How crucial is animal testing for the advancement of medicine?
Dr. Young: Medical researchers have many tools available to them, and when people get into debates about the usefulness and necessity of animals in medical research, it’s not a debate about whether we use an alternative or we use animals. There are many tools, and ways used to discover new medicines, new devices. There are epidemiological studies, there are in vitro tissue culture studies, there’s computer modeling, there are molecular database structural analysis; but they all fit together with the use of animals in medical research. For example, we make observations on populations of human beings. We say, okay, this population is more susceptible to this disease than other populations. What is similar about this population? We draw conclusions and make hypotheses. We can test some of those through modeling or in vitro testing, but ultimately, if you are going to go to clinical trial with a new drug or a new diagnostic modality, the federal government, the Food and Drug Administration
