Kelvin Hopkins MP has tabled Parliamentary EDM 66, which highlights our campaign and calls for a rigorous public scientific hearing to judge animal models – now proven to fail the search for effective human treatments and cures.
This called for debate has conditions endorsed as “well set out and fair” by Michael Mansfield QC: independent experts from the relevant fields of science will judge which medical position is correct, based on referenced position papers – as is the normal procedure for peer review.
Please ask your MP to join the cross-party members who are signing Parliamentary EDM66, simply click the image below, or type in your postcode at this link, to write to your MP today.
The highly regarded cancer specialist Dr. Azra Raza gave her TED Talk in 2015, explaining why we MUST STOP funding mice models of cancer, if we are to help find effective treatments and cures for human patients:
An increasing number of expert doctors and scientists, outside the animal-based research sector, agree that animal models hold no predictive value for patients. Experts who have published on this position are far too numerous to name here, but they include pharmaceutical companies which acknowledge the failure of animal models in their drug development process and write about this openly and often in the scientific literature, and the Editor in Chief of the BMJ, Dr Fiona Godlee, who published her Editor’s Choice in June 2104: How predictive and productive is animal research? This piece concluded by quoting from the paper it cited:
‘If research conducted on animals continues to be unable to reasonably predict what can be expected in humans, the public’s continuing endorsement and funding of preclinical animal research seems misplaced.’ (Emphasis added).
We have collected together 50 referenced examples of animal testing which have led to human deaths; please share this important document via our twitter account. These 50 examples alone should be enough to halt the continued funding of such veterinary principles for human patients!!
But above all, our medical Board has recently delivered Trans-Species Modelling Theory (TSMT) which explains exactly how and why animals are shown, time and time again, to fail the search for effective human treatments and cures. TSMT is founded upon current understanding of evolutionary biology and complex systems. How many people today would risk their lives going to the veterinary clinic, instead of attending a specially trained human medical specialist?
Progress is building in Parliament!
136 MPs have now signed four Parliamentary Early Day Motions, calling for a rigorous scientific debate to stop the continued waste of funding for clearly failing animal models. Please note that this EDM is now closed for the UK election, on June 8th.
The so-called ‘Big Animal Research Debate’ is false and no more than a big con!
We have published tweets making sure people are aware that there is a false project called the ‘Big Animal Research Debate’, organised by the UK’s PR for animal experiments ‘Understanding Animal Research’ (UAR). This so-called ‘debate’ is aimed at influencing young people at universities, to try and mislead them that animal-based research helps human patients. We are grateful to Dr. Dan Lyons for his tweets exposing UAR’s agenda:
There’s a 3rd goal though @AnimalArguments? Frame debate to achieve preferred pro-animal research result and publicise that? @LucyJParry — Dr Dan Lyons (@DoctorDanLyons) February 6, 2017
The so-called ‘Big Animal Research Debate’, aka UAR, have refused to submit the name of their expert for the genuine medical debate being called for by 134 MPs and Dr. Jane Goodall, who underlines the importance of a genuine debate hearing – being overseen by independent experts from the relevant fields of scientific expertise, who will judge which of the two opposing scientific positions is correct.
UAR are not interested in medical truth. Parliamentary EDM 400 draws attention to their empty ‘Concordat On Openness On Animal Research’, which proclaims to develop communications with the media and public, but in reality hides from rigorous scientific scrutiny, preferring instead to attempt to mislead young minds by organising unmoderated debates at university debating societies, about a life and death issue, with no qualified independent experts on hand to guide the event and judge the debate’s conclusions.
Thank you to Peter Egan for his quick tweets helping people understand that the ‘Big Animal Reearch Debate’ – @animalarguments – is a big con and not to be trusted.
