Other Ways to Test Products Besides Animal Testing

Before medical or cosmetic products can be put on the market, scientists must test them rigorously to ensure that nothing about the product might harm consumers and, in the case of medical products, that they have the desired treatment effects. In the process of creating or testing products, researchers often use laboratory animals. They may kill the animals to test products on the animals' tissues, or keep them alive to test the product's effects on a living organism. Either way, many people have ethical objections to the use of animals as test subjects and call on the scientific community to use alternatives whenever possible.

Computer Models

• Computer models can often predict how substances will react with each other.

  In many cases it is possible to create computer simulations of the human body's systems, showing the effects of particular diseases or treatments. The advantage of computer simulations is that they relate specifically to humans, eliminating the possibility of an animal responding differently to a product than a human would. However, by definition computer models rely on current scientific knowledge and data, and are therefore limited in their ability to generate new discoveries.

Epidemiological Studies

• An epidemiological study, or population study, analyzes the behaviors of large numbers of humans, looking for links between behavior and disease. Epidemiological studies can find correlations between diet and certain types of cancer, or between the use of certain products and the incidence of particular diseases. Epidemiological studies do not use animals, but they are useful only after particular products, or at least the product's ingredients, are already on the market and are being used by large numbers of people.

In Vitro Testing

• In vitro testing means cell and tissue cultures are grown outside of the living animals.

  Sometimes, researchers can test substances on human tissues rather than on animals. They can grow human cells in the lab and do tests directly on the human tissue. There are two main advantages to in vitro testing: low cost, and the fact that it shows the effects of a substance on actual human cells. On the other hand, in vitro testing does not show what a product's effect may be on a living organism, which is far more complex than a petri dish full of cell cultures.

Ethically-Sourced Animal Tissue

• If these pets die of natural causes, their owners could donate the bodies to science.

  Many animal-rights activists feel that doing tests on dead animals would be ethical if the labs acquired the animals' bodies in ethical ways. They call on the scientific research community to use the bodies of animals that had been wild or living as pets, and that had died of natural causes. They also call on veterinarians who do surgery on animals to donate any leftover tissue, such as organs or tumors that were removed, to science research. According to this view, scientists could also use animal tissues that were abandoned in the wild, such as the placentas left behind after an animal gives birth.