Animal Testing

3 Pages 763 Words

Animal Research
A health care crisis exists in the land of milk and honey. In the United States, approximately 37 million people have no medical insurance. Another 50 million people have inadequate insurance (). Life threatening diseases are increasing at an alarming rate, and the cost of containment of those diseases is rising proportionately. Because timely cures are so important, the need for focused and accurate research is vital. In the past, animal testing has produced some valuable results, but most of the experiments conducted today lack validity. The key to solving the health care crisis lies in appropriate and responsible funding for medical research. Each year, however, the National Institute of Health irresponsibly allocates 8.3 billion dollars to unrelated experiments classified as basic research ().
One example of irresponsible funding is the fact that basic research is not limited by the value of the expected outcome. While most people view animal testing as carefully regulated and deemed valuable, the definition of basic research for scientific purposes is "any experiment born of sheer scientific curiosity" (LATimes, June 8, 1993). The same publication lists the United States as the world leader in basic research. When Drs. William H. Danforth and Doris Schoenhoff were interviewed in the June, 1992 issue of Academic Medicine they concurred, "Most research is trivial and never cited anyway.” To obtain funding at the taxpayer's expense, a basic research program does not need validity. Once the NIH awards the grant, the experimenter can claim that the work has significance, and the NIH extends the grant year after year without question. In an attempt to reduce paperwork and red tape, the NIH has now established the MERIT program, an acronym for Method to Extend Research in Time. This program allows experimenters to extend their grant monies year after year with even less regulation.
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