Wriiten Proposal Powerpoint Presentation

Table of Contents

Executive Summary 3

Proposal’s Purpose 5

Problem 5

Solution 6

Conclusion 8

References 9

Executive Summary

Purpose

This proposal explains why researchers need to stop animal testing and recommends the alternatives that should replace the use of animals when testing medicines and products. The proposal draws attention to the fact that animal testing sometimes leads to wastage and is unreliable.

Problem

Animal testing is considered unethical because it subjects animals to a lot of suffering, injuries, or even kills some of the animals. Besides, it is wasteful considering that of all the drugs that scientists find effective in animal testing, 92 % will fail to work in human beings. Additionally, even using animal testing to find a cure to human diseases does not enhance health among the humans. Medical advances that utilize animal experimentation also raise questions. Further investigations indicate that since scientists induce diseases in laboratory animals, there exists discordance between such illnesses and the ones that affect humans naturally.

Solution

The analysis of the issue reveals that it would be ideal to look for substitutes to animal testing to end the controversies. Therefore, researchers could adopt computational models that forecast how drugs could affect human beings. Bioinformatics and systems biology are other significant replacements of animal testing that can also test products and drugs before consumption by human beings. Moreover, several advanced technologies including MEG, MRI, TMS, EROS, and PET are useful animal testing alternatives that do not raise any unethical concerns. Other solutions to the animal testing debate are using human tissue studies, stem cell methods, in vitro techniques, microfluidics, epidemiology, genetic methods, as well as tissue engineering. The proposal also finds it useful to hasten the shift to more efficient and reliable substitutes by creating awareness regarding the shortcomings of animal testing.

Conclusion

The report concludes that although the world still needs to manufacture various products and medicines to treat human diseases, it is not necessary to kill animals. Instead, it is better and safer to embrace the alternatives to animal testing.

Animal Testing: Why it needs to stop

Purpose

A majority of the experiments to test the effectiveness of medicines as well as products utilized by human beings make use of animals. Although most scientists prefer animal testing, people have been proposing to reconsider the technique. Therefore, the purpose of this research paper is to discuss the importance of stopping animal testing. Besides, the paper will also suggest alternate methods that scientists should utilize during the analysis of medicine and products instead of using animals.

Problem

The biggest problem regarding animal testing in experimentation is that it is wasteful and unreliable. According to Hajar (2011), animals are not equal to human beings, and they are different, so it is not effective to use animal testing results on humans. For that reason, it 's hard to understand the human physiology by using animals in experiments since they are different from human beings. Another reason that makes animal testing unreliable is that the animals used in experiments differ in genetics and physiology across various species. Akhtar (2015) argued that improving animal studies have not enhanced their reliability because genetic and physiological differences lead to variance in results. For instance, rats might indicate varying test results although they belonged to the same strain but obtained from various environments. Therefore, the effectiveness of drugs in an animal model does not match its usefulness in treating human diseases. That is the reason, 92% of the drugs that were effective in animals do not work in human bodies. Furthermore, sometimes the scientists are unsuccessful when testing products and medicines using animals. At the same time, many animals are injured during the experiments, and others die (NEAVS, n.d.). Consequently, such animals die or suffer in vain because the experiments do not benefit anyone.

Apart from being unreliable and wasteful, animal testing is considered unethical by many people. The animals are held captive in laboratories where they undergo numerous tests. For that reason, the experiments lead to suffering as well as injuries. Thus, animal rights groups started criticizing the use of animals for biomedical research based on inhumane treatment and cruelty towards animals (Hajar, 2011). Some countries around the world even enacted regulations to ensure scientists used humane practices during animal testing. However, it is not enough to use ‘humane’ practices since the animals still suffer.

Moreover, animal testing to find a cure does not enhance human health. Animal testing is likely to result in abandonment of effective therapeutics. Besides, animal testing of human drugs is costly, and some of those funds could have been used in other valuable testing techniques. Medical advances using animal experimentation is also questionable because it might produce misleading safety studies that harm human beings (Akhtar, 2015). Another issue arises because animal models of diseases differ from human diseases. In the laboratory, the scientists artificially induce diseases in animals. Nonetheless, people acquire the illnesses naturally. Additionally, it is impossible for the scientists to reproduce human diseases in laboratory animals that are a 100 percent identical to the ones occurring naturally.

Solution

It is necessary to address the issue of animal testing considering all the problems associated with it. The best way to do so is to replace animal testing with non-animal substitutes. The first alternative to animal testing is computational models where the impact of drugs in humans is predicted using virtual human organs and metabolism computer programs (Arora et al., 2011). Systems biology is another method that is applicable in carcinogenesis and toxicology. For example, scientists could study the metabolism of drugs using fungi thus decreasing the number of laboratory animals. In vitro techniques could also replace laboratory animals in researching how chemicals cause human responses. Therefore, in vitro techniques do not need a living organism to perform cellular biology procedures since they just require a controlled environment.

Moreover, instead of using animals, microfluidics chips are useful in studying metabolism in the human body. The scientist adds the test drug to the human tissues placed in the microfluidics chips so that he or she could perform a computer analysis using the information. Stem cell methods are an effective animal replacement since they enable the researcher to test toxicology and diseases utilizing embryonic stem cells. Arora et al. (2011) also suggest that human tissue studies are useful in disease research where scientists obtain human tissues from volunteers. In the past, researchers have successfully studied HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases using human tissues. Advanced imaging technologies such as TMS, PET, fMRI, MRI, MEG and SPECT are other methods that could substitute animals in experimentation. Epidemiology entails doing research about the relationship of diseases and lifestyle factors using existing data has proved valuable in the past. Other alternatives to animal testing include genetic methods, tissue engineering, as well as bioinformatics.

The second solution to stopping animal testing is ensuring that the transition to using more humane and safer science is done quickly. As a result, it is crucial to creating awareness regarding the availability of reliable and more efficient substitutes.

Conclusion

Animal testing results in more harm than good, so it is the time the world finds an ideal solution to this problem. Consequently, substituting animals with other methods in testing drugs and products is necessary. Besides, it is not reasonable to kill animals just because the world is developing products such as soap, pesticides, and perfumes among others.

References:

Akhtar, A. (2015). The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 24(4), 407–419. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0963180115000079

Arora, T. et al. (2011). Substitute of Animals in Drug Research: An Approach Towards Fulfillment of 4R’s. Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, 73(1), 1–6. http://doi.org/10.4103/0250-474X.89750

Khan, F. (2011). Biotechnology Fundamentals. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

NEAVS. (n.d.). Animals in Science / Alternatives. Retrieved from New England Anti-Vivisection Society: http://www.neavs.org/alternatives/in-testing

RSPCA. (n.d.). Replacing animals. Retrieved from RSPCA: https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/laboratory/replacinganimals