I hope this is an April Fool's joke.<p>I just retired after 19 years in the pharma industry. Animal testing is essential for new drug safety assessment because off-target damage to tissues cannot be detected using any method other than entire animals since drug byproducts from digestion or absorption do not exist in the lab -- in vitro or in silico. Measuring drug effects on the body requires exposure to ALL of an animal's tissues to see which will react. Drug efficacy too can't be measured usefully without full body animal and human studies.<p>Whomever proposed this obviously did not talk to _anyone_ in the pharma industry. The strategy is completely and dangerously clueless. I'm sure Derek Lowe will very soon explain this in more detail in his blog at Science.<p>Washington has gone insane.