I dispute this - the results of animal research on therapeutic benefit are massively overstated.
Most animal research doesn't have therapeutic benefit as a goal or any prospects of contributing to any therapy. Pretty much none is successful on these terms.
Even so, animal research as a whole is still justified and gets public funds on these terms, without any evidence of results.
Can you name one therapy, confidently, perhaps even without searching, that has clearly come out of animal testing?
[To answer my own question, the only example that I'm immediately aware of is: thalidomide.]
Why, in any other circumstance, would we want to spend a precious resource in unlimited quantity on something that is expensive, unethical, and doesn't work?
There are significant problems with generalizing from from animal models to humans. There are also significant problems with the ways this research is authorized and conducted. This is true even if you discount all animal suffering that research creates.
However, to claim that animal research hasn't had a massive positive impact on the advancement of biological knowledge and healthcare is not based in reality.
Vaccines, cancer treatements, anesthetics, and so on. Could some or many of these have been discovered without the use of animals in research? Perhaps--but hindsight is what it is, and I'd rather do research on animals with known and well-trod methodologies to discover these now in parallel with developing new techniques to make these discoveries without the use of animal models; not eschew the models until we have alternate methods.
Animal testing has found hundreds of vaccines against HIV that work in primates, but none of them have worked in humans.
How is that a useful thing to spend time on? You have a model, and it's proven that your model doesn't work: I would expect you to throw away the model.
You could spend those excellent researchers and science budget on anything else, and expect better results.
(I get that all drugs have been tested on animals out of legislative requirement, but I hope it's clear we are talking about using animal models for de novo drug discovery).
For a business-oriented forum, I find it hard to understand why people see this as valuable.
Most animal research doesn't have therapeutic benefit as a goal or any prospects of contributing to any therapy. Pretty much none is successful on these terms.
e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1781970/
Even so, animal research as a whole is still justified and gets public funds on these terms, without any evidence of results.
Can you name one therapy, confidently, perhaps even without searching, that has clearly come out of animal testing?
[To answer my own question, the only example that I'm immediately aware of is: thalidomide.]
Why, in any other circumstance, would we want to spend a precious resource in unlimited quantity on something that is expensive, unethical, and doesn't work?