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Critical Acclaim for Book on Animal Experimentation
23rd July 2012
Authored by Centre Fellow Dr Andrew Knight, The Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments has received critical acclaim from scientists and philosophers alike.
Commented Professor Jörg Luy of the Freie Universität Berlin: “This unemotional book represents one of the most serious scientific body blows ever inflicted against an established field of research. A paradigm shift away from animal experimentation within biomedical research is likely to come, and when it does, this book will probably be identified as one of the causes.”
Said Professor Peter Singer: “In The Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments, Andrew Knight takes the debate about the utility of research on animals to a new level of scientific investigation. Instead of just listing hand-picked instances of benefits or harms produced by research on animals – a procedure obviously prone to bias in the selection of cases – he has sought more objective, unbiased indicators of the value of research on animals. His data is devastating to the common assumption that the practice of experimenting on animals has demonstrably high utility for humans, and is therefore justified despite the costs to animals. The Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments shows clearly that there is insufficient empirical basis for the belief that the benefits of invasive research on nonhuman animals outweigh the costs.”
For a selection of the reviews including those by Nobel Laureate Professor J. M. Coetzee, Professor Bernard E Rollin, and Dame Jane Goodall, see here. The medical and scientific evidence in Knight’s book has resulted in widespread interest and published academic debates, see here. He has subsequently been invited to speak on its themes at Europe’s largest laboratory animal science conferences.
Further information about the book can be found here. The book is one of eight texts recently published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of the Centre’s groundbreaking Series on Animal Ethics, see here.