Green Light for Alternative to Rabbit Test

-A framework is developed to take explicitly into account the conflicting demands of ethics and scientific rigor in the design of clinical trials. The framework recognizes the part played by the clinical-scientific community in the weighing of a new result provided by a clinical trial. To illustrate the usefulness of the framework, a value system is adopted which gives relatively high weight to ethical considerations. The analysis based on this value system reveals some limitations of the present clinical-trials mechanism, especially if success is defined exclusively in terms of cure, and other dimensions of the health system, such as explanatory, care, cost or prevention variables are neglected. On the basis of this analysis, it is suggested that: