Question: why do we experiment on animals and plants and not humans????

Melissa Brereton answered on 14 Mar 2013:

We do experiment on humans! During my PhD, I worked in the hospital and we used cells and tissues from the human placenta (yuk!) but other people also took blood samples from patients and experiment on them. When a new drug is being developed, there are lots of stages and steps that need to be performed. We have to use animals and cells to find out whether the new drug will work and at what dose does it have the best effects. It is unethical to do these initial tests on humans because we don’t know at this stage whether the new drug is going to have lots of side effects. Only when we know that the drug has the potential to work, we can then test it on humans. This is what we call “clinical trials” and there are 3 phases. The first phase of clinical trials are performed on about 20-80 healthy patients to check that the dose of the drug is correct. The second phase is performed on 200-300 patients with the disease the drug is going to treat to check that it works. The third phase is performed on a large number of patients (3000 people) with the disease to check that it works on a larger scale.

To perform good science, we need to perform experiments on animals, plants and humans to be sure that what we discover is real