Science on the menu, a podcast by the European Food Safety Authority

Hello and welcome to another episode of Science on the Menu.

My name is Ed Bray and I work in the communications team at EFSA and joining me today is Jean-Lu Dorn

who is a senior scientific officer working on scientific methodologies in risk assessment. Welcome to the podcast,

Sean Lee. Thank you very much, Edward. Today we're going to be talking about animals, but not the

animals that are on our farms that are producing food and drink. We're going to be talking about

animals that we think about less in the food safety system, and that's the animals that

are tested on to ensure that substances in the food system are safe. And we're going to talk

about some more recent scientific developments that could help us to move beyond animal

testing altogether. So first, Jean-Lou, what is the purpose, actually, of animal testing?

Historically, animal testing exists since the 1960s, after the famous thalidomide incident

discovered in Australia.

Can you tell me more about that?

So thalidomide was taken as a drug,

as an antidepressant or as a sleeping pill,

and pregnant women took it,

and then the consequence of thalidomide intake was basically children with no limbs.

A medical doctor discovered that thalidomide itself was so-called teratogenic so it basically

blocked the development of limbs in the fetus because it went through the placental barrier.

From that, the legislation was set to then test very briefly all those chemicals for their

potential to have adverse effects, for example, on the fetus, but also on any organ of the body, be it liver, lung and so on,

to be very brief.

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