On mailing list I found
this interestign link to page with 50 DEADLY CONSEQUENCES OF
LAB ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS
Despite the ineffectiveness of penicillin in his rabbits, Alexander Fleming used the antibiotic on a very sick patient since he had nothing else to try. Luckily, Fleming’s initial tests were not on guinea pigs or hamsters, it kills them. Howard Florey, the Nobel Prize winner credited with co-discovering and manufacturing penicillin, stated: “How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940s, for penicillin would probably never been granted a license, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized.”
By the way, what are alternative testing methods, without animals?