Betsy’s mission is to help FLOE make the EDM 25 science hearing happen. We all need to achieve this science hearing because the Government currently believes animal testing saves human lives. Whilst the Government is under this illusion, nothing will change. Animals do not have rights, and laboratory animals are entirely excluded from the Animal Welfare Act, and the protection of its unnecessary suffering clause. The Government’s current scientific policy is “why fix what’s not broken?”
We need to pressure the Government to hold the EDM 25 science hearing, which was supported by 93 cross-party MPs last session, to demonstrate publicly that animal experiments are widely reported to be entirely failing the search for human treatments and cures. If the vivisection community had facts on their side they could take this opportunity to try and prove us wrong; but the animal experimentation community is opposed to their position being judged in the science hearing, and this, of course, speaks volumes as an important conversation in its own right.
The EDM 25 science hearing has conditions endorsed as “well set out and fair” by human rights defence barrister Michael Mansfield QC. The hearing’s format is based on the tried and tested practice of peer review: two opposing science position papers (one for and one against animal experiments) will be judged by a panel of independent experts from the relevant science fields, including evolutionary biology, complexity science, genetics, basic research, chaos theory, clinical research and philosophy of science.
The hearing needs to be mandated by the Government in order to have legal consequences; the expert judges can then make their decision on claims that animal testing ‘saves human lives’: the judges will be able to rule on current evidence that animal models are unequivocally demonstrated to fail as predictive models of humans.
After the experts have passed their judgement, animal modelling can be immediately banned, with no procrastinating about asking the Government adhere to outdated, cruel 3Rs legislation which prolongs the false science of animal experimentation by stating such experiments can continue if there is no ‘validated replacement’. Precious funding can be immediately redirected to state-of-the-art human-based research, such as gene-based medicine, where today’s treatments match the individual DNA of each unique human patient – and we now know this is different even for identical twins.
The experts who illustrate FLOE’s scientific evidence
The science experts who illustrate FLOE’s evidence are based at Americans and Europeans for Medical Advancement; led by Dr. Ray Greek and the late Dr. Niall Shanks, these brilliant scientists defeated plans by Cambridge University to build a multi-million pound primate laboratory, with a ruling against that lab on ‘national interest, medical and scientific grounds”. Dr Jane Goodall celebrates Dr. Greek’s victory over that primate laboratory in her video, below: