AFMA is focused on improving healthcare by improving research. By using scientifically viable research methods we hope to see better drugs to brought to market faster and cheaper. Studying diseases in animals in hopes of predicting human response, developing drugs based on the misconception that animal studies are predictive for humans, and testing drugs for efficacy and safety in animals is not a viable way to accomplish this.
When AFMA makes statements like this we are frequently challenged with past discoveries that have been attributed to animal models. For example in the CNN.com panel discussion Michael Conn PhD of the Oregon Health Science University supported his claim that animal models are necessary by stating that tuberculosis was gone from planet because of research with animals and that heparin, an anticoagulant was made from pig intestines. On the same CNN segment, Tom Holder of Pro-Test stated that every single medical advance in human history has come about because of research using animals and that scientists would love to stop using animals because doing so is very expensive. The thinking behind statements such as these is that if animals were vital for past breakthroughs it is reasonable to assume they will be vital for future ones. This section of the website is dedicated to taking an in-depth examination of claims made pro-testing spokes people. (While the following essay can be read in isolation, the reader would be well served to read Animal Models in Light of Evolution to put the material in a more fully developed context.)
The facts about the material universe are sometimes counterintuitive and in the case of using animals today, science is studying diseases and drug responses on a very different level than in the 1800s and early 1900s. In the past, science was looking at traits and functions that were largely shared among species thus animals could be used as surrogate humans. Science is currently studying disease and drug response at the level where the differences between individual humans are of critical significance. This fact has implications when addressing how important animal models will be today regardless of how important they were in the past.
However, another point needs to be made when the topic of past breakthroughs is being debated. As time advances, revisionist history sometimes rears its ugly head. In this series of essays we will examine the role animals played in the most frequently cited breakthroughs. You will see that the role of animals has either been vastly exaggerated or simply falsely portrayed. You will also that the vested interest groups conflate the use of animals for tissue or as incubators with their use as predictive models. We propose that such misleading statements occur because society is more easily persuaded to allow the use of animals in current research if it can be convinced that animal predicted human responses or played a vital role on past breakthroughs.
Click below to examine the role of animals in:
The discovery and development of penicillin.
