I congratulate my hon. Friend Bill Etherington on presenting such a strong, passionate speech about the implications of experiments using animals. I recognise many of the things that he said, having practised some of those methods myself. As a young student, I was taught to inject rabbits and get antibodies from them. I had to fill in Home Office forms and so on, but there was a laxity even then about how seriously the issue was taken. Later in life, of course, during cancer research, one cured mice of cancer but was never sure whether it would work in human beings as well.

The great increase in using animals, particularly mice, is due not just to stem cell research but to the fact that people now want animal models for cystic fibrosis and other diseases, given that they can obtain genes, put them into what are called knockout mice or nude mice and see what happens in the process, thereby studying the progress of a particular illness. The increase in the use of mice is justified by scientists on the basis that it will help to give us some input into sorting out diseases, whether rare diseases or other sorts.

I am going to say something that opens up the whole field. As a hardened scientist, I never questioned what I did. They were just things that one did. However, I think that we have now learned quite a bit. I pay tribute to FRAME and Professor Michael Balls. He and I worked together, argued together and taught together. As a matter of fact, I got him his job. When he was at Berkeley, I brought him back to this country. Ever since then, we have conversed about alternatives to animal experiments, although not in the sense of doing away with animal experiments completely, because it is recognised that—in some cases, anyway—they can be useful. However, we should be working much harder to develop not just regulations but new technologies to replace some animal experiments.

I say that because I have a Bill, which is supported by Mr. Amess and the Safer Medicines Campaign, to evaluate tests carried out on animals against the alternative methods coming to the fore. I had not realised how fast such alternative technologies were emerging until I attended a conference a few months ago at the Royal Society run by the Safer Medicines Campaign. There is an opening up among scientists. More and more scientists are getting involved in considering alternatives. We should welcome that, particularly if the validation process that we are trying to pass in Parliament allows us to assess whether animal experiments are working, whether they tell us what we think we can see in a mouse, a rat or other animal, and how other technologies compare.

As my hon. Friend said, there have been some tragedies in the field in which animal experiments on mice or other animals have been carried out, yet when the drug is put into human trials, a Northwick Park situation arises. In those trials, drugs for certain types of leukaemia—I will not go into the details—had adverse effects on people; in fact, they nearly died. Much has been written about that. In other instances involving pharmaceutical companies, there have been side effects that were not seen in animals but were seen in humans when the drug entered human trials. I know that if a drug is used, it is best to see how it works physiologically on the whole organism—I have used that argument in the Chamber. However, in physiology and biochemistry there are differences between animals and between animals and humans. That must be taken into consideration.

I am a great believer in some of the tests that have been carried out. My colleague, Mr. Willis, always wants me to talk about Dundee university, where understanding how a basic scientific procedure called protein phosphorylation worked in normal organisms allowed the development of nine effective drugs to treat cancer. From a position of not understanding how something works, people can arrive at a point where it does work. As far as I know, there have been no adverse effects in that arena and it has to go through the legal process.

We all get letters from the public—I received letters about the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 because people did not like some of the things that were being done. Professor Michael Balls and I had a terrible fallout over some issues—he was watching what I was saying and we fell out and disagreed. That has been published. I have seen him since and there is no problem. We have argued out the matter.

Animal tests must be validated in some way, but they never have been. I have mentioned some cases where there have been problems. I want to talk not only about the number of animals involved, as my hon. Friend did, but about my concerns over the impact on patients of using animals as surrogate humans to develop and test new medicines. We rely on animals as a final safety screen before clinical trials on people. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, 92 per cent. of potential new drugs do not work in human trials. Sarah Boseley, a reporter from The Guardian, who I think is one of the best reporters in the country, digs deep and wins lots of prizes for what she unearths. She does not need the Freedom of Information Act 2000; she goes to countries such as Malawi in Africa and sees how drugs are being used in that community. She said:

"A million Britons are hospitalised by prescription medicines every year, costing the NHS £2 billion."

It is admitted that drugs often have side effects, which can differ between different people. Drugs are metabolised and mobilised in different ways depending on our individual genetic make-up.

There have been lots of reports from the United States and a vision has developed there focused on trying to limit animal tests and replace them with new technologies. I will not describe all those new technologies, as they have been mentioned before. People are critical of some, but not of others. Using human tissue is a more favourable practice in laboratories because we can have banks of such tissues. They can be studied and we can understand how a new compound will work. There are DNA chips, where the effect of a drug on a particular gene is looked at on a slide. There are different computer models, and microdosing is new technology where small amounts of a drug can be given to a human to see what reaction it produces. At the conference that I attended, I found it stimulating to see the good sciences being used to try and work out alternative procedures. That is why I hope that the Bill manages to get somewhere as we look for validation of those technologies.

There have been many inquiries into animal testing. The Lords Select Committee, the Animal Procedures Committee, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Weatherall report all called for research into the validity of animal tests. None of those inquiries assess the effect of that on predicting drug safety, and that is a huge gap. The Committee on Safety of Medicine's evaluation was the first, I think, to require a scientific comparison of the ability of animal tests to predict the risks of drugs in humans with the ability of a set of human biology-based tests. That is worth taking forward, and I compliment not only the Safer Medicines Campaign but also FRAME; they have continuously made us think about other ways of doing things.

Perhaps we can make savings by using these technologies. This is an expensive business involving animal housing, ensuring that welfare is properly provided, arranging Home Office visits and spending time in collecting data from different laboratories. Enabling animal houses to be smaller would save a lot of money for a starving higher education process. I remember once in Portcullis House that I saved a university £1 million by ensuring that humans could not enter its animal building. It was thought that allowing access would leave it open to the kind of people who have recently been imprisoned for their violent behaviour because of their beliefs about animals. There is a huge change in the way that people think about animal experiments, the need for them and the possible alternatives. I welcome that. This scientific field might turn out some very exciting results.