You are being disingenuous @AnimalArguments you know perfectly well what @ScienceForCures means. You should grow up stop & bothering animals
We should also point out that the title ‘Animal Research’ is deliberately twisting the use of a term employed by scientists who research the wild lives of animals – including the Jane Goodall Institute. Animal research is like human research: it is always for the benefit of the research subject, and conducted with their full consent. Animal experimentation is the term that UAR should be using, like human experimentation: this always harms the subject and is never conducted with their consent. Please visit this medical blog by Ray Greek MD for more light on the use of these important meanings.
PLEASE TAKE ACTION TO HELP!
Please ask your MP to sign Parliamentary EDM 400, which call for a genuine medical debate hearing about false claims that animal experiments can predict the responses of human patients. Simply type in your post code at this link to write to your MP today!
More false science perpetuated by registered charities, tragically confined by the Government’s Charites Commission in order to limit campaigning to the false 3Rs.
FRAME is one such charity – ‘Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Research’ – and the director of the FRAME laboratory is Dr Andrew Bennett, an active animal experimenter who conducts painful invasive experiments on rats, falsely claiming they are predictive models of human patients.
Flying in the face of current medical knowledge – that animals are now proven to have never held predictive value for human patients – FRAME spouts the usual 3Rs nonsense, calling for something that has never existed in the first place to be ‘replaced with an alternative’, excerpt below:
‘While EU law says that alternative methods should be used if they are available, there are many areas where no effective non-animal methods exist. The latest Directive says EU member states should support alternatives, but there is no specific legal requirement to create them. FRAME is helping to find them.’
Our position at PCFC is clear: animal models are killing human patients. Abandoning this level of catastrophe is never dependent upon anything else being available.
MEP Eleonora Evi recently invited the president of our medical Board, Dr Ray Greek, to address a Conference at the EU Parliament. Filmed below, Dr Greek outlines the thorough medical debate hearing which needs to happen. Judged by independent experts, this hearing will enable decision makers to refuse advice from the vested interests (including the 3Rs), which is currently creating an unprecedented rise in often fatal illnesses, with the subsequent knock-on-effect of national economic burdens.
Dr Andre Menache, below, also addressed the same EU Conference, highlighting the misleading 3Rs, and concluding that animal experimentation for human patients is “the biggest health scandal of modern times – and the biggest scientific fraud of modern times”.
PLEASE TAKE ATION TO HELP!
131 MPs have now signed four Parliamentary Early Day Motions (EDMs), calling for the thorough science debate hearing, outlined by Drs Greek and Menache above. Please ask your MP to sign the current EDM 400! Simply type in your post code at this link to write to your MP today.
Drs Ray Greek and Andre Menache presented talks at an EU Parliament Conference to Counter the EU Commission, which is ignoring the European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI) secured by 1.173 million citizens – who signed the ECI to hear scientific evidence that will end experiments on animal models, falsely claimed able to predict the responses of human patients.
A debate hearing for this scientific evidence to be judged is being called for by 130 MPs, to date, who have signed 4 Parliamentary EDMs; the current being EDM 400
This post marks the launch of our focus on the extremely damaging consequences of buying into the false concept of ‘One Medicine’ – for animals and humans alike. The president of our medical Board, Dr Ray Greek, has published an excellent blog, titled ‘Many Species, Many Responses to Drugs and Diseases’ which addresses the Humanimal Trust’s recent appeal for funding of the entirely misleading ‘One Medicine’, and we urge you to please read Dr Greek’s excellent blog as this short post does not do it justice.
Many will be shocked to learn that the concept of ‘One Medicine’ is being presented to Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee, for funding, by TV ‘Supervet’ Noel Fitzpatrick who founded ‘The Humanimal Trust’. Mr Fitzpatrick’s appeal to the Committee suggests that by using veterinary patients – such as dogs and cats – as claimed predictive models of human patients, this will ‘reduce’ the numbers of purpose bred laboratory animals. This is a very good example of the false scientific principles of animal modelling being supported by the 3Rs – Reduction, Refinement and Replacement – an initiative introduced in 1959 to develop ‘humane experimental technique’ on animals.
