• Question: Why do we need to use animals in medical research to produce new drugs?

    Asked by Dr P to Ali, Alex on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Alison Thomson

      Alison Thomson answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      We don’t have to, but if we didn’t we probably wouldn’t have created as many cures as we have today!
      We can’t reliably create an entire organism in a dish, so we have to use animals instead so that we have a full body system to look at when we’re seeing how well a drug works. Once we find out if a drug is useful, we move on to human trials – to make sure that it doesn’t have any bad side effects.

      Hope this helped!

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