How true is the claim that we no longer need animal testing to further advance medical research?

Not true at all.

It is unlikely that we will be able to completely do away with animal research in the foreseeable future.  While we can learn a lot from data mining, computer modeling, and work in cell cultures, there is no way to predict how a treatment will affect a full living organism without testing it in one. There are many, many things about the body that we still do not know; particularly in the why/how department.  There are some systems that are clearly responding to some signal, but we don't know what that signal is.  There are some genes that lead to discrete phenotypes in different people, but for reasons not yet uncovered.  There are some people in chronic pain that is unresponsive to analgesics, but our current diagnostic tools cannot provide an explanation for it. All of this means that there are just too many things we still don't know for us to be able to accurately discern what the effect of a treatment will be without actually trying it out.  I will say, however, that there are some pretty strict protocols in place with regards to experimentation on animals, and a number of hoops that must be jumped through before you get to order a passel of mice and start performing tests.  If you're interested, here are a few of websites and agencies tasked with describing and enforcing these protocols: Federals Laws Specific to Animals and Animal Research: http://awic.nal.usda.gov/government-and-professional-resources/legislation-regulations-and-guidelines-subject/laboratory http://www.onlineethics.org/cms/13119.aspx Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals: http://awic.nal.usda.gov/government-and-professional-resources/legislation-regulations-and-guidelines-subject/laboratory Other Animal Welfare Laws: http://awic.nal.usda.gov/government-and-professional-resources/federal-laws

I've personally never heard a general statement like that. One of the main promotions is that we don't need to test beauty/cosmetic products on animals and I 100% agree on that. The fact that a living creature, an animal, shouldn't lose his life so a company will create a new lipstick aside, there are already tons of cosmetic products, including organic and natural ones that were proven to be safe for health. The situation gets a little complicated about medical research. I like to show this The Guardian article on the subject: Now we can do all sorts of clever things with cell cultures and computer  simulations, do we need to use living creatures to drive medical science forwards? The government certainly thinks so, as vivisection is still perfectly legal - if heavily regulated. "The Animals  (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 forbids the use of animals if other adequately validated methods can provide the required information," says a spokesman for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the body that licenses new medical treatments. "By the time a  potential new medicine goes into the animal-testing stage of  development, it has already passed through all the available non-animal  methods." Recent beneficiaries of animal testing are breast cancer patients who have been prescribed the drug Herceptin, which was developed using mice. So are more than 70% of Nobel prize winners in the fields of physiology and medicine. Nevertheless, anti-vivisection campaigners such as Andrew Tyler of Animal Aid aruge that "you can't  reliably apply data obtained from animals to the sphere of human medicine. Animal experiments add only confusion." While it is true  that testing a drug, for example, on a pig, will not tell you  definitively how a human will react to it, the argument is more complex. Pigs are not humans, but they are a lot closer than a dish of cells or a latex model. Gill Langley, scientific adviser to the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, agrees. "I would never claim that all  animal experiments are without scientific value," she says, but argues that more needs to be done to develop non-animal alternatives. A few years ago I was a doctor looking after an elderly man whose heart had been partially replaced by a metal pump developed partly in sheep. It gave him a few extra years. Living bodies - for the foreseeable future - are too complex to be universally and glibly replaced by culture dishes and simulations and, if animal testing saves lives, for now they remain absolutely necessary. With this on mind, there's also a big moral argument. Are animals' lives less important than humans' that we don't test on humans because we think it's wrong but acceptable to do the test on animals even though it won't even give a 100% accurate result? Why risk the lives on innocent animals when there are a lot of prisoners in jail who are there for brutal crimes and not give anything to society? Would it be better to look for human volunteers rather than forcing our tests on animals? I'm not saying yes or no to any of these questions, but the moral side of medical research on animals is really endless and can make everyone think including myself.

Vivisection is absolutely not moral, OR necessary (or too effective) in finding cures for illness. In order to understand this, you need only do some reading: http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/vivisection-part-one-the-necessity-of-vivisection/#.Urg1OvRDveM http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/vivisection-part-two-the-moral-justification-of-vivisection/#.Urg0yPRDveM