During the summer I did a co-op term at the Child and family Research Institute (CFRI) in a lab that performed diabetes research and was given the opportunity to perform some mouse work.  What I didn’t realize when I first expressed interest in mouse work, was how much training I had to receive before I was actually qualified to work with mice.  By the time I was certified to perform inter-peritoneal injections on mice it was mid-June and my term was almost half over.  I first had to take an online ethics course, which I did in my spare time while finishing my previous co-op.  Then I had to take a training course in person on how to properly handle the mice, after that I had to take a separate injections course and that was just for subcutaneous and IP injections.  If I wanted to learn other techniques I would have needed more training.  This made me realize that the university does make a fairly serious effort to ensure that animals are only used when it is necessary for the research and that when they are used that they are treated as ethically as possible.  If anything scientists want the animals to behave as they would naturally, that way experimental results can be interpreted as a result of treatment rather than an artefact of they way they are being held in captivity.  Those condition are not easy to replicate, but the scientists that I worked with did there best to ensure that the mice were psychologically healthy.  Furthermore, none of the scientists that I worked with enjoyed injecting mice-it’s not fun to stress the animals out and everybody does their best to make sure that the animals suffer as little as possible.  There is no doubt that it would be far more ethical to not perform animal research.  But, nevertheless, it is a necessary if you want to understand a biological system more completely.  The alternative to in vivo work in diabetes research is to use insulinoma cells or human pancreatic islets from donors. Insulinoma cells are immortalized cancer cells, and although they work well as a proof of concept they can hardly be considered representative of the complex in vivo systems that are being studied.  Human cells are obviously desirable, but they are precious and hard to come by.  So the next best option is to study mice as a model mammalian system at least until other more humane alternatives are developed.  To conclude, I think that providing that the animals are treated as well as they can be considering the circumstances, I feel that the possibility of contributing to research that may one day alleviate the suffering of many people justifies the use of animal models in research as I am not sure how much progress would be made without them.  If there was a viable, more humane alternative to the use of animal models it would definitely be preferable to use it.  But until then, it is necessary for the progression of a lot of research that is performed in the lifesciences.