Question: would you ever use animals to experiment on them

Mark Travis answered on 16 Jun 2010:

It is a very difficult choice whether to use animals in experiments or not. In a perfect world, we would never use an animal in an experiment. But the world I am afraid is not perfect……

Say for example you are wanting to use a new drug treatment in humans. Is it OK to test this straight on humans to see if it had side-effects? Or is it better to use an animal to figure this out? Obviously you don’t want to harm the animal, but if we are ever going to use any medicines, we need to have a good idea whether they will be safe or not.
Also, in order to be able to know what biological things to target with new drugs, we need to understand how biology works and what goes wrong in disease. Many animals have remarkabely similiar biology to humans, so make very good models for human disease. Again, no one wants to use animals- but what other choice is there if we are going to be able to design medicines to help cure diseases of humans, and also diseases of animals themselves?