Animal Testing

Animal testing has been receiving a lot of bad publicity in the past years. In the past century some of the most important discoveries have been found using animal testing. For example, in the 1880’s Emil von Behring found a vaccine testing on guinea pigs. The immunization was for diphtheria which is an upper respiratory. Behring received a Nobel Prize in 1901 for his discovery. Another person that used animal testing that you might be more familiar with is Jonas Salk. He was also a Nobel Prize winner and he used Rhesus monkey cross contamination studies to isolate three forms of polio which affected hundreds of thousands of people each year. It is said that each monkey that was killed saved 65 lives. Millions of lives have been saved because there was an immunization that was found through animal testing. These are just a few examples of what we can accomplish. Ethically we want to save human lives. What is the cost? I do agree though that there is times when animal testing could wait. But if we decide to abolish animal testing, what would happen to human kind? We have not had a major plague in a long time. Abolitionist would like to stop any kind of animal research no matter the consequence and that scares me. I consider myself a minimalist, if at the end of the day your testing is doing more good than harm to humanity I am ok with that.