I found a great resource on the Council on Humane Giving’s website. It’s a list of non-animal-using scientific research methods that the scientists who work for or are funded by humane charities conduct.

Here is a brief summary of each kind of research method:

Some scientists use epidemiological studies — basically observational studies where scientists examine historical trends using sophisticated methodologies. This kind of study is not as failure-proof as randomized experiments like animal-tests, but it has the benefit that it can take place over hundreds of years (whereas most randomized experiments are too expensive to keep going more than a few years at most) — the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease, for example, was determined this way.

Other scientists use in vitro research, which I’ve written about already.

Other scientists use in silico techniques (which I’d never heard of before, but it sounds very cool) — where they predict the toxicity of chemicals based on computer-modeled molecular structures — this can be useful to determine whether a chemical has the potential to cause cancer or birth defects.

Other scientists use “safety testing on human cells” instead of live rats. Interestingly enough, the Council for Humane Giving suggests that this is a more accurate measure of testing toxicity. It cites an evaluation that found that using human cells to test toxicity to humans was a heck of a lot more reliable than using live rats to test toxicity to humans (I’m a little unclear on how this works — it was a “Rat LD50 test” — I think this means you take a bunch of rats, and you keep injecting them with an untested chemical until 50% of the rats die horrible painful deaths. Then, if a huge amount of the untested chemical had to be used to kill half the rats, you decide that the chemical is probably nontoxic to people. But if only a few grams were needed, you decide the chemical is probably dangerous to humans). The evaluation found that using human cells to test toxicity was 83% more accurate compared to only 58% for the rat LD50 test.

I think these are all interesting research methods — I only hope more scientists will use them!

Categories : alternatives to animal testing, cruelty free