Moneim A. Fadali, M.D., Cardiac/Thoracic Surgeon, UCLA Faculty, Board
of Directors, Royal College of Surgeons of Cardiology, Canada, UCLA
Clinical Staff, as reported by Fur'n Feathers, October 1987:
"Animal models differ from their human counterparts. Conclusions
drawn from animal research, when applied to human disease, are likely
to delay progress, mislead and do harm to the patient."
Dr. Med. Bernhard Rambeck, since 1975 director of the Biochemistry
Department of the Society for Epilepsy Research in Bielefeld-Bethel,
West Germany. From his speech at International Symposium of April 25,
1987, Zurich:
"As a scientist, I am of the opinion that animal experiments bring
no progress in the diagnosis and therapy of epilepsies. I have a
well-founded suspicion that similar facts apply in other areas of
medicine."
Prof. Dr. Bruno Fedi, Director of the Institute of Pathological
Anatomy at the General Hospital in Terni, Italy, in a video interview
with CIVIS in Rome, January 11, 1986:
"The abolition of vivisection would in no way halt medical
progress, just the opposite is the case. All the sound medical
knowledge of today stems from observations carried out on human
beings. No surgeon can gain least knowledge from experiments on
animals, and all the great surgeons of the past and of the present
day are in agreement on that."
Moneim A. Fadali, M.D., F.A.C.S., Cardiovascular and Thoracic
Surgeon, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, in a video interview with
CIVIS representative Kathy Ungar in March 1986 (abstract):
"I agree that for the benefit of medical science, vivisection or
animal experimentation has to be stopped. There are lots of reasons
for that. The most important is that it's simply misleading, and both
the past and the present testify to that."
Prof. Dr. Salvatore Rocca Rossetti, surgeon and Professor of Urology
at the University of Turin, Italy, in the science program "Delta" on
Italian television, March 12, 1986:
"Nobody has become a surgeon because of having operated on
animals. He has only learnt wrongly through animals. I have been able
to see this over my many decades as a surgeon, also as a Director of
hospitals. I have carried out tens of thousands of operations on
people without ever performing them first on an animal."
Prof. Dr. Ferdinando de Leo, professor of Pathological and Clinical
Surgery at the University of Naples, in an interview with Hans Ruesch
for the television station "Teleroma 56" in Rome, May 6, 1986.
Translated from Italian:
"I have been a surgeon for 51 years. I am still performing
operations daily, and can state that in no way whatever do I owe my
dexterity to animal experimentation... If I had had to learn surgery
through animal experiments I would have been an incompetent in this
field, just as I consider those of my colleagues to be incompetent
who say that they have learned surgery through animal
experimentation. It's true that there are always advocates of
vivisection who say that one must first practise on animals in order
to become a surgeon. That is a dishonest statement, made by people
who reap financial benefit from it."
A.L. Cowan, MD, Acting Medical Officer of Health, New Plymouth, New
Zealand, N.Z. Listener, August 31, 1985, p.10:
"It is well-known that animal effects are often totally different
from the effects in people. This applies to substances in medical use
as well as substances such as 245y and dioxin."
Italian parliamentarian Gianni Tamino, researcher at the University
of Padua, the most important medical university in Italy, in an
interview with Domenica del Corriere, No. 48, December 1, 1984:
"As a researcher I am involved with mutagenesis and
cancerogenesis, two areas in which experimentation is fundamentally
indispensable. I therefore know what I am talking about. And I say
"No" to vivisection. Not only on ethical, but above all on scientific
grounds. It has been proved that the results of research with animals
are in no case valid for man. There is a law of Nature in relation to
metabolism, according to which a biochemical reaction that one has
established in one species only applies to that species, and not to
any other. Two closely related species, like the mouse and the rat,
often react entirely differently..."
Prof. Dr. Guilio Tarro, Head of the Dept. of Virology and Oncology at
the Medical Faculty of Naples University and partner of Albert Sabin,
in a letter dated 2nd of March 1983:
"I have finally come to the conclusion that no serious importance
can be attached to any laboratory experiment on animals in the study
of analgesics, for the results cannot in any circumstances be
extrapolated to human beings."
A. D. Dayan of Wellcome Research had admitted in Risk-Benefit
Analysis in Drug Research, Ed. J. F. Cavalla, 1981 (MTP) (In A'-Def.
Jan./Feb. 86):
"The weakness and intellectual poverty of a naive trust in animal
tests may be shown in several ways; e.g., the humiliating large number
of medicines discovered only by serendipitous observation in man
(ranging from diuretics to antidepressants), or by astute analysis of
deliberate or accidental (human) poisoning, the notorious examples of
valuable medicines which have seemingly 'unacceptable' toxicity in
animals, e.g., hepatic necrosis in mice, the stimulant action of
morphine in cats, and such instances of unprecedented toxicity in man
as the production of pulmonary hypertension which appeared during
animal tests. Because of the often misleading nature of animal
experiments this could divert attention from other possible
side-effects which may arise. In any case, human trials should
involve careful clinical observation whatever animal or alternative
tests have indicated."
Prof. Dr. Kurt Fickentscher of the Pharmacological Institute of the
University of Bonn, Germany, in Diagnosen, March 1980:
"Normally, animal experiments not only fail to contribute to the
safety of medications, but they even have the opposite effect."
Prof. Dr. Heinz Oeser, in one of the leading German weeklies, Quick,
March 15, 1979:
"As a cancer specialist engaged in clinical practice, I can't
agree with the researchers who believe that results obtained with
laboratory animals are applicable to human beings."
From Tierversuch und Tierexperimentator (Vivisection and Vivisector)
by Herbert Stiller, M.D. and Margot Stiller, M.D., Hanover, 1976:
"Practically all animal experiments are untenable on a statistical
scientific basis, for they possess no scientific validity or
reliability. They merely perform an alibi function for pharmaceutical
companies, who hope to protect themselves thereby."
In the supplement to the Neue Juristische Wochenschrift (New Legal
Weekly), in the Zeitschrift fur Rechtspolotik (issue 12, 1975), Prof.
Dr. Herbert Hensel, Director of the Institute of Physiology at
Marburg University, writes:
"In the opinion of leading biostatisticians, it is not possible to
transfer the probability predictions from animals to humans... At
present, therefore, there exists no possibility at all of a
scientifically-based prediction. In this respect, the situation is
even less favourable than in a game of chance... In our present state
of knowledge, one cannot scientifically determine the probable
effect, effectiveness or safety of medicaments when administered to
human beings by means of animal experiments... The example of the
Thalidomide disaster... illustrates this problem particularly
clearly. Such a medicine-caused disaster could no more be prevented
with adequate certainty through animal experimentation today than it
could at that time."
Prof. Dr. med. Hardegg, Animal Experimenter, at the Conference on
Laboratory Animals, in Hanover, 1972:
"Animal tests conducted to establish the effect of medicaments for
humans are nonsense."
Rene Dubos, Pulitzer Prize-winner and professor of microbiology at
the Rockefeller Institute of New York, wrote in Man, Medicine and
Environment (Praeger, New York, 1968, p. 107):
"Experimentation on man is usually an indispensable step in the
discovery of new therapeutic procedures or drugs... The first
surgeons who operated on the lungs, the heart, the brain were by
necessity experimenting on man, since knowledge deriving from animal
experimentation is never entirely applicable to the human
species."
Arnold D. Welch, Department of Pharmacology, Yale University School
of Medicine, in Drug Responses in Man, 1967:
"In part because of possible major differences in responses to
drugs in animals and man, the knowledge gained from studies in
animals is often not pertinent to human beings, will almost certainly
be inadequate, and may even be misleading."
Dr. James G. Gallagher, Director of Medical Research, Lederle
Laboratories, Journal of American Medical Association, March 14,
1964:
"Another basic problem which we share as a result of the
regulations and the things that prompted them is an unscientific
preoccupation with animal studies. Animal studies are done for legal
reasons and not for scientific reasons. The predictive value of such
studies for man is often meaningless -- which means our research may
be meaningless."
W. Mitchell Stevens, M.D. F.R.C.P, Medical World, Dec. 1, 1933,
p.335:
"...the results of drug experiments upon animals are, as far as
their application to man is concerned, absolutely useless and even
misleading."
Dr. G.F. Walker, Medical World, Dec. 8, 1933, p.365:
"My own conviction is that the study of human physiology by way of
experiments on animals is the most grotesque and fantastic error ever
committed in the whole range of human intellectual activity."