I’m back never having once posted during the 9th World Congress on ‘Alternatives to Animal Testing in the Life Sciences‘. After this experience, I have one piece of advice, never bring a computer with which you are unfamiliar to an event and expect to be able to post.

In any event, there will be a series of five articles published in the fairly near future about alternatives to animal testing. In the meantime, here are a few tidbits about the congress and from the congress sessions:

• it was big (I estimate at least 1000), with scientists and teams from Japan, UK, Korea, US, Brazil, the Czech republic, and China in particularly high relief although there were representatives from many other countries as well
• with the March 2013 ban on animal testing for cosmetics, only cruelty-free cosmetics can be sold in Europe (none of the sessions I attended provided information on how one might be certain that a company’s cosmetics were in fact cruelty-free, presumably there is some sort of certification process)
• human-on-a-chip/organ-on-a-chip work was first attempted by Uwe Marx in Germany in the early 1990s
• while fewer animals are used for testing in some areas (Europe’s cosmetics ban eliminated some tests), overall use is rising according to Roman Kolar, Animal Welfare Academy, Germany

There will be more over the next few weeks as I prepare the articles.