It is nice to see Professor Steve Jones decisively debunk the animal rights myth, made for example by extremist John Curtin, that the congenital deformities caused by thalidomide were somehow linked to animal tests. In fact, it was the thalidomide disaster which led to extensive protocols for safety testing – of all types – for new medicines.

Two categorical statements can be made about thalidomide. Firstly, it was never administered to pregnant animals before it was used in humans. This is confirmed in a factsheet from the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection which states that:

The Thalidomide tragedy is often quoted to illustrate the failure of animal experiments but this drug was never tested in pregnant animals before it was released for human use.

Secondly, only five months after the teratogenic effects of thalidomide had been established and the drug withdrawn, the same effects were shown to occur in rat and rabbit, and subsequently in numerous other species of mammal. The paper in The Lancet on April 28th 1962 described the deformities in the New Zealand white rabbit with the comment that the expert had “never seen anything like this during fifty years experience of rabbit breeding”.