The Big Dog campaigning against medical research dogma
A ten foot beagle is embarking on a nationwide tour promoting the funding of more effective human-based medical research today. Alex Irving from the Big Dog Tour explains why.
Meet the giant dogabout to tour the UK on a political and fundraising mission, promoting human-based research and personalised medicine.
In a world where commerce and wealth are given priority over innovation and public health, the organisers hope The Big Dog Tour will make people around the UK smile and donate. Nevertheless the message for Parliament is a serious one. It’s a call to the government to prioritise the funding of advanced innovative human-based medical research which can save patients with chronic diseases, instead of wasting billions of pounds funding the entrenched commercialisation of traditional research methods that fail patients.
We're living in the greatest and fastest period of technological development in human history, yet the discovery of cures for chronic diseases and effective drugs is delayed due to reliance on misleading data from ineffective traditional research methods.
Victorian researchers two hundred years ago could be forgiven for the naive scientific assumption that experiments on non-human animals would produce data that ‘predicts’ the human response to diseases and drugs. But in the light of radical advances in scientific understanding, particularly of Evolutionary Biology and Complexity Science, today's researchers cannot be forgiven for continuing to squander valuable resources on experiments, based upon a non-scientific un-evidenced assumption, which are of no benefit to patients. When challenged to provide evidence in support of their claims that 'animals predict the human response', those with vested interests only offer anecdotes carefully constructed to spin correlation as causation.
Fiona Godlee editor in chief - British Medical Journal summed it up in her article June 2014
‘If research conducted on animals continues to be unable to predict what can be expected in humans the public’s continuing endorsement and funding of preclinical animal research seems misplaced.’
The Big Dog says no more Dogma!
Find out more about The Big Dog Tour fundraising for human-based research at Cancer Research Wales
here
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