Question: have you ever tested on over animals that are not mice or rats.

Ed Bracey answered on 14 Nov 2017:

I’ve only worked on mice and rats.
I think the more complicated the animal’s brain is, the more self aware it is.
So I don’t want to work on anything whose brain is bigger or more complex than a mouse.
Certainly not monkeys or non-human primates – to me they’re people too!
Humans are different because they can give consent.
I’d much rather work on humans who give permission than other species that can’t.
But there are things we can’t do with humans that we can with mice, like use genetic modifications that allow us to dye certain types of brain cell, so we can see which other brain cells they’re connected to.
I mean, we could do this in humans, but it’s not legal in most cases.
Some of the work people do on monkeys is necessary if we want new medicines.
People test new medicines on other species like mice and rats first to see if they have bad reactions to a new medicine. They are more similar to us than a lot of people realise!
After that’s done, a few monkeys are generally used, because they are so similar to humans, before the new medicines are tested on a few humans.