“How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940’s, for penicillin would probably never been granted a license, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized”

“… prevention [of polio] was long delayed by the erroneous conception of the nature of the human disease based on misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys.”`

“…every one of the more than 50 preventive vaccines and more than 30 therapeutic vaccines that were successful against HIV/AIDS in primate studies has failed in human clinical trials.53”

“Uncritical reliance on the results of animal tests can be dangerously misleading and has cost the health and lives of tens of thousands of humans.”

“More than 800 chemicals have been defined as teratogens in laboratory animals, but only a few of these, approximately 20, have been shown to be teratogenic in humans.”

“The observation that great apes, chimpanzees in particular, were immune to the AIDS causative agent, HIV-1, prompted scientific experts to advise the French government that blood, possibly contaminated with HIV, posed no risk…the French government decided to authorize transfusion of the contaminated blood. As a consequence, some 5,000 haemophilic patients became seropositive, many later developed AIDS.”

“…by 1963 prospective and retrospective studies of human patients had already shown a strong correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.17,18 In contrast, almost all experimental efforts to produce lung cancer in animals had failed…As a result, health warnings were delayed for years, while thousands of people died of lung cancer.”

“I have never known a single good surgeon who has learned anything from vivisection.”

“…90% of the drugs still fail because of either unacceptable toxicity, or once we give them to humans we find that they’re not working the way they were supposed to. So why are these facts so grim? Because we have used a mouse model that is misleading. They do not mimic human disease well and they’re essentially worthless for drug development.”

“Drugs known to damage the human foetus are found to be safe in 70% of cases when tried on primates.”

“The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades, and it simply didn’t work in humans.”

“It’s been estimated that cancer drugs that enter clinical testing have a 95 percent rate of failing to make it to market, in comparison to the 89 percent failure rate for all therapies . . . Indeed, “we had loads of models that were not predictive, that were [in fact] seriously misleading,”

“Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons. The predictive value of such studies for man is meaningless.”

“For the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, animal experiments provide an important legal sanctuary. In cases of death or disability caused by chemical products or adverse drug reactions, the responsible companies claim due diligence by pointing out that they performed the legally prescribed “safety tests” on animals and are therefore not accountable. As a result, the victims or their families most often come away empty-handed after suing for damages.”

“The great majority of perinatal toxicological studies [in animals] seem to be intended to convey medico-legal protection to the pharmaceutical houses and political protection to the official regulatory bodies, rather than produce information that might be of value in human therapeutics.