Animal model systems in cancer research have been a total failure…not a single essential drug for the treatment of human cancer was first picked up by an animal model system. All of the drugs in wide current clinical use were only put into animal model systems after finding clinical clues to their therapeutic possibility. The money was spent…for two main reasons. First, it was a highly profitable undertaking for certain medical schools and research institutions that were incapable of doing any genuine cancer research. Second, it was sustained by a superstitious belief in a grossly unscientific notion: mice are miniature men…in sum, from the standpoint of current scientific theory of cancer, the whole mystique of the animal model systems is hardly more than superstitious nonsense…the moral is that animal model systems not only kill animals, they also kill humans. There is no good factual evidence to show the use of animals in cancer research has led to the prevention or cure of a single human cancer.
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…one of the great fallacies in this calculation is that they are assuming that the mouse or rat or the hamster predicts for man, and we have no basis for this prediction…So it’s again a half-baked guess… Does the animal model have any relevance to human disease? If not we’re wasting a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of good scientists, and a lot of good space at NIH… I completely agree with Dr. Clayton that extrapolation is unscientific… the chief objective here is to keep us all employed and to make sure we do interesting experiments so we can keep coming back to nice places like this.
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The recommended daily allowances are based on arbitrary, unscientific, and tainted standards (in a speech about his bill backed by 37 senators to reduce the power of the FDA)
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