PETA Global Issue 3

Bringing Science Into the 21 st Century Science background: © iStock.com/MATJAZ SLANIC

The Consortium is working to replace the hundreds of millions of animals abused and killed in experiments each year with high-tech, animal-free test methods. A Smoking Robot and Three-Dimensional Tissues So far, the Consortium and its international affiliates have provided more than $5 million to develop and implement non-animal testing methods, including these: • A three-dimensional lung tissue model to replace the animals forced into the aforementioned inhalation tubes • An antitoxin produced without bleeding and abusing horses • Internationally used computer models for predicting toxicity instead of poisoning animals • A tissue model, now accepted around the world, to replace rabbits in corrosion tests that cause painful, oozing ulcers The Consortium also donated a “smoking robot” and three other non-animal inhalation machines to four international laboratories so that, for the very first time, they can test e-cigarettes and other hazardous substances under conditions that mimic human exposure and don’t use animals.

Consortium scientists also regularly meet with representatives of the chemical, pesticide, pharmaceutical, medical device, and personal care product industries to collaborate on strategies for implementing non-animal test methods. No Dogs, Rabbits, or Rats, Please: We Can Do Better Consortium scientists worked with personal lubricant maker Good Clean Love to persuade the US Food and Drug Administration to accept results – for the first time ever – from simple, non-invasive skin tests on human volunteers, instead of requiring the company to inject rabbits and guinea pigs with lubricants, and paved the way for other companies to do the same. They also persuaded the Indian government to accept non-animal methods to replace rabbits in drug tests, and in Canada, their efforts led to the elimination of a test in which dogs were repeatedly poisoned with pesticides over the course of an entire year. Thanks in part to the groundwork laid by the Consortium’s scientific research and collaboration, the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21 st Century Act recently became US law. The legislation,

Consortium scientists work with government agencies to replace animal tests with humane methods.

I magine being shoved into a tube so narrow that you can’t move a muscle while toxic substances that burn your lungs are pumped into it – and being left to suffer like that for hours. That’s what animals endure in crude, cruel tests that have been going on for decades, even though the results are unreliable, partly because superior, non-animal tests have not yet been adopted by slow-to-modernize regulatory agencies. But the PETA International Science Consortium Ltd., which celebrates its fifth anniversary this year, is changing that.

14 SMART SCIENCE