“Every major medical advance is attributable to experiments on animals.”
This is simply not true. An article published in the esteemed Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine has even evaluated this very claim and concluded that it was not supported by any evidence. Most animal experiments are not relevant to human health, they do not contribute meaningfully to medical advances and many are undertaken simply out of curiosity and do not even pretend to hold promise for curing illnesses. The only reason people are under the misconception that animal experiments help humans is because the media, experimenters, universities and lobbying groups exaggerate the potential of animal experiments to lead to new cures and the role they have played in past medical advances.
Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine and several British universities published a paper in the British Medical Journal titled “Where Is the Evidence That Animal Research Benefits Humans?” The researchers systematically examined animal studies and concluded that little evidence exists to support the idea that animal experimentation has benefited humans.