Let's come to the second part of this lecture.
After this personal introduction,
I would like to introduce now the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing.
And I think this quote by Mahatma Gandhi is quite telling.
He said, "The greatness of a nation and
its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
We actually heard something quite similar from the president,
who said a couple of years ago,
"I think how we treat our animals reflects how we treat each other."
And there's something about it.
Passion for animals, animal welfare,
is something very positive for a scientist,
even though we sometimes consciously have to take the decision to sacrifice animals,
but we should do so for only very justified purposes.
EU and US are quite different in many aspects.
For example, you can compare the population of the number of scientists.
The European Union has now more than 500 million people,
so about 60 percent of this is the US population,
but the US has, in proportion, much more scientists.
It has about 92 percent of the scientists in the EU,
so almost on par with number.
Publication-wise, it is about the same,
78 percent of publications compared to 100 percent EU.
But in the highly cited journals,
the 10 percent most cited ones,
the US is clearly ahead.
There's also differences in how much funding is there available per publication,
per research where clearly,
there's much more funding on the US side.
But there's one thing which I wanted to stress here,
which is there's a tremendous difference in animal use.
In the US, despite having less researchers,
there are using three times more dogs for example.
So, there's a much broader willingness to
employ animals in research as you will see later.
The Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing,
which I took over in 2009,
is actually celebrating it's 35th birthday already this year.
The center was created and headed for 27 years by Ellen Goldberg,
my predecessor here at Hopkins,
as the first and still premier information hub on alternative methods.
And this T-shirt tag here says a little bit on what our approach is.
It says, "These T-Shirts were tested on animals. They didn't fit."
And that's exactly what we're interested in.
Whenever an animal experiment does not fit,
we are trying to help replacing it,
coming up with something better than testing on animals.
I believe very much that humane science is the best science.
I've been working with the center and Goldberg,
you see here now, seven years before I took over,
we did joint workshops and conferences,
and we wrote this article in Scientific American which is,
for me, very important because it gave a very important message.
It is about protecting more than animals.
If you hear from me and others during this lecture,
critical things about animal experiments,
it is not because we believe that animal welfare is
more important than patients or consumer health.
We are in a school of public health.
I'm a physician. My first interest is health of people.
But I hope to convince you in this lecture series,
that very often we have better tools than animal experiments.
And this is exactly the message which this art particular gave,
protecting more than animals.
And I'm very proud that it was actually translated into 11 languages,
the only article of this kind to have the original being in Scientific American.
Our center started because of animal welfare.
Henry Spira was very well known as an animal activist.
There's actually a Hollywood movie done about his life and books written about him.
And his pressure put on cosmetic industry in the '70s,
for example with this one page ad,
as you can see here, "How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?"
This type of pressure lead cosmetic industry look for
partners to create a center for alternatives to animal testing.
Lena SmirnovaResearch Associate
Thomas HartungProfessor