Make no mistake: whether the animal is a an outpatient at a veterinary clinic or a prisoner in an animal laboratory, neither animal will be able to predict the responses of human patients. This medical fact is openly acknowledge by the wider scientific community – outside the vested interests – including the British Medical Journal,The Medical Research Council and the National Institutes of Health, whose latest statistic, that animal modelled medicines have a failure rate in excess of 95%, was released on October 8th.
Some of you may be interested to read an article by the science-based campaign For Life On Earth (FLOE) which was commissioned by the campaign ‘Oppose B&K Universal’ many months ago now, to document Noel Fitzpatrick’s support of the principles of animal experimentation for human patients; this article can be accessed here.
In closing we again urge our readers to visit our medical Board’s excellent critique, it’s about the ‘Humanimal Trust’, and our short post today does not do that critique justice – here’s the link to Dr Greek’s piece.
We are grateful for an information request by Dr John Pippin to the National Institutes of Health, which has led to an up-to-the-minute official confirmation of the failure rate for new human medicines, after animal tests, as EXCEEDING 95 percent:
“Several thousand diseases affect humans of which only about 500 have any treatment. Thanks to our growing understanding of human biology, along with the increased availability of innovative technologies, there is an unprecedented opportunity to translate scientific discoveries more efficiently into new, more effective and safer health interventions. Currently, a novel intervention can take about 14 years and $2 billion to develop, with a failure rate exceeding 95 percent.”
It is entirely unacceptable that an outdated 70 year old law continues to require animal testing for new human medicines – including the use of Beagle dogs – which is a now proven humanmedical disaster. We would be extremely grateful if campaigns including ‘Cruelty Free International’ and ‘Run Free’ could please STOP calling valid human-based medical research an ‘alternative method’ for something that clearly fails the human rights of patients, not just animals. Animal testing does not work. Human-based medical research has a track record of success. These are not alternatives for each other, they are opposites. Campaigning for ‘cruelty free methods that work better’ and are ‘more dependable’ is a scientific lie which has to be taken seriously, for the sake of everyone affected. We hope that related campaigns can begin to honour medical truth: if the NIH can, surely the world can also follow suit!
Today, Friday 21st October, ‘Stand Up to Cancer’ will be televised live to raise money for Cancer Research UK – which spends most of its funding on misleading animal-based research. The National Cancer Institute has said it believes we have lost cures for cancer because studies in rodents have been believed [1]. The Editor in Chief of The British Medical Journal, Dr Fiona Godlee, reported on the failure of such animal models for human patients in her Editors Choice, June 2014 [2] This article concluded by quoting from the paper it cited:
“If research conducted on animals continues to be unable to reasonably predict what can be expected in humans, the public’s continuing endorsement and funding of preclinical animal research seems misplaced.”
And pharmaceutical companies acknowledge the failure of animal-based research in their drug development process, and write about this openly and often in the scientific literature. And if that wasn’t enough, leading oncologist, voted one of America’s Top Doctors, Dr Azra Raza – currently advising the Vice-Presidents ‘Cancer Moonshot’ project – made the now widely acknowledged, absolute failure of mice models of cancer the focus of her TED-X talk, below:
Yet still the vested interests at Cancer Research UK – who make billions every year from falsely claiming veterinary principle will cure human disease – continue to ignore human misery, raising false hopes for patients in the face of a steep rise in cancer cases, which is producing a knock on economic burden.
ALL IS NOT LOST!
Thankfully, 128 members of the UK Parliament – and climbing – have signed 4 Parliamentary Early Day Motions calling for evidence of the failure of animal-based research to be heard in a peer reviewed science process, by independent experts who will judge a properly moderated public scientific debate hearing. The conditions for this hearing have been endorsed as “well set out and fair” by Britain’s foremost human rights defence barrister, Michael Mansfield QC. Please take action! Ask your MP to join those signing the current Parliamentary EDM 400 at this link.
