Continuing our video series on the patient benefits of animal research, a patient interviews a scientist on how stem cells, based on animal research, may be used to repair hearts. Professor Michael Schneider of Imperial College tells Alan Keys about stem cell research and how it may lead to treatments for heart disease. Michael describes how the availability of stem cells allows his team to determine the molecules involved in heart cell death and also how to protect those cells from death during a heart attack.

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On the principal that you can’t really understand something until you have tried it yourself, the education team have been encouraging young people up and down the country to try their hands at taking blood samples from the tail veins of a pair of laboratory rats.

Not real rats of course, but the rubber training kind that can help young people understand how much skill and patience is needed for efficient blood sampling without causing any undue distress (to the rats at least).

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The UK Department of Health is being urged to review the national immunisation programme against cervical cancer, in response to a dramatic rise in throat cancer linked to oral sex. Cases of oropharyngeal cancer have more than doubled to over 1,000 annually since the mid-1990s after remaining stable for many years. Since 2008 in the UK, girls between the ages of 12 and 13 have been given a protective vaccine against cervical cancer. Now, there are calls for a similar immunisation programme for boys.

Animals were used to understand the virus that triggers most cases of cervical cancer and aided the development of the cervical cancer vaccine. The papilloma virus, or wart virus, was discovered in real jackalopes, rabbits with horns, in the 1930s.

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Before January 1922, a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes was in effect a death sentence: many died of starvation. And before 1945 when the NHS was founded in the UK, you could only get insulin if you could afford it.

Monday 23 January 2012 is, they say, the 90th anniversary of the first successful use of insulin, saving the life of teenager Leonard Thompson in Toronto General Hospital.

According to Michael Bliss, who wrote the definitive history The Discovery of Insulin, the only creature which had received more insulin than Leonard or any other animal was Fred Banting and Charles Best's famous dog Marjorie. The dog became diabetic when she had her pancreas removed on 18 November 1921 and was still receiving her daily insulin, at that time a fairly crude pancreatic extract, in late January.

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