“Interspecies differences may lead to concluding that substances that are innocuous or beneficial in humans are harmful, and that substances that have insidious effects on humans are harmless. For example, penicillin is extremely poisonous to guinea pigs. Had penicillin been subjected to the routine animal tests, as new drugs presently are, it would never have been tried on humans.”

— Deborah Mayo

Source: Against a Scientific Justification of Animal Experiments, p. 351

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Deborah Mayo 6

American philosopher

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“Differences in reaction to toxic substances vary considerably between species so that the value of these tests remains doubtful. Although thalidomide was extensively tested on animals in several countries, its terrible properties were not discovered. Conversely, penicillin, the greatest medical discovery of the century, was not extensively tested on animals before its miraculous therapeutic qualities were demonstrated in human patients. If it had been fully tested on animals its high toxicity for guinea pigs would have almost certainly prevented its clinical use.”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

Experiments on Animals (1971)

“How fortunate we didn't have these animal tests in the 1940s, for penicillin would probably not have been granted a licence, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realised.”

Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and sexiest man

Reported in Dennis V. Parke, "Clinical Pharmacokinetics in Drug Safety Evaluation," in ATLA: Alternatives To Laboratory Animals https://books.google.it/books?id=WMZNAQAAIAAJ, vol. 22, no. 3, May/June 1994, p. 208.
The context is: "the present approach to drug safety evaluation, based on experimental animal studies, is known to be of questionable scientific veracity and has never been satisfactorily validated as an appropriate surrogate system for man. My former teacher, Sir Alexander Fleming, in his late years, chided me, saying …"

“I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD … It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug? (2006)

“I would never have become an animal rights advocate if I had not first been a human rights advocate, especially for those humans (the very young and the very old, for example) who lack the understanding or power to assert their rights for themselves.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Prologue
Empty Cages (2004)

“In recent years, the studies of the effects of drugs on the behavior of animals have been playing an increasingly important role. Animal studies have been an advantage over studies with human subjects because better control of experimental variables and a possibility of using a wider range of the doses. It is also permissible to administer toxix compounds to animals. One can interfere surgically with various parts of the central nervous system while investigating the effects of the drugs. The whole field of comparative psychopharmacology has been recently reviewed”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Weckowicz (1967) "Chapter VI - Animal Studies of Hallucinogenic Drugs" in: Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond (1967) The hallucinogens. p. 555

“All men possess in their bodies a poison which acts upon serpents; and the human saliva, it is said, makes them take to flight, as though they had been touched with boiling water. The same substance, it is said, destroys them the moment it enters their throat.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book VII, sec. 15.
Naturalis Historia

“Humanity is a moral disaster. There would have been much less destruction had we never evolved. The fewer humans there are in the future, the less destruction there will still be.”

David Benatar (1966) South African philosopher

Source: Chapter 1: The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-natalism https://books.google.com/books?id=J6dBCgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA44&pg=PA55#v=onepage&q&f=false, 2015, p. 55
Source: Permissible Progeny? The Morality of Procreation and Parenting (2015)

“If human beings were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible… This does not mean, however, that humans are not, and do not have to be, something, that they are simply consigned to nothingness and therefore can freely decide whether to be or not to be, to adopt or not to adopt this or that destiny (nihilism and decisionism coincide at this point). There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality.”

Giorgio Agamben (1942) Italian philosopher

Source: The Coming Community (1993), Ch. 11 : Ethics

“Although it may be extremely reasonable (especially from our present vantage point) to conclude that some part of human evolution, if not aspects of the diversification of hominoids in general, is indeed preserved in the fossil record of Africa, this does not in and of itself lead inexorably to the conclusion that humans and African apes are closely related.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

5 History, Morphology, Paleontology, and Evolution
Orang-utan Biology (1988)

“If the computer had been a human, its eyebrows would have raised.”

Robert L. Forward book Dragon's Egg

Source: Dragon's Egg (1980), Chapter 6, “Contact” Section 3 (p. 202)

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Deborah Mayo 6

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