The issue of what role, if any, animal experimentation played in past discoveries in not relevant to what is necessary now for research and safety testing. Prior to scientist developed the cell and tissue cultured common today, animals were routinely used to harbor infectious organisms. But there are few diseased for which this is the case-modern method for vaccine productions are safer and more efficient. Animal toxicity tests to determine the potency of drugs such as digitalis and insulin have largely been replaced with sophisticated laboratory tests that do not involve animals. (Barnard, 1998).

The industry has always been quick to exploit the less than conclusive results of animal tests, especially in fields such as onconlogy. Consequently, the drug saccharin remains on sale to the public because it appears to cause bladder cancer only in male rats. The ingestible contraceptive drug Depo-Provera was banned in the United States over twenty years ago on the basis that is caused cancer in baboons and dogs. However, The Food and Drug Administration and The American Health Regulatory Authority recently reinstated the drug because twenty years of human experience in those countries, which did not prohibit its use, had convinced the Food and Drug Administration that Depo-Provera did not cause cancer in humans. Another example that is even more bizarre is the drug Tamoxifin, which is used to treat human breast cancer. Even though Tamoxifin reduces the incidence of mammary cancer in rodents, it actually increases the presence of liver cancer in rodents, and appears to be also toxic to the kidney (Menache, 1998).

The use of animals for research and testing is only one of many investigative techniques available. Dr. Barnard believes that although animal experiments are sometimes intellectually attractive, they are poorly suited to addressing the urgent health problems of our era, such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, birth defects and AIDS. In addition, animal experiments can mislead researchers or contribute to illness or deaths by failing to predict the toxic effects of drugs. The U.S. General Accounting Office reviewed 198 of the 209 new drugs marketed between years of 1976 and 1985 and found that 52% had “serious postapproval risks” not predicted by animal tests or limited human trials. These risks were defined as adverse side effects that could lead to disability, hospitalization or death. Consequently, these drugs had to be relabeled with new warnings or withdrawn from the market. (Barnard, 1998).

All of the chemicals mentioned above had been tested on different animals prior to their use on the soldiers. Nevertheless, the animal tests were evidently not able to prevent the Gulf War veterans and their children from becoming the real guinea pigs. It is a known fact that the military uses unknown numbers of animals to test all kinds of weapons, including atomic bombs and its chemical and biological weapon arsenal. But it would be a terrible mistake to assume that the military used only animals, and not humans, as guinea pigs. Over the last decades it has been repeatedly revealed that our military has been caught red-handed conducting experiments not only on thousands of unsuspected and

Some topics in this essay:
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