Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Special Section: Moving Forward in Animal Research Ethics
The author thanks the Humane Society of the United States for its support of the many campaigns to reduce and replace animals in toxicity testing.
Introduction
The systematic and widespread use of animals for toxicity testing and risk assessment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The first such toxicity testing conducted on behalf of public authorities in the United States, in the first decade of the twentieth century, used not animals but human volunteers. Dr. Harvey Wiley's famed Poison Squad consisted of twelve young males who were the subjects of feeding experiments from 1902 to 1904 that involved benzoate, borax, and formaldehyde.1The use of humans then gave way to an increasingly heavy use of laboratory animals for both safety tests and risk evaluation as well as for biomedical research. But there are many signs that safety testing approaches are now changing, and changing rapidly. That is why this article is entitled "Ending the Use of Animals in Toxicity testing and Risk Evaluation."
In 1976, when I first started promoting the concept of alternatives to the use of animals in biomedical research and safety testing, I never dreamed that I would be able to employ such a title during my advocacy career. However, I am now confident that such a goal is achievable within ten to fifteen years. In addition, I am confident that the new nonanimal paradigm will provide better human and environmental risk assessment more quickly and cheaply than the standard method of feeding chemicals to rodents (and a few nonrodents). In this article I outline the policy initiatives and technical developments that have led to this point and that support my central contention that the goal is attainable, desirable, and ethically obligatory.
Historical Background
In the 1950s, Sir Peter Medawar, a British immunologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1960 for his work on transplantation immunology, suggested to Major C. W. Hume, the founder of the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) in London, that biomedical laboratory technology had advanced to the point that opportunities existed to reduce the cost to laboratory animals by modifying techniques. Encouraged by Medawar, Hume persuaded UFAW to support a project to...