Using animals for biomedical research is morally right; however, using animals for the testing of cosmetics is morally wrong. "Animals need protecting," says Ann Rotsten, the wife of Michael Rotsten. Michael Rotsten is a lawyer in California. For Rotsten, no case or client is too large, too small or too furry. Fifty-four year-old Rotsten works from a one-room office in Los Angeles and runs one of the only practices in the nation devoted exclusively to dogs, cats, livestock, birds, and just about anything that is not human. Rotsten has taken on about 250 animal-related cases such as helping Virginia O"Brien legally adopt K.K., an abandoned horse (Jerome 72).
Working with animals in research is essential to continued medical progress. Many medical breakthroughs have been made by the benefits of animal research ("Animal"). If the vaccine to prevent and cure polio were not developed in monkeys (Murray), polio would kill or cripple thousands of children and adults in one year ("Animal"). Insulin-dependent diabetics would not have insulin, a benefit of research on dogs, without animal research (Murray). Lack of medication to control high blood pressure would cause sixty million Americans to risk death from heart attack, stroke or kidney failure without animal research. In one year, more than one million Americans would lose vision in at least one eye because cataract .
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surgery would be impossible without animal research. Also, smallpox would continue unchecked and many other people would join the two million people already killed by the disease. Instead, smallpox has been eradicated with the help of animal research ("Animal").
Without animal research, scientists are limited in their mission to finding treatments and cures for illnesses such as Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and spinal cord injuries. Over the past century, animal research has helped to increase a person's life span by nearly twenty-eight years.
