Can we justify experiments on animals that have no obvious benefit to human health?
Scientists are very keen to protect what they see as their right to carry out experiments on animals that have no direct or immediate relevance to human health. This may seem entirely unjustified to us if we think that animal experimentation can only be justified to find better ways to treat human beings. The scientists point to examples like the biologists studying how some cells in the eye of the fruit fly form as the fly develops. It turns out that the gene that controls the development of these fruit fly cells is also involved in human cancer. Such research has led to the development of a new class of anti-cancer drugs, in a way no one could have predicted at the start.
