History of animal testing

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One of Pavlov’s dogs with a saliva-catch container and tube surgically implanted in his muzzle. Pavlov Museum, 2005

The History of animal testing goes back to the writings of the Greeks in the third and fourth centuries BC, with Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Erasistratus (304-258 BC) among the first to perform experiments on living animals (Cohen and Loew 1984). Galen, a physician in second-century Rome, dissected pigs and goats, and is known as the "father of vivisection." ^[1]

Animals have had a role in numerous well-known experiments. In the 1600s, William Harvey described the movement of blood in mammals. In the 1700s, Antoine Lavoisier, used a guinea pig in a calorimeter to prove that respiration was a form of combustion, and Stephen Hales measured blood pressure in the horse.

In the 1880s, Louis Pasteur convincingly demonstrated the germ theory of medicine by giving anthrax to sheep. In the 1890s, Ivan Pavlov famously used dogs to describe classical conditioning. Insulin was isolated first from dogs in 1922, and revolutionized the treatment of diabetes. On November 3, 1957 a Russian dog named Laika became the first of many animals to orbit the earth, including many monkeys and apes.

In the 1970s, leprosy multi-drug antibiotic treatments were developed first in armadillos, then in humans. In 1996 Dolly the sheep was born, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. In the same year the anti-viral AIDS drug, Tenofovir, was discovered in Rhesus monkey studies at the University of Washington Regional Primate Research Center.^[2]^[3]