As ive just been on a similar forum which was most recently discussing penicillin i'll put this in. refer to http://www.curedisease.com or http://www.curedisease.net for more
A statement by Flemming himself:
How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940’s, for penicillin would probably never been granted a license, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized. [7]
And from Florey:
Mice were used in the initial toxicity tests [by Florey and Chain] because of their small size, but what a lucky chance it was, for in this respect man is like the mouse and not the guinea-pig. If we had used guinea-pigs exclusively we should have said that penicillin was toxic, and we probably should not have proceeded to
try and overcome the difficulties of producing the substance for trial in man. [8]
To Muhali3 (above) Im afraid I would have to disagree. There is not even a reliable correlation between mice and rats in terms of drug/chem effects., nor between any 2 different species no matter how similar. Having more DNA in common does increase applicability but it is still too low to be useful, it is more effective at getting drugs to the human trial phase and providing legal protection in rare cases where manufacurers/polluters are sued. Humans and bananas have 60% dna in common. dna is the keyboard but any tune can be played on it, ie it is when a gene is turned on and off that determines what is created. To quote Dr Ralph Hayward, former scientific director of huntington life sciences, "The best guess for the correlation of adverse toxic reactions between human and animal data is somewhere between 5% and 25%" and "90% of our work is done for legal and not for scientific reasons." 92% of drugs which pass the animal testing phase fail in clinical trials.
re. med. research as humans and animals only have the same diseases 1.16% of the time it is not surprising that the 'animal model' is a consistent failure in curing human disease. Retrospect is worthless, predictiveness is valuable but not provided by animal tests/research. selectively and retrospectively choosing animal tests/research whose results were correct for humans is not meaningful. i can only advise that people refer to sites created by the many doctors/scientists who are critical of vivisection for scientific reasons eg http://www.curedisease.net http://www.curedisease.com http://www.mrmcmed.org http://www.navs.org http://www.dlrm.org http://www.pcrm.org http://www.speakcampaigns.org.uk there are many others
Merged post follows:
Consecutive posts mergedFor brevity's sake it may be worth referring to chimpanzees, the closest animal to the human, having about 99% DNA in common with us. They do not get HIV aids when given HIV infected blood therefore it was allowed into the French blood bank killing about 8000 people, they do not get malaria or hepatitis, these 3 diseases kill millions of humans annually. They get polio via the respiratory system not the digestive system (as humans do), this delayed polio research by 25 years. They can consume strychnine in large quantities with little ill effect and do not get lung cancer from smoking, this (and other animal 'tests') delayed warnings on cigarette packets for 10 years. No human disease has been cured from monkey or other animal experiment. We have 30,000 diseases to choose from according to my googling and tens of millions of animals killed in medical research each year yet no cures. This is as good a model for humans as you can get in an animal. Genetically altering an animal does not make it a useful model for human medical research or testing of drugs etc. It does not become a CAM and the ADMET of a drug cannot be determined in this way. Animal experiements are occuring for reasons quite different to what the public is being told.
