why have alternatives to animal skin testing lagged behind alternatives to animal eye testing?
TRANSCRIPT
J. Toxicol.Put. & Ocular Toxicol., 15(1), 95-96 (1996)
EDITORIAL
WHY HAVE ALTERNATIVES TO ANIMAL SKIN TESTING LAGGED BEHIND ALTERNATIVES TO ANIMAL EYE TESTING?
In the late 1970s, the animal rights movement was once again catalyzed in the United States by concentrating on the elimination of the Draize eye irritation test in rabbits. This focus on the eye of an emotionally attractive animal was a public relations masterstroke. This led to the funding of research into alternatives to the Draize test, to the almost total exclusion of funding research for alternatives to any other type of animal test.
The next target of the animal rights movement advocates was the LD,, test in rats.
Animal skin testing has not been targeted as such, but has been subsumed under the general ban on all animal testing.
Any rational approach to the socioscientific issue of animal testing would have capitalized on the existing science of cell physiology and the medical disci- pline of immunology to further existing skin culture tests as alternatives. Addi- tional research monies could then be devoted to furthering this existing base of scientific and medical knowledge and techniques.
When emotion and public opinion predominate, reason and common sense have no chance.
Some 15 years later now, a symposium devoted exclusively to alternative skin testing models and available commercial techniques has finally been held, to the credit of the symposium’s organizers and the proceedings’ editors.
This editorial first appeared in Volume 12, Number 2, 1993.
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96 JACKSON
We are pleased to offer this excellent set of proceedings to our readers in the hope that reason and common sense will have more to contribute at this stage of the development of alternatives to animal testing than emotion and public opinion.
Edward M. Jackson, Ph.D. EDITOR
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