TEENAGERS, we all know what they are like. Selfish, self-centred, boorish - too far up their own baggy jeans to give a thought about anyone else.

Young people today are a menace and a nuisance, with their loud music, antisocial behaviour and general awful lumpiness. We'd all be better off if they stayed in their smelly and untidy bedrooms until they turned into responsible adults, wouldn't we?

Normally I believe every word put into this column. Well, maybe a few over-heated words slip through the net at times of getting carried away (and all columnists like to do that occasionally). But my first two paragraphs today are, my regular readers will be relieved to know, complete and utter rubbish.

I don't believe a word of it, and neither should you three.

Despite all the nasty shouting to the contrary wherever you look these days, I feel mostly positive about young people, with the possible exception of the ones who pinched my bike.

And as evidence of youthful spirit, bravery and wisdom, I would like to introduce you to Laurie Pycroft, the 16-year-old from Swindon whose one-teen protest movement has re-invigorated the debate about experiments on animals, and brought student demonstrators on to the streets of Oxford shouting in support of such experiments.

Laurie, a bedroom blogger and sixth-form drop-out, used his computer to set up a pro-vivisection website, calling it Pro-Test. In doing so, he attracted an astonishing amount of attention - from some of the most respected scientists in the country, from the police advising him to keep quiet, and, inevitably, from the sometimes menacing animal liberation lobby.

Just think of it: one apparently aimless teenager triggered a demonstration held in support of the controversial animal research laboratory at Oxford. All by himself, more or less. This one boy dared to speak out on something about which so many adults had decided to keep quiet, for fear of coming to personal harm.

And in doing so, he has given voice to the silent majority of people - put by surveys at 75 per cent of the population - who back experiments on animals, mainly rats and mice, as the price for developing new medicines and treatments.

Nobody truly likes the idea of animal experiments, but such scientific research has brought about so many modern medical wonders. Without animal testing, many illnesses and diseases of the past would still be fatal today.

As John Stein, professor of physiology at Oxford, told the Pro-Test demonstrators: "Imagine yourself with a drowsy, whimpering three-year-old with meningitis. Fifty years ago, that child would have died. Now, due to the discovery and isolation of penicillin in this university, we can stop that child dying."

This is a reasonable, nay important, view to hold - yet it is one that, due to the sometimes violent opposition of a militant minority of pro-animal extremists, no one has been saying out loud for some time now. Thanks to a floppy-haired teenager with a bedroom pallor, people are at last speaking out.

There is, it should be said, no excuse for experimenting on animals by cosmetic companies.

If that horrible misuse of animals hasn't already been completely wiped out, it should be.

But experiments on animals that save lives should certainly be permissible, at least until science and technology offer an alternative route.

WHILE we are on teenagers, here is a difference between now and then (then being the 1970s, now being the 'here and'). The other day I retrieved a pile of long-lost CDs from the 17-year-old's bedroom: two Joseph Arthurs, an REM best-of, the latest David Gray and one Counting Crows.

It was just like the old days when my dad was always having to retrieve his Beethoven LPs from my bedroom - not. For some reason, my classics-loving dad reciprocated by never showing the slightest interest in my Grateful Dead collection or the latest King Crimson release.

Everything's much more culturally mixed up these days.

Updated: 09:49 Thursday, March 02, 2006