Animals in Scientific Research 405 imposed by the directive Once an animal researcher has adequately addressed the 3Rs, there is very little to stop an animal experiment from going ahead As discussed above, the vast majority of experiments will be of a fundamental nature, for which there is rarely any scope for replacement What almost all proposals for fundamental research share is a common formula: the researcher will state that disease X affects a large proportion of the world’s population; that there is currently no known cure for this disease; that his or her laboratory has developed an animal model of the disease; that the disease is complex and cannot be studied in simple cell culture; and that the disease must, therefore, be studied in a living animal There is no scope within the 3Rs principle to question whether the animal model is relevant to the human genome (Greek et al 2012) Fundamental research is of itself sufficient justification To paraphrase the quote by Jeremy Bentham, ‘The question is not, can the animal experiment be replaced? But, does it actually work?’ In ignoring current science the ethical review process is complicit in animal abuse Few animal researchers are willing to engage in scientific debate with experts who consider the animal model to be invalid as a modality for predicting how a drug or a disease will affect human beings Some of the most powerful criticisms of the animal model have recently been voiced by animal researchers For example, Seok and colleagues published an article entitled ‘Genomic responses in mouse models poorly mimic human inflammatory disease’ (Seok et al 2013) Another paper published in the journal Nature in 2014 clearly shows that mice and men are genetically far further apart than was previously thought Although mice and humans share most of their genes, the way those genes are regulated is very different in the two species, thus calling into question the role that rodents play in medical research (Yue et al 2014) These articles and others (for example ‘Of Mice and Not Men: Differences between Mouse and Human Immunology’) (Mestas and Hughes 2004) are highly significant for two reasons First, it is the mouse that bears the brunt of animal abuse and suffering in science in terms of sheer numbers; and second, if the immune system of the mouse is not predictive of what happens in humans, then almost all mouse research becomes irrelevant since the immune system plays an absolutely key role in disease research, from vaccines to arthritis and from wound healing to multiple sclerosis In the competitive world of science, in order to survive one must ‘publish or perish’ In this context, many animal researchers tend to put their careers well ahead of animal suffering Thus, there is a tendency to increase the size of the test group (for example using 10 animals per