Marmoset

Draft Summary: not for publication or quotation.

I show how difficult it is to answer the most important question about laboratory animals: just how useful and necessary are animal experiments? I watched marmoset monkeys suffer and die in experiments that simulated human Multiple Sclerosis, and well after I’d thought the experiments were dead ends, the United States licensed an MS treatment based on the marmosets who had suffered in our laboratories. Animal activists and research defenders each have their lists of animal testing bombs and bombshells; neither list convinces me to shutter all the labs or to approve every scientist’s application to launch an animal experiment. The necessity of animal testing changes daily, as scientists develop new nonanimal alternatives and we build a database for scoring case-by-case how animal and nonanimal tests succeed in predicting human medical outcomes. I conclude that animal experiments are still necessary for medical progress, despite reat advances in developing nonanimal tests. But not every experiment deserves the privilege of
using lab animals. We need to find better ways to weed out experiments in advance that hold
insufficient promise to justify animal suffering they would cause.