in my experiments because I still don’t know how I feel about it.

      My head as a scientist says that it’s important for us to do things like drugs testing on animals before we give the drugs to humans so that we reduce the chance of any new drugs hurting humans. If we could cure cancer or AIDS but had to test the medicine on animals first, I think most people would want animal testing to happen.

      My heart as an animal lover says that doing experiments on animals is unfair and that we should always find alternatives when possible. I’d like to think that this happens already and that scientists who do carry out experiments on animals do what they can to make the animals suffer as little as possible. There are also problems because medicines can affect animals in a different way to people so even if a drug seems to work for an animal, it could be harmful for humans. For example, chocolate is poisonous to dogs but most people love it!

      I think that the issues surrounding animal testing are very important and it’s good that you are thinking about them. This was a really good first question to answer 🙂 The BBC website has a good page about this which I read before answering your question – you might find it useful: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/using/experiments_1.shtml

    • Photo: Mona Gharaie

      Mona Gharaie answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      In my research, I study the strategies to reduce CO2 emissions released by industries, so I don’t do any experiment that involves animals. In some researche areas such as pharmacology, they may need to do some experiments on animals to study the effect of a specific drug, but I am glad I never work in such fields.

    • Photo: Emma Bennett

      Emma Bennett answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      Not at all, as a plant scientist I don’t have to deal with animals which makes my life a lot easier as it can be quite difficult to get permission to do animal testing.

      You see the great thing about working with plants is that I can pretty much do whatever I like to them, such as treating them with dangerous chemicals and no one has a problem with this.

      Where possible I believe that scientists try to use models instead of animals, so in the food department we have a lot of gut models to look at things such as how digestible certain foods are.

    • Photo: Michael Taggart

      Michael Taggart answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      An important question this. My research involves finding out how muscle cells in the body work mainly those in blood vessels and the womb of pregnant women. In many health complications like hypertension or premature labour, these cells don’t work as they should and so we have to develop drugs that can correct this in order to try and improve health outcomes for these patients. We are fortunate in that we do perform a lot of experiments using samples donated by women attending our local hospital (Newcastle RVI) so we do get a lot of information about how the human cells work. We also try to develop computer models that help to explain the biology we are working on. However, it is simply a fact that we cannot get all the information we require from these samples – there are not enough of the samples available, sometimes they are complicated by the patients having already been on some form of medication and it is, of course, quite another step to actually test the effects of new drugs inside a human body. This means we can still only develop new drugs by using animal models that most closely resemble the human scenario we are working on. So, unfortunately, it does mean using animals in experiments in parallel with the human tissues we study. If you do use animals, however, then every process is very carefully regulated by Home Office legislation called the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, 1986. And, certainly, we do not poison any animals.
      You might be interested in a DVD that the The Physiological Society has produced, which schools can order or you can view online, that aims to explain why animal experiments in science are necessary:
      http://www.physoc.org/site/cms/contentviewarticle.asp?article=991

    • Photo: Joseph Finlayson

      Joseph Finlayson answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I’m quite interested in trying out the Schroedingers cat thought experiment (It involves putting a cat in a box to subject it to quantum indeterminacy) in real life. But alas, it’s very difficult to get permission from university ethics commitees to do this.

      You can read a rhyme about Schroedinger’s cat here: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/113/the-story-of-schroedingers-cat-an-epic-poem. It’d probably be a separate question if you wanted the full story though.

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