Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise today to talk about a bill that would lift a mandate in the law dating back to the Great Depression. This mandate is that drugs have to be tested on animals before clinical trials in humans. This law was created back in the thirties--but I think makes no sense today--when the only methods we had back then were animal trials or human trials. But as the cofounder of a leading bioconvergence startup wrote in ``Forbes'' last December: [T]his legislation was passed 20 years before the first modern blood tests, 40 years before [the] modern computers and 60 years before the human genome was mapped. Now, we have all these tools and so many more to evaluate and ensure the safety of cosmetics and drug candidates before they reach human trials. The problem is, the law never caught up to the science. The law perversely requires drug developers to test on animals, which often means killing them after the test is over, even when nonanimal methods would work better. Passing this bill will put a stop to the needless suffering and death of millions of animals in labs across the country. An emeritus neurology professor at Mayo Clinic, David Wiebers, wrote earlier this month in the Kansas City Star that the-- [D]ifferences in genetics and physiology among species can change the way a drug is metabolized in the body. As a result, the predictive value of using animals for toxicity testing is far from optimal.…”