Question: Have you found a cure for the disease that you have been trying to cure? Do you test on Animals?

Alex Pool answered on 9 Nov 2014:

Sadly I haven’t found a cure for cancer yet, but every day our experiments let us know more about how cancer acts. So we’re always learning new things that we can then start to think about how we can turn that understanding into a potential cure.

As for the testing on animals, that’s a great question. I don’t work on animals with my current research but I used to. But with that I should explain more about how animal testing works.

Animal testing here in the UK has the strictest rules that you’ll find anywhere in the world. It’s all aimed at making sure the animal suffers as little as possible, if anyone breaks those rules then they’re in a huge amount of trouble as they’re breaking the law.

So any researcher who works on animals has to do an intensive course and are given a license, then each place that the animals are kept also has to have a license and are subject to surprise inspections from the government to make sure everything is in order.

There are different categories of experiment ranging from mild to moderate to severe. There have to be very special cases before anyone would be allowed to do a “severe” experiment and those are rare.

All scientists who work on animals work under the rules of what we call the 3Rs.
1) Reduce – so use as few animals as possible for your experiment
2) Replace – wherever possible don’t use animals at all, do it on cells in a petri dish or computer modelling
3) Refine – any procedures you do on animals permanently look at ways to make them better so the animal suffers as little as possible.

Any scientist I know who works on animals has the utmost respect for the animal, it’s not like on films where you get crazy scientists torturing animals – the animals are always the priority.

Sometimes animal experiments are the only way to do an experiment, as there’s only so much you can do with cells in a petri dish, but it’s always the last resort.

So whilst I don’t do animal experiments at the moment I can feel safe knowing that my colleagues that do are very strictly regulated as to what they can and cannot do, and that the animals always come first and are well looked after.