Leslie Burford

English

Ms. Abraham

November 1, 2012

Carlson and Sabin both wrote about the topic of the use of animal testing. Carlson is against animal testing. Sabin is for the use of animals to further medicine. Sabin has the inside advantage because her husband was a scientist but Carlson makes a very good argument.
The article “Animal Research Saves Human Lives” by Heloisa Sabin’ is about the benefit of animal researching to cure Polio. Sabin gives the example of Forest Gump in the scene where he runs out of his leg braces. The comparison to Forest and the use of animal research is that the process to find a cure seemed that easy because of the use of animals. Instead of having to do a hit and miss process on humans or to wait for our genes to find immunity. On the other had animal rights ideology does not agree with this victory or how the human race go there. The people of animal rights ideology do not believe in the use of animals for experimentation. Sabin says that the leaders of this (animal rights activists) do not remember the suffering of infants in the early fifties that had infant paralysis and poliomyelitis. The young parents who had to worry about their children getting that disease. This disease is deadly. Beaches, theatres and playgrounds were places where the bacteria for polio was most common and most people avoided them. Polio claimed millions of lives and left many with limp brittle limbs, or in an iron lung not ever really experiencing the real world. In U.S. alone polio struck 58,000 children in 1952. Sabin’s husband, Albert, did a lot of research for a cure for polio. After almost thirty years of studying he came up with an oral vaccine. It was introduced in the United States in 1961. After nearly forty years of this vaccine polio has been reduced tremendously in the Western Hemisphere. Albert says that there could not have been an oral vaccine if not for the use of countless animals used for experiments. Many people would have died or been suffering from polio still today. Animal activist claim that before the vaccine came into the picture social hygiene was improving the effects of polio and that animals did not need to be used to find a vaccine. The article “Why We Don’t Need Animal Experimentation” by Peggy Carlson is that animal experimentation is not only, mostly irrelevant to curing human disease, it also uses up a lot of health care dollars and many scientist themselves question the value of the experiments. Carlson states that when Mr. Sabin was creating the vaccine he did questionable animal experiments creating a detour to creating the vaccine. About 30 million animals die from testing each year, which does not justify how the results usually turn out. Also the vaccine used monkey cells that can cause serious disease when transferred to humans. Carlson goes on to state that nearly everything that medicine has learned about cancer and birth defects has