The article above is full of half-truths and outright lies.
Where possible, researchers use animal alternatives. Animals are expensive, and every study that involves animals must be reviewed by an ethics committee. If a procedure might cause pain to an animal, the researcher must explain how they plan to relieve the pain—and if they don’t plan to give pain relief, they must have a strong experimental justification for it. In addition, any researcher doing studies with live animals must take species-specific ethics training annually. This training includes learning how to humanely euthanize animals when continuing the experiment would cause too much pain—allowing an animal to die could mean that it experienced a lot of pain. And so on, and so on.
While computers are essential for research, they simply cannot model a complex biological system.
There are many kinds of experiments that do not require testing in animals. For instance, I did not need live animals to try to figure out how dioxin is poisonous when I was in grad school—indeed, the kinds of experiments I did couldn’t have been done in animals. However, I used tissue extracts (taken from animals), and I grew cells, which need to be fed with fetal calf serum.
I could go on, but I won’t. The bottom line is that there is no substitute for animal use in research, unless one is doing plant research.
If you accuse someone of writing half-truths, let alone lies, you should give specific references, whereas you do not explain what these half-truths and lies are. This is the standard procedure in scientific and academic discourse, which, as a scientist - as you profess to be - you should know very well and practice.
You say that researchers where possible use animal alternatives because animals are expensive.
But in reality, as in all areas where big business and huge amounts of money are involved, the opposite happens: the interests at stake are so great that a massive campaign of promotion - and misinformation, into which trap you seem to have fallen - is put into place.
Be it manufacturers of cigarettes, alcoholic drinks, weapons, or the animal experimentation industry, if something which is bad for human welfare is at the same time good for some people’s pockets they will find a way to advertise it, justify it and make it appear right.
Also, public research establishments can have an interest in using animals to justify their requests for higher grants and funding.
There is a huge industry behind animal experiments: lab animal breeders, carers, handlers, importers, manufacturers of products for lab animals and so on.
The “strong experimental justification for it” that you claim must be given is simply the dogmatic belief in a 19th-century paradigm of reductionist, anti-evolutionist biology, that of Claude Bernard.
You say: “While computers are essential for research, they simply cannot model a complex biological system.”
Nor the complex biological system of a species can model that of another. You cannot have it both ways: if a biological system is complex, it is also species-specific.
The bottom line is that you have not given any valid arguments in support of your bottom line.
You make another comment: “I have to wonder what an animal-rights activist is doing posting on a conservative forum.”
What is there in conservatism that is irreconcilable with advancing the moral status of animals?
This is another dogmatism, like believing that we cannot do without animal experiments.