Importance Of Vivisection

Vivisection, conventionally known as animal testing, is known as the act of using animals for scientific purposes, specifically by dissection. Many people have chosen to disprove this method of scientific research, such as myself, due to not only the common concern for the animals themselves, or the recent advancements in the scientific field, but also the now-known ineffectivity of the practice. As an avid animal-lover myself, as well as a science-lover, dissections in Biology class were my least favorite part of the entire curriculum. As teachers would hand us our tools and the poor animals, I was unable to understand why all of this was necessary. What exactly was the point of this? And I never got the answer, as I never gained anything

For instance, the renowned discovery of penicillin was done using animal testing, specifically with mice. However, while vivisection may have been necessary years ago, with technology and scientific advancements, it can begin to be replaced with the use of cell cultures, which are grown cells made to form miniature organs, allowing scientists to test the effectiveness of new medications and other therapies. Maybe in the 1940s, vivisection would have been necessary, but nowadays there are more ways of conducting research in a more humane and effective way. People may interject by saying that animals are the perfect test subjects due to the fact that most animals being tested on, such as mice, have at least 98% similar DNA to our own, yet in reality, it is clear to see our differences. Many pro-vivisection organizations and pages fail to understand that a simple 2% can completely alter scientific experiments, with evidence lying simply in our appearances alone. This can be supported using a study of the comparison between the way that humans cope with severe trauma such as sepsis, and the way mice cope with it. As a result of this comparison, it was clear that mice and humans use completely different set of genes for this reason, making the differences outweigh the

Animal research is further supported by the authors, as they describe the consequences that science would face if animal research was no longer used, stating that the “assessment of the safety and efficacy of new medications would be severely compromised” (Cline, Sanchez 2). While the authors do understand how animal research was important in the past, allowing scientists to develop and test life-changing medications, they fail to recognize the fact that as time goes on, science changes, and that there are alternatives to animal research even today, such as what I had mentioned earlier with cell cultures, as well as many others that are being tested all the time, and such that will continue on into the future. This will not only help the future of science, but it will also help the animals all over whose fates are decided by the hands of those who wish to end