Rat Trap: The capture of medicine by animal research – and how to break free

by Pandora Pound

With devastating logic and clarity, Dr Pandora Pound, Research Director at Safer Medicines Trust, comprehensively dismantles the case for animal research, bringing to an end the 150-year-old debate about its value once and for all. Focusing on the science rather than animal suffering – and including no distressing details – she provides a riveting account of how the practice became so well established, before proceeding to painstakingly reveal the futility and shockingly poor quality of most animal studies.

Medical progress is being thwarted by an obsolete and harmful practice, but Pound showcases the awe-inspiring technologies, both old and new, that would revolutionise medicine if only it could escape the stranglehold of animal research. Rat Trap slays the many myths about animal research and shows that, far from being a necessary evil, it is one of the most important and urgent scientific issues of our time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science

264 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 28, 2023

Reviews

[Elisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a longtime vegetarian, I’ve been very vocal about animal rights but, with regards to medical experimentation, I had nothing to say. This book showed me how wrong I’ve been. The author doesn’t tackle this issue from the side of animal rights but from the medical viewpoint. For those who may not want to read this fearing what kind of horrors they won’t be able to forget, rest assured that there are no gory details. It is still extremely sad to think of all these lives, but there is nothing graphic about it. I also appreciated how the science is approachable. All the technical details are clear enough for every reader. The parts about legislation are kept to a minimum and the author focuses on the relevant information, without adding too many details. This is at once a hard and an easy read. Easy because it’s not difficult to follow and hard due to the subject matter. That said, it is vital for animal advocates to learn these details. Yes, maybe I owe my migraine medication to the suffering of many but there are better ways now.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, #NetGalley/#Troubador!

[melhara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating look into the potentially outdated practice of using animal testing in pharmaceutical drugs. It explores the history and rationale of using animals in the medical field, the practicalities and effectiveness of this type of testing, and new methodologies that are now available that can replace the need for lab animals entirely, while also offering faster and more reliable results.

There are a lot of interesting stats to digest from this book. I've always felt comforted by the fact that a product has been tested on an animal because if it's effective on an animal, chances are, it would work on humans too right? In fact, I remember in university, my best friend (studying health science) and I were chatting about the absurdity of doing without animal testing. Well, this book opened my eyes to the shocking statistic that 90 percent of all experimental drugs fail in human trials even though they've passed the animal tests. Maybe that's because humans are a completely different species from rats, dogs, monkeys, and any other type of lab animal. The way we process medication, our immune system, health, physical exercise, diet, environmental factors - it's all different. There are a number of diseases that exist in humans that don't exist in other animal species, and vice versa. And so, comparing the successful lab results on an animal should not apply to humans as it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

This book also goes into detail about the substandard quality of animal research and the amount of time and resources wasted on animal research even when it has been found to be unnecessary in some cases and was only conducted to check off a box as part of a regulatory requirement. It seems that the regulatory requirements need to be updated and that if animal testing is required, it needs to be conducted at a higher level than what's currently practiced.

Finally, the most interesting part of the book was the exploration of alternative solutions to animal testing. This includes using organoids (microscopic versions of parts of human organs that can self-assemble under the right conditions), which can then be exposed to experimental drugs to identify the effectiveness of the drug. There's also the use of an organ-on-a-chip which can recreate the microenvironment that cells are exposed to within the human body, which can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of an experimental drug when introduced to a 'human' environment (which is what was used for testing existing drugs' efficacy in combating Covid-19 during the pandemic. This method saved months, if not years, of time that would have been required for animal testing). Finally, using AI software/in silico/mathematical models to predict the effect of experimental drugs on human trials. All of these innovative technological advances have yielded stunning results in which the findings can be translated to humans (whereas animal testing results tend to be unreliable and cannot be translated directly to humans).

As a layperson with zero background in biology or life sciences, I found this book to be readable and understandable (for the most part), although I did feel that it oversimplified some of the statistics regarding the impracticality of animal testing (after all, isn't the scientific method all about trial and error, and that failed animal experiments still offer some scientific value to the overall experiment?). I also feel like this book is trying to push a lot of new practices into the pharmaceutical industry when it appears to me that the technology is still quite new, has not been standardized yet, and may not be readily accessible to the industry at large.

It sounds like the field of pharmacology still has a lot of work to do in terms of updating its animal testing standards and incorporating innovative and effective practices into the way we test experimental drugs. Perhaps one day, we can do without animal testing at all. Although it sounds like we're really close, we're just not there yet (due to the newness of the technology and lack of buy-in from the broader scientific community and regulatory agencies). But it's really only a matter of time before people open their minds and start to incorporate updated technological practices in their research methodologies.

Overall, still a very interesting book to read and I hope we strive towards improving the way we approach testing pharmaceutical drugs in light of new technological advances. Also, from all the animal testing that's been conducted and the number of times cancer has been cured in mice, I hope this means that veterinary sciences are far more advanced and that some good has come out from all this animal testing (so much so, that our pets might outlive us all one day!).

I received an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

*** #36 of my 2023 Popsugar Reading Challenge - A book you think your best friend would like ***

[Kathy Archibald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking and brilliant! Should be required reading for every school, university and scientific institute. Ask your MP to read it - urgent action is needed NOW.

[N]

(Sampled) I commend the author for opening up discussion about something that's considered "settled" (whether experimenting on animals is actually effective science), but my god, this book is dry and repetitive.

[Katherine Heasman · Rating 5 out of 5]

You don't need a science background to understand this book. It's an accessible, solid explanation of the medical need to replace animal experiments with modern human-based methods. A must read.

[Vania Terzopoulou · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a good book - I am sure that when we have heard of Pandora Pound we know that we have someone excellent experience of this sad field of animal testing and experimentation.

[Roisin Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very persuasive and well evidenced. Highly recommend!

[B.]

This is so boring. I'm really interested in this topic but the writing was so dry, it reminded me of my uni days. Dnf in chapter 1