Computer modeling still requires animal research

While searching for evidence of the necessity of animal research in the medical field, I came across a video at Brainfacts.org, called “Research Questions and Technique”.  This video addresses some of the alternatives to animal research.  In the video, researchers Michael E. Goldberg MD and Sharon L. Juliano PhD are interviewed regarding the various possible approaches to conducting medical research.  Both Dr. Goldberg and Dr. Juliano acknowledge that medical research data can be obtained using computer modeling, but it is not as simple as turning on the computer and clicking the “run simulation” button.  Dr. Goldberg put it this way, “Computer modeling requires data.  In order to understand our data, we often have to get help from computational neuroscientists, but they can’t do anything without us.  You can’t model data if you don’t know what the data is.  And so biologist, who work in wet labs, who work with organisms, who work with cells, who work with behaving animals, provide the data so that computational neuroscientists can help us understand.”  What he means by this is that computer modeling is built by people who rely on data obtained by people who conduct the hands on research, which includes animal research.  In a nut shell, computer modeling depends on animal research.  Dr. Juliano put it this way, “Data (computer) modeling is a very important tool that we can use in conducting research, but data modeling has a limited set of inputs and outputs, and when we do data modeling, we always have to bring it back to the real organism, to the real cell, or the real animal in order to understand if that (computer modeling result) is something that has worked.”  What she was saying is that computer modeling, although a legitimate research tool, is still very limited in its complexity.  The results from those models still must be verified in the real thing.  Dr. Juliano also added that while conducting a set of experiments on a cell culture, it yielded very different results than when they conducted the same experiments on the same cells on an intact animal. “So you needed the whole animal in order to have the proper response…..I think it’s very important to understanding how we do research and why using a whole entire animal is important.”  Cell cultures just do not produce the same results as when the whole animal is used and so the information obtained from cell cultures is limited by comparison.