SOUNDBITES and QUOTES
For over a century medical doctors
have opposed animal experimentation in relation to human medicine.
These are some critical quotes from the speeches at the four
DLRM Congresses...
1991
“Medicine is, essentially, a science of observation,
in which experimentation is only a minor part of the medical
investigation. But the worst of it is that this minor part
has been contaminated by a gross error – that of having
taken animals as models for humans.”
Professor Dr Pietro Croce
“I wanted to know whether animal experiments
were actually useful for their intended purpose.........what
I found flatly contradicts the government party line, that
animal experimentation has led to virtually every major advance
in the last hundred years.”
Dr Brandon Reines
“To understand the almost revolutionary effect
of our ideas on how to use cell cultures instead of animals
in toxicity testing (and the almost counter-revolutionary
reactions against these ideas), you must be acquainted with
the thinking of the toxicologist of some years ago.”
Professor Bjorn Ekwall
“Vivisection must be unequivocally condemned
and completely abolished in all its aspects – medical,
military, industrial and cosmetological.”
Professor Dr Lea Franken
1992
“Since the beginning of the modern medical boom,
all eyes have been on microbes, molecules and animal models.
When did anyone in authority ever stand back and take a long
look at the whole human being?”
Dr Peter Mansfield
“For the sake of both animals and humans, it
is high time to replace this concept of medicine and morality,
based on animal experimentation and lack of thinking, by adopting
a thinking medicine and renouncing animal experimentation.”
Dr Werner Hartinger
“Vivisection is dictated by convenience, not
science. It is a strange, unrealistic mind that accepts a
genetically engineered moron as a replica of human physiology,
or at least one that pertains to it. It may be a feat of engineering,
but it has no place in the meaningful study of human disease
and its treatment, for it bears even less resemblance to us
than its unfortunate predecessors do.”
Dr David Johnson
“Imagine how many people could be saved and
cured if the money used for animal experiments were put into
organising hospitals efficiently all over Greece, transporting
patients in well-equipped ambulances and informing people
about preventive medicine!”
Dr George Haritakis
“As long as medical science studies man and
his illnesses by always using an entirely inadequate animal
model, medicine cannot recognise or study man’s peculiarities
or special features, especially that fine interplay between
body, mind and spirit, the disturbance of which presents itself
as illness.”
Dr Bernhard Rambeck
“Vivisection is an aberration, a foolish practice
that leads medicine astray, creating millions of human victims
in the process: we are all victims of toxic drugs, of common
medical errors, of wrong medical information and of medical
delusions.”
Professor Dr Pietro Croce
“The Kuru sickness among the Papuans stems from
the intakes of certain albumens into the organism –
more precisely, the Papuans had the custom of eating the brains
of the dead. BSE has the same cause: animals, especially cattle,
have been forced, for purely commercial reasons, to adopt
eating habits not appropriate to the species: they have ingested
albumen products as so-called “fattening fodder”
which were taken from animal bodies unfit for human consumption.
Cattle are herbivores – they have been turned into carnivores
and the result has been Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.”
Dr Gerhard Buchwald
1995
“Do we not have good reason today to be sceptical
about the triumphalism, the expectations and the promises
implied by today’s new methodology of transgenic animals
– just as, some forty years ago, we were sceptical about
the hype attaching to axenic animals?”
Professor Dr Pietro Croce
“It is about our ability to change the agenda,
to change and protect the environment – and that environment
must be indivisible. And it isn’t just about animals
in the environment; it is also about the earth on which they
stand, on which we stand, and the heavens above us, with the
ozone layer and the holes in it – the whole global environment.”
Mr Michael Mansfield QC
1997
“The mad, wretched practice of inserting genes
into the embryos of another to create “transgenic animals”
has already produced moribundly ill entities with new shapes
and forms beset with terribly hideous diseases......Genetically
engineered organisms could create environmental chaos and
may trigger new pandemics and major devastating epidemics.”
Dr Moneim Fadali
“We must always remember the fact that all sections
of the public are capable of recognising and understanding
the flaws and dangers of such research. They therefore have
as much right, and indeed duty, to be involved in this campaign
as have the professionals.”
Ms Joy Palmer
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The following quotations are from doctors and lawyers opposing
animal experiments, on medical and scientific grounds.
"Vivisection is rooted in error, and when the
truth becomes known, it will disappear."
Dr Max Mader, (OP Graz) 1908
"My own conviction is that the study of human
physiology by way of experiments on animals is the most
grotesque and fantastic error ever committed in the whole
range of human intellectual activity."
Dr G F Walker, Medical World, 8.12.1933
"The idea, as I understand it, is that fundamental
truths are revealed in laboratory experimentation on lower
animals and are then applied to the problems of the sick
patient. Having been myself trained as a physiologist, I
feel in a way competent to assess such a claim. It is plain
nonsense."
Sir George Pickering, (Regius Professor of Medicine at
the University of Oxford,) British Medical Journal, 26.12.1964
"Atrocious medical experiments are being made
on children, mainly physically and mentally handicapped,
and on aborted living foetuses given or sold to the laboratories
for experimental purposes. This is a logical development
of the practice of vivisection. It is our urgent task to
accelerate its inevitable downfall."
Prof Pietro Croce, (Pathologist, Italy; Author of 'Vivisection
or Science?') ILDAV Symposium Holland, April 1988
"There is no comprehensive animal model for humankind...
The truth is, and always has been, that the first clinical
use of new medication in human patients provides the first
reliable clues as to what can be expected of it. Pre-marketing
research on animals is a lottery; post marketing surveillance
comes too late for the first human victims of side-effects."
Dr Peter Mansfield, (GP, Founder-President of 'Doctors
in Britain against Animal Experiments'.) Animal Experiments
in Medicine: The Case Against,' May 1990
"We use a method [vivisection] which continues
to lead to terrible mistakes, which kills thousands of people
and which contributes to our environmental problems... none
of which can be predicted under animal laboratory conditions.
I have had talks with many doctors and scientists, who are
perfectly convinced that animal testing is dangerous, not
only for the animals, but also, and most of all, for us,
human beings..."
Dr. Madeleine Petrovic, Dr at Law, Austria, (Chairwoman
Austrian Green Party in Parliament, Vice-President DLRM),
DBAE Scientific Congress, May 1995
"Freed from the error of vivisection, future researchers
will be able to base medical research on a genuinely scientific
foundation... gradually restoring to medicine that scientific
quality that today is usurped by vivisectionist error."
Prof Pietro Croce, MD, (Hon President DLRM), Author,
'Vivisection or Science?'
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