Julia Stephenson: Green Goddess

I live close to the luscious Lush unguent and beauty potion shop on the King's Road. It's a bacchanalian, scented delight - all those tubs and creams! And they don't test their products on animals. In there last week, I was pleased to see they were running a campaign against animal testing as part of International Primate Day on 1 September.

Jeremy Corbyn MP and Animal Defenders International marked the day by delivering a report, "Primate Nations", to 10 Downing Street. The report, which argues for a ban on the use of primates in experiments, is supported by doctors, scientists, researchers, the RSPCA, 200 welfare groups worldwide and the primatologist Dr Jane Goodall.

We don't need to capture wild primates to destroy them in laboratories. While there are similarities between us and primates, there are key biological differences that make primate research unreliable. The TGN1412 experimental drug trial caused horrific side effects to its human volunteers, even though monkeys had been force-fed a dosage 500 times stronger with no side effects.

Testing on animals slows medical progress because it tells us about animals, not people. Aspirin is safe for people, but can be fatal to cats; penicillin can kill guinea pigs; arsenic is very dangerous for humans but not for rats, mice or sheep; insulin is safe for humans yet can produce deformities in mice, rabbits and chickens. Thalidomide was tested on animals.

Dr Michael Coleman, senior lecturer in toxicology at the Department of Pharmacy, Aston University, notes: "As well as the ethical considerations, scientifically, primates are simply not close enough to us to act as good experimental models, and we should be promoting replacements. We must leave behind the intellectual laziness of relying on animal models and invest in human-cellular based alternatives for the future."

Animal tests for household products, weapons and pharmaceutical drugs are big business, and escalating. Yet many experiments are bewilderingly pointless. At Columbia University, lead pipes are implanted into the skulls of monkeys to study the connection between stress and menstrual cycles. Very few women have large weights surgically attached to their skulls, but they do suffer from other types of stress - perhaps the realisation that their money is wasted on ridiculous schemes like this.

Yet the focus is on a tiny minority of extremists - most animal-rights protesters are compassionate and law-abiding - at the expense of rational debate.

Oddly, we can't avoid television shows about people being operated on while programmes depicting animal experiments are considered too horrific, and experiments take place in gulag-type establishments hidden from public gaze. Why the secrecy? It's time to open up these places to the cameras, to let the public know what goes on in them and to start a debate not financed by anyone with a vested interest in perpetuating this iniquitous system.

www.ad-international.org; Doctors and Lawyers for Responsible Medicine ( www.dlrm.org); www.curedisease.net