Pierson: Football or WW2?
ewwwwwww…
Yes, unfortunately, despite that is it today largely unneeded.
Vivisection, specifically, surgery on live animals for the purpose of scientific research; the term has also come to mean any experimentation on live animals. Many millions of animals are used worldwide annually in this way. Humane societies question the needfulness of some vivisection, and in the United States the Animal Welfare Act of 1970 sets limits on the use of animals in laboratories. In many cases simple organisms, tissue cultures, and so forth can be used instead.
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It is highly unlikely that anyone would argue for unneeded experimentation on animals, or deny that some experiments on animals have been unnecessarily cruel. But how much of the research that is crucial to understand and treat human diseases requires the use of animals? The following contrasting viewpoints from medical researchers do not address the ethical issues surrounding animal experimentation, but rather discuss the benefits and drawbacks of research on animals, and the extent to which such research is needed today. These articles originally appeared in the February 1997 issue of Scientific American.
Animal Research Is Wasteful and Misleading
By Neal D. Barnard and Stephen R. Kaufman
The use of animals for research and testing is only one of many investigative techniques available. We believe that although animal experiments are sometimes intellectually seductive, they are poorly suited to addressing the urgent health problems of our era, such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, AIDS and birth defects. Even worse, animal experiments can mislead researchers or even contribute to illnesses or deaths by failing to predict the toxic effects of drugs. Fortunately, other, more reliable methods that represent a far better investment of research funds can be employed.
The process of scientific discovery often begins with unexpected observations that force researchers to reconsider existing theories and to conceive hypotheses that better explain their findings. Many of the apparent anomalies seen in animal experiments, however, merely reflect the unique biology of the species being studied, the unnatural means by which the disease was induced or the stressful environment of the laboratory. Such irregularities are irrelevant to human pathology, and testing hypotheses derived from these observations wastes considerable time and money.
The majority of animals in laboratories are used as so-called animal models: through genetic manipulation, surgical intervention or injection of foreign substances, researchers produce ailments in these animals that “model” human conditions. This research paradigm is fraught with difficulties, however. Evolutionary pressures have resulted in innumerable subtle, but significant, differences between species. Each species has multiple systems of organs—the cardiovascular and nervous systems, for example—that have complex interactions with one another. A stimulus applied to one particular organ system perturbs the animal’s overall physiological functioning in myriad ways that often cannot be predicted or fully understood. Such uncertainty severely undermines the extrapolation of animal data to other species, including humans.
Animal Tests Are Inapplicable
Important medical advances have been delayed because of misleading results derived from animal experiments. David Wiebers and his colleagues at the Mayo Clinic, writing in the journal “Stroke” in 1990, described a study showing that of the 25 compounds that reduced damage from ischemic stroke (caused by lack of blood flow to the brain) in rodents, cats and other animals, none proved efficacious in human trials. The researchers attributed the disappointing results to disparities between how strokes naturally occur in humans and how they were experimentally triggered in the animals. For instance, a healthy animal that experiences a sudden stroke does not undergo the slowly progressive arterial damage that usually plays a crucial role in human strokes.
During the 1920s and 1930s, studies on monkeys led to gross misconceptions that delayed the fight against poliomyelitis. These experiments indicated that the poliovirus infects mainly the nervous system; scientists later learned this was because the viral strains they had administered through the nose had artificially developed an affinity for brain tissue. The erroneous conclusion, which contradicted previous human studies demonstrating that the gastrointestinal system was the primary route of infection, resulted in misdirected preventive measures and delayed the development of a vaccine. Research with human cell cultures in 1949 first showed that the virus could be cultivated on nonneural tissues taken from the intestine and limbs. Yet in the early 1950s, cell cultures from monkeys rather than humans were used for vaccine production; as a result, millions of people were exposed to potentially harmful monkey viruses.
In a striking illustration of the inadequacy of animal research, scientists in the 1960s deduced from numerous animal experiments that inhaled tobacco smoke did not cause lung cancer (tar from the smoke painted on the skin of rodents did cause tumors to develop, but these results were deemed less relevant than the inhalation studies). For many years afterward, the tobacco lobby was able to use these studies to delay government warnings and to discourage physicians from intervening in their patients’ smoking habits.
Of course, human population studies provided inescapable evidence of the tobacco-cancer connection, and recent human DNA studies have identified tobacco’s “smoking gun,” showing how a derivative of the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene targets human genes, causing cancer. (It turns out that cancer research is especially sensitive to differences in physiology between humans and other animals. Many animals, particularly rats and mice, synthesize within their bodies approximately 100 times the recommended daily allowance for humans of vitamin C, which is believed to help the body ward off cancer.)
The stress of handling, confinement and isolation alters an animal’s physiology and introduces yet another experimental variable that makes extrapolating results to humans even more difficult. Stress on animals in laboratories can increase susceptibility to infectious disease and certain tumors as well as influence levels of hormones and antibodies, which in turn can alter the functioning of various organs.
