Insulin, the polio vaccine and diphtheria antitoxin all began with animal experiments
Before 1922 a diabetes diagnosis meant death. Frederick Banting's experiments on dogs showed that extracts from the pancreas could treat the disease, leading to insulin. Much of modern medicine has a similar backstory, which is why animal research remains both widely used and fiercely argued over.
Animal testing means using non-human animals as models to answer scientific and medical questions, usually in universities, medical schools, drug companies and defence laboratories. It works because all living things share ancestry, so many metabolic and developmental pathways are conserved across species, letting researchers study disease without risking human subjects. The earliest references come from Greek writers; Aristotle and Erasistratus experimented on living animals, the Roman physician Galen dissected pigs and goats, and in 12th-century Moorish Spain the physician Avenzoar tried surgical procedures on animals before operating on people.
The list of results is long. In the late 19th century Emil von Behring showed the effects of diphtheria toxin in guinea pigs and developed an antitoxin that helped end the disease as a major threat; the Iditarod sled race recalls the 1925 serum run to Nome. John Cade's guinea pig studies revealed the calming properties of lithium salts, transforming care for bipolar disorder. Jonas Salk used rhesus monkeys to identify the most virulent polio strains; after his vaccine was released in 1955, US polio cases fell fifteen-fold within five years, and Albert Sabin's improved version followed in 1963.
Animals also went to space, with the dog Laika orbiting Earth on 3 November 1957. Armadillos helped produce leprosy treatments in the 1970s, and in 1974 Rudolf Jaenisch created the first transgenic mammal by inserting monkey DNA into mice.
The scale is vast. About 192 million vertebrates, from zebrafish to primates, were estimated to be used annually as of 2015, and 11.5 million animals were used in the European Union in 2011. Rules range from strict to relaxed depending on the country. Supporters point to medical progress; opponents raise cruelty and question how reliably animal results translate to people, and efforts to develop alternatives are under way. Even the vocabulary is loaded: vivisection originally meant cutting open live animals, but is sometimes used as a pejorative for any such experiment.
Source: Animal testing
