Welcome to the The Replacement, a bi-weekly newsletter covering the global transition away from animal testing.
Most people don’t know how to feel about animal research.
Media outlets often fall into one of two traps:
glossing over the uncomfortable realities of animal testing, or
uncritically adopting inflammatory language from animal rights groups.
The Replacement aims to fill the space in between.
Here, you’ll find digestible, clear-eyed, and sometimes opinionated summaries of the latest developments in animal research policy and new approach methods (NAMs).
This field can be hopeful, exciting, and awe-inspiring. It can also be nuanced, politically tangled, and uncomfortable.
Big changes are happening now — let’s dive in together.
About Celia
Celia Ford is a neuroscientist-turned-journalist writing about how technology shapes the creation of knowledge. By day, she covers AI safety & policy at Transformer.
As a former primate electrophysiologist, Celia is selfishly invested in animal research policy, and believes in pushing biomedical research institutions towards the best human-centered science possible.
Between 2022 and 2025, she was a fellow — first at The Open Notebook, then at WIRED (via the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship program), and most recently at Vox’s Future Perfect. She reported stories on everything from pink cocaine to pole dancing, including the culture of animal research.
Before transitioning to journalism, Celia earned an ScB in cognitive neuroscience from Brown University and a PhD in neuroscience from UC Berkeley, where she studied reinforcement learning and the orbitofrontal cortex.
She lives in the California bay area with her partner and their two cats, Charlotte and Ferrari. When she’s not writing, you can find her dancing, lifting weights, playing music, or watching Love Island.
