How will we combat AIDS without animal experimentation?
Billions of dollars have been spent trying to inflict AIDS on animals over the last twenty years, and these efforts have been entirely futile. Though researchers have succeeded in infecting chimpanzees with HIV, none has progressed to AIDS. Given this inability to produce an adequate animal model, it is foolish to assume that animal experimentation will lead us to therapies and cures for this terrible disease. Some in the AIDS community, with lives hanging in the balance, have come to this conclusion and engage in political protests against animal experimentation. Even scientists who have supported the chimpanzee model now vehemently criticize its lack of scientific merit: The chimpanzee model doesn’t get a lot of support in the scientific community. I just don’t see much coming out of the chimp work that has convinced us that that is a particularly useful model… [an animal model] that takes 12 to 14 years to develop doesn’t sound to me to be ideal.
Logic dictates that if a researcher cannot successfully induce AIDS in another species, they will neither cure it in humans using animal experiments. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to inflict AIDS on animals over the last twenty years, and these efforts have been entirely futile. Though researchers have succeeded in infecting chimpanzees with HIV, none has progressed to AIDS. Given this inability to produce an adequate animal model, it is foolish to assume that animal experimentation will lead us to therapies and cures for this terrible disease. Some in the AIDS community, with lives hanging in the balance, have come to this conclusion and engage in political protests against animal experimentation. Even scientists who have supported the chimpanzee model now vehemently criticise its lack of scientific merit:The chimpanzee model doesn’t get a lot of support in the scientific community.
