Question: Dont' you feel guilty about having to break animals bones so you can try to repair them?

James Chan answered on 16 Mar 2011:

Hi Holly, you are right to be concerned about the animals – in fact, I share the same concerns as you, especially when I first started out. But what I think persuaded me is that you have to remember why we are doing this. We are hoping to help the thousands and millions of people around the world to be able to walk or work again. There are many people whose bones do not heal properly and may need to have the limbs chopped off or have limbs that are forever painful. So I think it’s a worthwhile project. the reason we test this on animals is because we need to try out our drugs and chemicals otherwise we’d be giving them to real people without really knowing what they’d do! They may be make the patient sicker, for all we know! The reason we use mice is because their genetic makeup is very similar to ours and so if our drugs work in them, we can be pretty confident they’d work in humans too.

Also, we make every effort to make sure the mice do NOT suffer! They do not actually feel any pain when I do the operation. I put them to sleep first, like I would to a normal person undergoing an operation, so that they wouldn’t feel a thing. Then I do the operation. I actually fix the broken bones so this takes away a lot of the pain, and then I give them a really strong pain killer in the nerve so that when they wake up, they do not feel any pain at all, and I can tell this because I can do different tests to make sure they are comfortable and in fact, they run around straight away when they wake up. If they were in pain, they normally just sit around and not want to disturb the broken leg. so we are not that cruel. The government has a whole load of rules to make sure we are kind to the animals otherwise we could be thrown into jail! So we have to make sure we treat them with respect. I know it may still seem cruel, but I think it’s important that we know what we’re doing before we do things on humans! I wouldn’t like my relatives, for instance, to have untested drugs used on them… what do you reckon?