Sir

The criticism of the UK animal regulatory system by Dan Lyons in Correspondence (“The animal-care regulatory system is a sham”, Nature 430, 399; 200410.1038/430399a) calls for a response. Currently in my fiftieth year of pharmaceutical research, I find it depressing to realize how many legislators and citizens accept the unsupportable position of the animal activists regarding the need for animals in biomedical research.

In my lectures and writings on this subject, I emphasize the unbelievable complexity of the intact animal body. Each day, the human heart pumps some 7,200 litres of blood through the trillions of cells in the body on a continuous basis. The cells and organs share biochemical messengers every second of the day. Despite all the information published on the function of the animal body, my guess is that we know only a small percentage of the reactions going on at any moment. What conceivable system could be devised outside the intact animal that would be able to mimic the complexity of the animal body?

I agree that animals should be properly housed and maintained and suffering reduced as much as it is humanly possible to do so. Also, every surrogate test system (cell culture, enzymes, genomics, proteomics and so on), along with computers, should be and are used daily in the laboratories.

But what logical human would agree to have a new chemical, never before tested in a whole animal, administered for the first time to himself or herself?

If the animal activists prevail, new drug discovery and development will cease. This at a time when we have available to us the greatest number of disease targets in history. Why can we not get this message across to our citizens and legislators? Where is the activists' protocol for discovering a new drug without using animals? Should they not be required to detail a programme in which animals will not be used?