Animals are among the everyday "tools" used by medical research institutes and pharmaceutical, virology and toxicology laboratories.
This issue regularly incites heated debate between defenders of animal rights and those who hold the notion of "a necessary sacrifice for scientific advancement".

For centuries, animals have paid a heavy price to man's scientific conquests.
As ideas about living organisms and in particular the status of animals evolved, people began to question animal experimentation in the mid-20th Century.

It is a surgery that has one of the highest success rate ... Each year, more than 20,000 Belgians profit from it: the hip replacement is having more and more followers. And not necessarily in the elderly population! How does one live before and especially after such an operation? Did you know that each case is unique and requires the use of multiple advanced techniques? After going the knife, most patients wonder why they have not taken that decision sooner !

What can be done in the event of foetal malformation or an uncertain diagnosis? This programme takes us through the work of specialists at the Hôpital Necker. The story of three couples gives us a disturbing insight into the limbo world of prenatal medicine. Based on medical and scientific advances, embryos that were previously left to grow in the shelter of the mother’s womb have become a focus of study. But, while it is now possible to examine an embryo, treatment remains difficult. Doctors can still be puzzled by images that remain difficult to decipher.

Algae were used for a very long time as food or fertilizer.

Between science and mystery, the placebo effect is one of the strangest phenomena of medicine.

 To find new drugs, man must now return to nature. Since time immemorial, the sea terrifies and fascinates because it is both a source of death and source of life.

Mycobacterium vaccae, a bacteria present in the mud of Africa, could revolutionise treatment of immune system disorders, proof that germs have therapeutic properties essential to our survival. Germs have always had a bad reputation. However, these micro-organisms are for the most part inoffensive.

At the turn of the century, there are still plants unknown to science.

Toads secretions to help children to digest ...

A plant recently discovered in the Cameroonian deep forest contains, according to botanists, a molecule effective against HIV.