Differences in reaction to toxic substances vary considerably between species so that the value of these tests remains doubtful. Although thalidomide was extensively tested on animals in several countries, its terrible properties were not discovered. Conversely, penicillin, the greatest medical discovery of the century, was not extensively tested on animals before its miraculous therapeutic qualities were demonstrated in human patients. If it had been fully tested on animals its high toxicity for guinea pigs would have almost certainly prevented its clinical use.

Even if animal experiments did result in a cure for AIDS, of which there is no chance, I’d be against it on moral grounds.

When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer, ... But I guess that was exactly what I did.

he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since.

[H]ad we had those investments early on, to carry this all the way through clinical trials years ago, we could have had a vaccine ready to go.

Management’ll never go for it. First, it’s live-animal research, which is controversial. Management hates controversy. Second, it’s something innovative, which means Management will hate it on principle.

If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.

We give antibiotics to most of the meat animals on the planet on most days of their lives — and we don't give them those antibiotics because the animals are sick. We give them because, back in the 1950s, it was discovered that if you give tiny doses of antibiotics to animals — much too small to cure an infection — you will cause them to put on weight faster, which is an economic benefit to the farmer or the producer. And, then, a little while after that, it was discovered that if you gave a slightly larger dose — but still not enough to cure an infection ... what would technically be called a sub-therapeutic dose — you could protect animals from the diseases that spread in crowded barns and feedlots — those barns and feedlots becoming crowded because of this temptation to grow animals faster and faster. So that’s where we are today — all around the world.

Since the first emerged in 1976, it staged dramatic raids on vivisection laboratories, especially in the United States during the 1980s. From 1996 to 2005, after the ALF nearly eliminated the fur industry in England, tactics closed down a half dozen breeders who supplied animals to laboratories, and liberationists stopped construction of a major animal research center at Cambridge University and almost at Oxford as well. If not for the massive intervention by British and American governments, activists might have bankrupted and destroyed a major pharmaceutical and product testing company, .

"Despite the prominence that "magic bullets" and "wonder drugs" hold in the layman's mind, most of the really decisive battles in the war against infectious disease consisted of measures to eliminate disease organisms from the environment. An example from history concerns the great outbreak of cholera in London more than one hundred years ago. A London physician, John Snow, mapped occurrence of cases and found they originated in one area, all of whose inhabitants drew their water from one pump located on Broad Street. In a swift and decisive practice of preventative medicine, Dr. Snow removed the handle from the pump. The epidemic was thereby brought under control - not by a magic pill that killed the (then unknown) organism of cholera, but by eliminating the organism from the environment."

The natural born reason we didn't git no yew-ranium when we crosses the li'l yew tree and the gee-ranium is on account of cause we didn't have no geiger counter.

How many innovative, potentially lifesaving drugs never make it to the marketplace because of the added costs in time and money imposed by the [Kefauver-Harris] Amendments? No one knows for sure, but the studies that have been done imply that we’ve lost about 80% of the innovations that we would have had in the absence of he Amendments.

The high tide of the... [industrial] age also happened to be a moment in history when human ingenuity gained an upper hand against the age-old scourges of disease. We have enjoyed the great benefits of antibiotic medicine for... a half-century. Penicillin, sulfa drugs, and their descendants briefly gave [hu]mankind the notion that diseases caused by microorganisms could, and indeed would, be systematically vanquished. Or, at least, this was the popular view. Doctors and scientists knew better. The discoverer of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, himself warned that antibiotic misuse could result in resistant strains of bacteria.
The recognition is now growing that the victory over microbes was short-lived. They are back in force, including... old enemies such as tuberculosis and staphylococcus in new drug-resistant strains. Other old diseases are on the march into new territories, as a response to climate change brought on by global warming [caused by the burning of fossil fuels]. In response to unprecedented habitat destruction by humans and the invasion of [what we call] wilderness, the earth itself seems to be sending forth new and much more lethal diseases, as though it had a... protective immune system with antibody-like agents aimed with remarkable precision at the source of the problem: Homo sapiens.

...Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had acquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.