Anti-vivisection campaigners have great trouble engaging in any sort of ethical debate about the use of animals in research. Why should that be? Simply because they know well that most of the public would accept the use of animals if it led to scientific and medical advances and saved lives. For that reason, anti-vivisection groups prefer the easy way out - to simply deny any medical menefits of animal research, claiming that the science is flawed.

It makes no difference to them how much evidence there is of scientific advances using animals. The overwhelming weight of expertise, from Nobel prizewinners to scientific organisations supporting the use of animals, has no impact on them. They simply have their own version of the truth.

This is why columnist Nick Cohen hit the nail on the head when he wrote in an article in yesterday’s Observer that it is psychologically easier for the animal rights campaigners to pretend that elite scientists are engaged in a giant deception than to face a hard choice.

Frankly, this deliberate evasion of the real ethical debate on the part of the anti-vivisectionists is annoying. Gill Langley is from the Dr Hadwen Trust (an anti-vivisection organisation which funds non-animal methods of research) and is also scientific adviser to the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. She stated in a television interview last week that she was “looking forward to an open debate, but it hasn’t started yet”. This is an astonishing statement from someone who gave evidence twice to the House of Lords committee, sat on the Animal Procedures Committee for eight years, and has been involved in dozens of debates, workshops, interview, reports, committees and investigations into animal research. One wonders what would ever be enough. More likely, she knows that she will never accept the scientific benefits of animal research. In that case asking for more debate is just a smokescreen to hide her real agenda - the animal rights position she has held for many years.