Who are we testing on animals for? Are animal tests really valid?

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the justification for animal testing and whether it really works.

 

With industrialization, the development of new drugs and the medical industry has grown by leaps and bounds, and with it, the need to test the effectiveness of drugs. Along with this, the question of whether animal testing, which is the most widely used standard for judging drugs, is valid has been raised. Animal testing is defined as testing on all animals except humans. Currently, about 200 million animals are sacrificed in animal testing every year, including 3 million in South Korea alone. This is because many countries, including South Korea, use animal testing as a standard for drug approval. But is animal testing really valid?
Even people of opposite genders, races, and places of birth have less than 1% difference in their actual DNA sequences. However, the DNA sequence difference between monkeys and humans, the species most closely related to humans, is about 16%. Furthermore, the diseases that humans and animals share in common account for a very small amount of disease, about 1.16% of all diseases. In fact, the vast majority of cancers, AIDS, dementia, etc. are found only in humans. “The history of cancer treatment in humans is the same as the history of cancer treatment in mice, and we’ve been treating cancer in mice for decades, and frankly, it hasn’t worked in humans,” said Dr. Klausner of the National Cancer Center in the United States. This raises the question of whether animal testing, which is based on animals with large differences in genetic sequences and fewer common diseases, can be applied to humans.
There have been tragic cases of blindly following animal testing. In 1953, thalidomide was developed in Germany to prevent morning sickness in pregnant women and was proven to be effective through numerous animal tests. At the same time, it was exported to more than 50 countries and marketed as a “miracle drug”. However, the availability of thalidomide coincided with the birth of 12,000 deformed babies a year, a side effect not seen in animal studies. Despite the spike in birth defects, pharmaceutical companies claimed that thalidomide had no harmful effects on rats, rabbits, pigs, and other animals. Eventually, however, it was discovered that thalidomide’s optical isomerism caused a serious side effect of malformations only in humans.
Thalidomide is not the only drug with different effects in humans and animals. Penicillin, a commonly used antibiotic for bacterial diseases, is a beneficial drug for humans but a potentially life-threatening poison for guinea pigs. Morphine, a sedative for humans, is a stimulant for cats. The same drug can have different effects on different animals, so it doesn’t seem right to extrapolate the results of animal testing to humans.
It is also a problem that the results of animal testing are far too poor for the investment. “As the author of Animal Testing in Greed and Arrogance says in the book, “Rats are the ones who vomit up papers when they’re drugged,” and it’s true that animal testing accounts for a large proportion of research results. But here’s the rub. As mentioned above, 200 million animals are used in animal testing every year, while only about 25 new drugs are registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) every year. Repeating ineffective animal tests and publishing them in papers could lead to a second thalidomide scandal with misleading results.
Although not discussed in Greed and Arrogance, animal testing should be banned for ethical reasons. Animal testing is justified on the basis of different ethical standards for animals and humans. The ethical basis for animal testing is the presence or absence of moral will. Moral will is the willingness to enforce norms or behaviors that one believes one ought to follow in light of social concern, public opinion, or custom. There are two contradictions here. First, humans don’t have moral will. Newborn babies and brain-dead humans can hardly be considered to have moral will, let alone thinking. However, they are naturally excluded from animal testing. According to the ethical standards of animal testing, they are clearly subjects. In other words, moral will, which is important in animal testing, does not seem to be an important basis for distinguishing humans from animals. Furthermore, it is not yet known whether animals other than humans have moral will, yet they are used in animal testing. Furthermore, despite the fact that there are numerous papers in scientific journals showing that animals such as monkeys and dogs have moral will, they are still used as test subjects.
It’s also problematic that unnecessary animal testing is done outside of regulations. The Code states that “research involving animals should be conducted only after a determination has been made that the educational value or scientific importance of the research justifies the potential adverse effects on the welfare and well-being of the animals, and that persons wishing to use animals for research purposes should consider the welfare of the animals as an important factor in planning and conducting the research and treat them with respect.” In practice, however, experiments are being conducted that contradict the Code. In the early 21st century, experiments such as puncturing the throats of dogs and monkeys and exposing them to cigarette smoke were conducted despite the self-evident fact that cigarettes are bad for smokers. These experiments hardly satisfy educational values or respect for animals. It seems necessary to consider whether animal testing should be authorized, not only from a practical point of view, but also from an ethical point of view.
It is also ethically problematic to insist on animal testing when there are alternatives to animal testing. Unlike in the past, there are now many great alternatives to animal testing. Two of the best examples are in vitro studies and mathematical modeling. In vitro studies involve culturing the target organ of a drug in a test tube to see if the drug causes side effects in the organ in vitro. Currently, many cancers that occur only in humans cannot be tested in other animals, so cancer cells are metastasized to the target organ in a test tube. Mathematical modeling is the use of mathematical formulas to calculate whether a drug will cause side effects in humans. In fact, thalidomide, whose side effects were not available in animal tests, was predicted to cause side effects by mathematical modeling. It seems unreasonable to insist on animal testing just because it is more expensive and time-consuming than other methods, when there are more practical and ethical options.
The interest in medicine and the development of medicines will continue as it always has. Animal testing has contributed to the development of medicine and has led to the discovery of effective new drugs, but it has also led to the deaths of victims of misguided research, such as the thalidomide scandal. I believe that preventing a second Thalidomide should be prioritized over developing new drugs with unknown side effects. Of course, stopping animal testing once and for all, which is the majority of drug testing, will cause a temporary medical step backward. However, if we do not stop animal testing, which is both ethically and practically flawed, and blindly follow the results of animal testing, we do not know when the second or third thalidomide case will occur. Therefore, we should gradually reduce the use of animal testing and increase the number of alternative research methods. In addition, when animal testing is unavoidable, I hope that individual experimenters will take the utmost responsibility for the animals in accordance with the Code of Conduct, and strict controls will be needed to ensure that the rules of animal testing are followed by society.