Alternatives discussed at Indian Science Congress.

delegates, including scientists and students, and six laureates participated in the event. For the first time, a plenary session on alternative methods entitled Animal Alternatives in Teaching and Testing was held at the ISC. Interest in alternatives has been spurred by the success of the Mahatma Gandhi-Doerenkamp Center (MGDC) for Alternatives to Use of Animals in life Science education , established at Bharathidasan University, tiruchirap-palli, tamil Nadu, by the Doerenkamp-Zbinden Foundation and People for Animals, Chennai, the only 3Rs institute in India, in phasing out animal dissections in higher education in a decision of the University Grants Commission (UGC), the regulatory authority of higher education in India, and led to an invitation to the MGDC to organize the session. the theme of the session and stressed the need for inculcat-ing and practicing 3Rs in scientific pursuit. Dr Akbarsha, also the Gandhi-Gruber-Doerenkamp Chair, thanked the ISCA for recognizing the science of 3Rs as an area of active research and nurture. " For a long time animal testing has been considered as a gold-standard for any kind of toxicity testing, but the value of animal testing is often overestimated, " said Dr Thomas Hartung, Doerenkamp-Zbinden Chair for evidence-Based toxicology, Johns Hopkins University, USA. Many experiments in animals have been shown to lead to false-positive or false-negative results. An interesting case is Aspirin, the first chemical entity introduced and used as a drug in 1897. After a variety of tests in animal models it is found to be severely toxic, in fact fatal, to animals. Its lD 50 in rats is equivalent to the therapeutic dose in humans! If subjected to regulatory testing as currently prescribed, it would not qualify to be declared as a drug for human consumption at all. therefore, animal experiments are not 100% reliable. " A rat is not a 70 kg man, " he said. About 70 million chemicals have been synthesized and about 100,000 of them are found in consumer products, whereas only a negligible number have gone through toxicity evaluation. If all these chemical entities were to be tested, an astronomical number of animals would need to be sacrificed and each test would cost about US$ 1.5 million. He pointed out that modern toxicological tools and approaches, including in vitro and in silico methods, can largely substitute or complement traditional animal tests. One such approach is mapping the human pathways of toxicity (Pot), which will possibly …