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Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)

/^t/It is commonly believed that without vivisection progress in medicine would not be possible. All new drugs and vaccines have to be checked for side-effects before they can appear on the market. However, predicting what the effect of a medicine will be on human beings from tests done on animals, may prove to be very difficult. Since human organism is very complex, very few species are similar enough to guarantee that the results of the tests will be reliable. Thus, there is not much point in experimenting on rats, mice or rabbits. Moreover, it is due to improvements in medicine and better standard of living, and not as a result of animal tests, that diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera or smallpox, which were fatal in the old days, are now in decline. In fact, penicillin and aspirin, two of the most widely-known drugs, were discovered just by chance. Therefore, since advances in medicine do not necessarily involve tests on animals, there is no need to use them any longer.