And before you leave this page, please listen to the radio interview – below – with the president of our medical Board, Dr Ray Greek, as he responds to the false scientific claims of primate modeller Prof. Roger Lemon. In 2003, Dr Greek secured a precedent ruling on ‘national interest, medical and scientific grounds’, defeating plans by Cambridge University to build a new non-human primate laboratory. Cambridge wanted to build their new primate lab on Green Belt land, but against Dr Greek’s medical expertise they failed to prove that their primate experiments were going to be ‘medically and scientifically in the national interest’. This laboratory was not built.
Please donate to valid human-based cancer research, with a track record of success
If you want to donate to valid medical research, with a track record of success for human patients, please visit Cancer Research Wales, which avoids misleading animal models entirely, and funds only effective human-based cancer research. Please donate to this great charity at this link.
References
1. Gura T: Cancer Models: Systems for identifying new drugs are often faulty. Science. 1997, 278 (5340): 1041-1042. 10.1126/science.278.5340.1041.
We are delighted that the president of our medical Board, Dr Ray Greek, was invited by Talk Radio Europe (TRE) to counter criticism by primate experimenter Prof. Roger Lemon, during his interview with TRE on 15th September. During that interview, Prof. Lemon criticised Drs Greek, Jane Goodall and Sir David Attenborough for taking a stand against primate experiments.
Listen to the interview:
Dr Greek’s opposes primate experiments solely on human medical and scientific grounds. His role as chief science witness for the Cambridge Inquiry secured a precedent ruling – on ‘national interest, medical and scientific grounds’ – defeating plans by Cambridge University to build a new non-human primate laboratory, in 2002. Cambridge wanted to build their new primate lab on Green Belt land, and therefore had to prove that their experiments were going to be ‘in the national interest’. Cambridge failed to do this, and Dr Greek’s medical Board proved that such primate experiments were in fact now proven to cause harm and fatalities to human patients. That primate laboratory was not built.
This month’s radio interview with Dr Greek marks another turning point in this discussion, as it shines a clear spotlight on the proven continued disgrace of animal modellers, who persist in using outdated 19th century science which hinders the progress of medical knowledge about human illness, and delays the arrival of effective treatments and cures. The Editor in Chief of the British Medical Journal reported on this in her Editor’s Choice, June 2014. Indeed the wider scientific community – outside the vested interests of animal modellers – agree that animal testing holds no predictive value for humans. Please order the excellent new leaflets on this very subject – you can order at this link!
122 MPs have – to date – signed 4 Parliamentary Early Day Motions, calling for a properly moderated public science hearing on the false claims that animal models can ‘predict the responses of human patients’. This is the start of a ground breaking action that will hear scientific evidence to move medical research out of the 19th century. Please ask your MP to join his/her colleagues and sign the current EDM 400; simply type in your postcode and send your MP a letter today.
Insightful radio interview with primate experimenter Prof. Roger Lemon
We’d like to thank Pippa Jones from Talk Radio Europe for securing an interview with primate experimenter Prof. Roger Lemon.
Prof. Lemon ties himself in scientific knots throughout the interview, eventually inferring that experiments on macaque monkeys are worthless because the chimpanzee model – our closest DNA relative – has been abandoned on scientific grounds! In the words of Prof. Lemon:
“In the case of chimpanzees there was, you know, overwhelming evidence, er, that the amount of contribution that was made from the sort of research that was being done, er, no longer justified their use”.
What does this say about Lemon’s lesser model, the macaque monkey, as ‘predictive for human response’? We’ll allow Lemon to finish that question for us:
“I’m just saying that at the moment I feel, from what I have seen that the balance is such that the work is justified and will continue to be justified because some of the things we have to deal with are very, er, special to primates and, er, the monkey is he best available model that we’re left with”.
Oh dear. Not a convincing argument about the ability of non-human primates to predict the responses of human patients: people who are critically ill and urgently need the best human-based, medical research that money can buy.
During the interview, Prof. Lemon also states that animals absolutely have ‘predictive value’ for human patients – and then he immediately contradicts this claim when pressed by interviewer Pippa Jones. This is disgraceful behaviour from a neuroscientist, who should have the best interests of critically ill patients at heart.
