Of Mice and Men

We live in a world where high calorie food is readily available for a lot of us. This combined with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles underlies the increasing levels of obesity in almost all nations globally. However maybe it’s not only what we eat, but also when we eat it? I’ll be discussing how recent research has identified how our body clock functions. How certain lifestyles result in our food intake becoming out of synch with our natural rhythms, and how this adds to the problems of obesity and associated health problems.

Good progress has been made in understanding stroke prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. Undoubtedly, the use of animals in stroke research has greatly contributed to this. Despite the progress made, stroke remains one of the most devastating diseases worldwide. Stroke is the third leading cause of death, and the leading cause of adult disability. No drugs have been approved specifically for the treatment of stroke in the last 25 years. My talk will discuss some of the reasons for this, and how improvement of animal welfare can help address this.

The medicines we take everyday were developed and tested using animals in laboratories. This issue has created lots of ethical and scientific discussion. Our project adopts a new approach to try and better understand this debate. This session will introduce our innovative research, and will also invite audience members to participate by considering whether and how the medicines we put into our bodies should be labelled with more information of how they were produced. What might the impact be, if medicines were labelled as ‘tested on animals’?