• Question: Do you test anything on animals in your lab?

    Asked by hannahwhitehead to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 12 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by chloconibear, alexist, miniguy99.
    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      I do not work with animals. I am not against animal testing where it needs to be done for research to progress, but I would really not enjoy working with animals in the lab. I know scientists who work with animals and none of them enjoy the experiments with the animals.

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      I used to do research using cells from mice, I had to take the tissue from mice as it was impossible to get it from human patients. It was not something I enjoyed and I was very careful to use as few mice as possible for my research.

      Now I don’t do any research on animals but unfortunately it is sometimes necessary to progress research to make human therapies. There is a lot of progress into finding alternatives but at the moment these are still not quite good enough to replace animal models.

    • Photo: Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan

      Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      Hi hannahwhitehead, I do take tissues from mice but as Matt says, great efforts are made to use as few as is possible. In fact there’s an organisation called NC3Rs which encourages scientists in the UK to use as little as possible and to work in as humane a way as is possible.

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