Just like Atari went out of style, and we moved on to bigger and better gaming systems, it looks like the old method of testing on animals will be replaced with more advanced (and more humane) testing within the next ten years. A brief article in this month’s VegNews states that:

The Environmental Protection Agency, the National Toxicology Program, and the National Institutes of Health have joined forces to phase out animal-testing…In their place, scientists would grow human-cell cultures in a lab, then expose them to lasers and analyze their reactions with computers. Because this technique enables thousands of chemicals to be tested at the same time, the agencies say this will be less expensive and time-consuming than injecting toxic substances into living organisms, yet also yield more reliable results.

Now it’s one thing for scientists to argue they need to test on animals to ensure the safety of their products on humans, but it looks like now they have no excuse not to move forward with this new practice. Less expensive, more efficient, less time-consuming AND more reliable? Sounds almost too good to be true. Think of all the thousands of animals that will no longer be subjected to experimental torture and neglect if this goes through. Hooray for science!!!

Scientific American wrote a more in-depth article on this topic, which you can find here.