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special offers via e-mail. Beyond Animal Research By Jonathan
Balcombe, Ph.D. Animal Smoking Experiments Scientists like to
joke that smoking is a leading cause of statistics. It's an
amusing observation, but sadly, when it comes to animal
experimentation, it’s all too true. Despite the failure of
numerous animal studies during the 1950s and 1960s to reveal a
clear link between cigarette smoking and cancer—and despite our
established knowledge from human clinical data that smoking is
deadly—smoking experiments on animals continue. A search of the
NIH PubMed database reveals dozens of rat and mouse smoking
studies published in 2004 alone. Here’s a brief sampling: - At
the University of California, Davis, male mice spent five months
in a whole-body inhalation chamber to assess three levels of
smoke exposure on lung tumors (Witschi et al. 2004). - At the
Institute of Biological Research and Technology in Athens,
Greece, a tobacco smoke carcinogen w