There does not seem to be any agreement between the two writers, while there is an obvious disagreement between them. Sabin agrees to Animal Testing: ?Animal research saves human lives? but Carlson disagrees: ?Animal tests are unreliable?. Animal testing is quite an arguable topic in the world. In Sabin’s article, she stated the example of her husband using polio vaccine as her persuasion as he was one that benefited a lot from the outcome of animal testing.
Her husband, Albert Sabin, inventor of oral polio vaccine, told a reporter before his death in 1993, ?There could have been no oral polio vaccine without the use of innumerable animals, a very large number of animals. ?(Sabin) Sabin shows that polio has been eradicated in Western Hemisphere in about forty years after the polio vaccine was introduced to United State. She truly believes that the polio vaccine saves the world from the fear of the polio, therefore she repeatedly reference to ?reality? to help her in persuading readers that animal testing is in fact an advantage. Since she shows that the information she pointed out was from the reality, not just something she made up, this makes readers easier to believe in her point of view. As can be expected, Carlson’s disagreement with Sabin about animal testing leads her to a dramatically different point of view as well. In Carlson’s article, she provides the information about how inaccurate animal testing are to support her point of view.
?Nearly everything that medicine has learned about what substances cause human cancer and birth defects has come from human clinical and epidemiological studies because animal experiments do not accurately predict what occurs in humans. ?(Carlson) Carlson uses cancer and birth defects as an example to disagree with Sabin’s example of her husband using polio vaccine. ?It was unfortunate that the original polio vaccine was produced using monkey calls instead of available human cells as can be done today. ?(Carlson) Carlson pointed this out because this sentence tells us that the medicine available today may be created or experimented on a non-human being. Using substances from animals other than human to produce medicine for human may result in serious disease. Sabin pointed out the story about her husband benefited from the polio research; thus she thinks animal testing can save human lives.
In contrary, Carlson pointed out the animal testing done in the past could be done on human nowadays; thus she thinks animal testing is unnecessary. And she does not believe the polio vaccine example can justify that it is worth to spend billion dollars and thirty million animals for the animal experimentation. In the article, Sabin used her husband, Albert, as an example to persuade people to agree with her in her article. Although writing only one example can make readers concentrate on how well her persuasion is, having more examples can let readers know animal research really saves human lives.
Sabin only listed one example in her argument, so I think Carlson did refuse all the argument in Sabin’s article. In Carlson’s article, the point about smoking cannot be tested on animals seemed most persuasive to me. But comparing to the article that Sabin wrote, Carlson seems to have lesser support for her argument, and this article might not be persuasive to some people. Sabin makes strong emotional appeals in her article. This plays a really large part in her persuasion.
Since most reader usually drives by emotional articles, this help a lot in making readers to think what Sabin said was really trustworthy. Carlson does not appeal to the emotion of the readers while she only stated her points one by one. When reading that article, I felt that it is only a report on why animal testing needs to be abandoned. It might not be easy for some readers to agree with the author in spite of the fact that she tried hard to persuade.
In conclusion, the disagreement between Sabin and Carlson on animal testing could appeal to different people. To accept Sabin, one would have to believe that if there were no animal testing, a lot of human would have died because of the polio disease. By using some animals, researchers could find out the way to save human lives that this is the best result to see. To accept Carlson, one would have to understand the problem that animals cannot be tested on every kind of newly researched medicine. It is because some of the tasks cannot be done on animals. For example, cigarettes cannot be tested on animals, as they do not know how to smoke.
