• Question: Have you ever harmed animals in your work?

    Asked by food to Kylie, Matt, Bex, RobB, Sam on 13 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by 765cesf48.
    • Photo: Rob Brass

      Rob Brass answered on 13 Jun 2016:

      Nooo, we don’t do any kind of animal testing, mostly because they’re anatomy is different to ours and so it probably wouldn’t be that helpful in radiotherapy!

      We actually give physics support to a local animal hospital (called Leahurst if you want to look it up) that gives radiotherapy to animals, so we actually help animals! 🙂 The machine they use is the same as some of ours and the vets come into our department and use the same software to plan their treatments as we do for humans! It can be a bit confusing when you look over there shoulder and see a big snout! They mostly treat cats and dogs there but they all have to be sedated to be treated as they wouldnt lie still otherwise!

    • Photo: Kylie Belchamber

      Kylie Belchamber answered on 13 Jun 2016:

      Hi Sophie,
      Animal research is really important for science. Scientists believe that animals should be used only when there are no alternatives and the research will produce new information that will benefit human and animal health. It is too dangerous to give humans new drugs without first finding out how much to give, whether the drug will work, and what the side effects are. I think it is thing we have to do, but we have to be careful.
      I don’t do animal research, but I have trained to work with animals in the past.
      Scientists don’t like using animals either. We are trying to find other ways to test drugs and do experiments. For example, scientists are working on growing whole human tissues and organs to test how the tissues would react to drugs. This is great, but a problem is that you cannot tell what the entire body will do based on just one tissue, the body is complicated! We also use computer simulations to try and simulate what will happen. But we still don’t know if this is completely correct, which is why we still use animals.

      I hope that answers your question. It is a difficult area of research, so I appreciate you asking the question.

    • Photo: Matt Dunn

      Matt Dunn answered on 13 Jun 2016:

      As part of my work with brain cells and brain disease, I need a source of brain cells. Where I work we use rats, and it would be too cruel to extract the brain while they are alive, so unfortunately the rats are killed in order to obtain brain cells.

      This takes some getting used to, but understand that no scientist would ever want to cause any suffering to an animal, and all these rats are well cared for and feel no pain.

      My work uses these cells in order to look for other alternatives, such as taking human cells from the skin and genetically converting them to brain cells. Unfortunately this technology isn’t well-developed enough to produce brain cells that work the same way as the body, while the cells from rats brains work 99% the same as cells from the human brain. As more work is done, and human cells from other sources get better and better, there will be less need for animal use.

      In this manner, I am using some animals at the beginning of my PhD, in order to make a new technique that replaces the need for animals by making human cells usable, and reducing the need for animals to be used in the future.

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