Experimentation From the Horses Mouth
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I have taken care to include whole quotes as I find them. Accordingly, if you pay attention you may find a sentence that if removed would have made the statement far more demeaning to certain people and to the activity of experimentation in general. Because I believe in keeping things in relative context though, I have avoided this entirely. Therefore, these statements are as issued.

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(23 Quotations)

• Dr. Jonathan Allan (Virologist: The Southwest Foundation) – "We assume, as a given, that these primates carry pathogens that are infectious to humans. You assume that it’s something that can kill you. But then in the next breath we turn around and ship a baboon up to Pittsburgh, they open it up, probably every human in the OR [operating room] is exposed to whatever is in there, and they stick it into a human. Does that seem rational?"

• Dr. Robert Anderson (Pathologist: University of New Mexico) – "We know more about the causes of death in old mice than we do about the causes of death in old people."

• Donald Barnes (Former Researcher: Air Force) – "When I first left the laboratory, I remained skeptical, stating 'there are some good [animal] experiments to be sure, but the majority are worthless,' or words to that effect. Now after years of looking for those 'good' experiments, I have long since concluded that they do not exist. But I had to do the looking for myself. I was simply too conditioned to the 'Party Line' to accept anyone’s word for this."

• Dr. B. B. Brodie (Pharmacologist) – It is "a matter of pure luck that animal experiments lead to clinically useful drugs."

• Dr. Irwin Bross (Former Researcher: Roswell Park Memorial Institute of Cancer Research, testimony before the United States Congress, 1981) – "the discovery of chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of human cancer is widely heralded as a triumph due to the use of animal models [. . .] However, there is little, if any, factual evidence that would support these claims [. . .] Indeed, while conflicting animal results have often delayed and hampered advances in the war on cancer, they have never produced a single substantial advance in either the prevention or treatment in human cancer."

• Dr. Irwin Bross – "Whenever government agencies or polluting corporations want to cover up an environmental hazard, they can always find an animal study to 'prove' their claim. They can even do a new animal study which will come out the way they want by choosing the 'right' animal model system."

• Dr. Irwin Bross – "From a scientific standpoint, what is pertinent is that [. . .] 'animal model systems' in cancer research have been a total failure [. . .] not a single essential new drug for the treatment of human cancer was first picked up by the animal model system. All of the drugs in wide current clinical use were only put into animal model systems after finding clinical [human researched] clues to their therapeutic possibility. The money [granted for animal research] was spent [. . .] for two main reasons. First, it was a highly profitable undertaking for certain medical schools and certain research institutions that were incapable of doing any genuine cancer research. Second, it was sustained by a superstitious belief in a grossly scientific notion: Mice are miniature men [. . .] In sum, from the standpoint of current scientific theory of cancer, the whole mystique of the animal model systems is hardly more than superstitious nonsense [. . .] The moral is that animal model systems not only kill animals, they also kill humans. There is no good factual evidence to show the use of animals in cancer research has led to the prevention or cure of a single human cancer."

• Dr. Tony Chu (Hammersmith Hospital, London) – "If you paint these products onto mice [. . .] you can induce skin cancers. But how that relates to the human system, nobody actually knows."

• Clinical Oncology (stated by an oncologist) – "It is in fact hard to find a single, common solid neoplasm [cancer] where management and expectation of cure has been markedly affected by animal research. Most human cancers differ from the artificially produced animal model…"

• Dr. Vernon Coleman (Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, UK) "...many vivisectors still claim that what they do helps save human lives. They are lying. The truth is that animal experiments kill people, and animal researchers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women and children every year."

• Dr. De Vries (performed first artificial heart transplant with the Jarvick 7, modeled and tested successfully in animals the first human recipient died) – "You can’t know the answer to strokes by looking at animals."

• Dr. C. Dollery – "For the great majority of disease entities, the animal models either do not exist or are really very poor. The chance is of overlooking useful drugs because they do not give a response to the animal models commonly used."

• Dr. C. T. Eason – "A comprehensive program of animal studies in mouse, rat, hamster, guinea pig, dog, and rhesus monkey completed prior to clinical trials failed to predict the occurrence of reversible, asymptomatic thrombocytopenia in up to twenty percent of patients receiving long term treatment with amrinone (medication used to treat heart failure, some patients died as a result of drug after it cleared tests on animals)."

• Prof. Dr. Bruno Fedi (Director: Institute of Pathological Anatomy in Terni, Italy) – "The abolition of vivisection would in no way halt medical progress, just the opposite is the case. All the sound medical knowledge of today stems from the observations carried out on human beings. No surgeon can gain the least knowledge from experiments on animals, and al the great surgeons of the past and present day are in agreement on that."

• Dr. Mark Feinberg (Leading AIDS Researcher) – "What good does it do you to test something in a monkey? You find five or six years from now that it works in the monkey, and then you test it in humans and you realize that humans behave totally differently from monkeys, so you’ve wasted five years."

• Moneim A. Fidali (Cardiothoracic Surgeon) – "I agree that for the benefit of medical science, vivisection or animal experimentation has to be stopped. There are lots of reasons for that. The most important is that it’s simply misleading, and both the past and the present testify to that."

• Alexander Flemming (Inventor of Penicillin) – "How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940s, for penicillin would probably never been granted a license, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized (Penicillin kills most animals)."

• Dr. James G. Gallagher (Director of Medical Research: Lederle Laboratories) – "Another basic problem we share as a result of the regulations and the things that prompted them is an unscientific preoccupation with animal studies. Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons. The predictive value of such studies for man is often meaningless-which means our research may be meaningless."

• Dr. S. Glushakova (et al. published in Nature Medicine) – "Animal models do not fully mimic the characteristic tissue pathology of human HIV infection."

• Handbook on Laboratory Animal Science (most revered textbook pertaining to experimentation on animals) – "Uncritical reliance on the results of animal tests can be dangerously misleading and has cost the health and lives of tens of thousands of humans, as in Ciba Geigy’s clioquinol scandal, the Opren disaster of Distra Products Ltd., or ICI’s Eraldin calamity."

• Dr. Werner Hartinger, M.D. (Chief Surgeon: West Germany, 1988) - "Vivisection is barbaric, useless, and a hindrance to scientific progress."

• Dr. Werner Hartinger, M.D. – "There are, in fact, only two categories of doctors and scientists who are not opposed to vivisection: those who don’t know enough about it, and those who make money from it."

• Dr. Herdegg (Vivisector: Conference on Laboratory Animals) – "Animal tests conducted to establish the effect of medicaments for humans are nonsense."

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