Make no mistake! Prof Lemon lies about up-to-date human medical knowledge throughout the entire interview. We are especially shocked to hear another regurgitation of the bread and butter claim by animal modellers, that the phenomenal treatment called Deep Brian Stimulation (DBS), for Parkinson’s patients, came from “monkey work”. This claim is now acknowledged by the wider scientific community – which lies outside Lemon’s vested interest – as absolutely false: DBS, for Parkinson’s sufferers, was discovered through human patient observation, NOT monkey-based research. Please visit this link to read our medical Board’s peer reviewed paper proving that Prof. Lemon’s claim about Parkinson’s is not true. Also available is the Open Letter addressing Lemon’s false claim, written for VERO by Dr. Marius Maxwell, a Board of Neurological Surgery-certified neurosurgeon, who was educated at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard.
Prof. Lemon is a good example of the vast vested interest which has been allowed to develop since 1847, when animal models were first institutionalised by a French doctor Claude Bernard – who went on to reject The Theory of Evolution. The financial benefits of working in the animal model sector today are now proven to be entirely out of step with up-to-date medical understanding.
Prof. Lemon has spent his entire life – his entire career – being paid to experiment on monkeys, claiming that such experiments can ‘predict the responses of human patients’. This is why he continues to lie about up-to-date human medical knowledge – not very convincingly. Prof. Lemon has a great deal to loose by leading doctors, such as Dr Fiona Godlee, Editor in Chief of The BMJ, who reported on the well known failure of animals a predictive models of human patients, in her Editor’s Choice, June 2014. [1] Prof. Lemon has a great deal to loose by pharmaceutical companies which acknowledge the failure of animal models in their drug development process, and write about this openly and often in the scientific literature. Prof Lemon has a great deal to loose by the National Cancer Institute, which believes we have lost cures for cancer because studies in rodents have been believed [2]. But by no means least, Prof. Lemon has a great deal to loose by the 122 MPs – and climbing – who are calling for him to agree to debate the president of our medical Board, Dr Ray Greek, in a scientific hearing that will be overseen by independent judges from the relevant fields of scientific expertise.
The wider scientific community – outside the vested interests of Prof. Lemon – agree that animal models hold no predictive value for human patients, and are now proven to actually delay the arrival of effective treatments and cures. [3 – 5 ] This is a very serious situation for patients, because the majority of funding still goes towards animal models.
We understand that the president of our medical Board, Dr Ray Greek, is being invited to counter the false information spun by Prof. Lemon, and we look forward to publishing that radio interview when it is available.
In the meantime we take this opportunity to please ask your MP to sign Parliamentary Early Day Motion 400. It joins the 122 Parliamentarians – and climbing – who have signed four Early Day Motions (EDMs) to date, calling for animal modellers – such as Prof. Lemon – to agree to debate our medical Board in a properly moderated public scientific hearing. This debate will be overseen by independent judges from the relevant fields of scientific expertise, who will be present to judge which of the opposing scientific positions is valid, based on referenced position papers and the live debate itself.
Please help MPs who are calling for this historic medical science debate; simply click the image below, type in your postcode and ask your MP to sign EDM 400. Alternatively, please visit this link.
To listen to the radio interview with Prof. Lemon please click the link below:
References
1.BMJ 2014; 348: g 3719
2. Gura T: ‘Cancer Models: Systems for identifying new drugs are often faulty’. Science. 1997, 278 (5340): 1041-1042. 10.1126/science.278.5340.1041.
3. Shanks N, Greek R Animal Models in Light of Evolution Boca Raton: Brown Walker Press; 2009.
4. Shanks N, Greek R, Greek J: ‘Are Animal Models Predictive for Humans?’ Philos Ethics Humanit Med 2009, 4:25.
5. Lumley CE, Walker S Lancaster, Quay, editors, 1990, ‘Clinical Toxicity – Could it have been predicted? Post-marketing experience’, 57–67; Heywood R. Animal Toxicity Studies: Their Relevance for Man.
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