In addition to medical research, animals are also used in the laboratory to test the safety of drugs and other chemicals; again, these studies are confounded by the fact that tests on different species often provide conflicting results. For instance, in 1988 Lester Lave of Carnegie Mellon University reported in the journal “Nature” that dual experiments to test the carcinogenicity of 214 compounds on both rats and mice agreed with each other only 70 percent of the time. The correlation between rodents and humans could only be lower. David Salsburg of Pfizer Central Research has noted that of 19 chemicals known to cause cancer in humans when ingested, only seven caused cancer in mice and rats using the standards set by the National Cancer Institute.
Indeed, many substances that appeared safe in animal studies and received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in humans later proved dangerous to people. The drug milrinone, which raises cardiac output, increased survival of rats with artificially induced heart failure; humans with severe chronic heart failure taking this drug had a 30 percent increase in mortality. The antiviral drug fialuridine seemed safe in animal trials yet caused liver failure in seven of 15 humans taking the drug (five of these patients died as a result of the medication, and the other two received liver transplants). The commonly used painkiller zomepirac sodium was popular in the early 1980s, but after it was implicated in 14 deaths and hundreds of life-threatening allergic reactions, it was withdrawn from the market. The antidepressant nomifensine, which had minimal toxicity in rats, rabbits, dogs and monkeys, caused liver toxicity and anemia in humans—rare yet severe, and sometimes fatal, effects that forced the manufacturer to withdraw the product a few months after its introduction in 1985.
These frightening mistakes are not mere anecdotes. The U.S. General Accounting Office reviewed 198 of the 209 new drugs marketed between 1976 and 1985 and found that 52 percent had “serious postapproval risks” not predicted by animal tests or limited human trials. These risks were defined as adverse reactions that could lead to hospitalization, disability or death. As a result, these drugs had to be relabeled with new warnings or withdrawn from the market. And of course, it is impossible to estimate how many potentially useful drugs may have been needlessly abandoned because animal tests falsely suggested inefficacy or toxicity.
Better Methods
Researchers have better methods at their disposal. These techniques include epidemiological studies, clinical intervention trials, astute clinical observation aided by laboratory testing, human tissue and cell cultures, autopsy studies, endoscopic examination and biopsy, as well as new imaging methods. And the emerging science of molecular epidemiology, which relates genetic, metabolic and biochemical factors with epidemiological data on disease incidence, offers significant promise for identifying the causes of human disease.
Consider the success of research on atherosclerotic heart disease. Initial epidemiological investigations in humans—notably the Framingham Heart Study, started in 1948—revealed the risk factors for heart disease, including high cholesterol levels, smoking and high blood pressure. Researchers then altered these factors in controlled human trials, such as the multicenter Lipid Research Clinics Trial, carried out in the 1970s and 1980s. These studies illustrated, among many other things, that every 1 percent drop in serum cholesterol levels led to at least a 2 percent drop in risk for heart disease. Autopsy results and chemical studies added further links between risk factors and disease, indicating that people consuming high-fat diets acquire arterial changes early in life. And studies of heart disease patients indicated that eating a low-fat vegetarian diet, getting regular mild exercise, quitting smoking and managing stress can reverse atherosclerotic blockages.
Similarly, human population studies of HIV infection elucidated how the virus was transmitted and guided intervention programs. In vitro studies using human cells and serum allowed researchers to identify the AIDS virus and determine how it causes disease. Investigators also used in vitro studies to assess the efficacy and safety of important new AIDS drugs such as AZT, 3TC and protease inhibitors. New leads, such as possible genetic and environmental factors that contribute to the disease or provide resistance to it, are also emerging from human studies.
Many animals have certainly been used in AIDS research, but without much in the way of tangible results. For instance, the widely reported monkey studies using the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) under unnatural conditions suggested that oral sex presented a transmission risk. Yet this study did not help elucidate whether oral sex transmitted HIV in humans or not. In other cases, data from animal studies have merely repeated information already established by other experiments. In 1993 and 1994 Gerard J. Nuovo and his colleagues at the State University of New York at Stony Brook determined the route of HIV into the female body (the virus passes through cells in the cervix and then to nearby lymph nodes) using studies of human cervical and lymph node samples. Later, experimenters at New York University placed SIV into the vaginas of rhesus monkeys, then killed the animals and dissected the organs; their paper, published in 1996, arrived at essentially the same conclusion about the virus’s path as did the previous human studies.
Research into the causes of birth defects has relied heavily on animal experiments, but these have typically proved to be embarrassingly poor predictors of what can happen in humans. The rates for most birth defects are rising steadily. Epidemiological studies are needed to trace possible genetic and environmental factors associated with birth defects, just as population studies linked lung cancer to smoking and heart disease to cholesterol. Such surveys have already provided some vital information—the connection between neural tube defects and folate deficiency and the identification of fetal alcohol syndrome are notable findings—but much more human population research is needed.
Observations of humans have proved to be invaluable in cancer research as well. Several studies have shown that cancer patients who follow diets low in fat and rich in vegetables and fruit live longer and have a lower risk of recurrence. We now need intervention trials to test which specific diets help with various types of cancers.
The issue of what role, if any, animal experimentation played in past discoveries is not relevant to what is necessary now for research and safety testing. Before scientists developed the cell and tissue cultures common today, animals were routinely used to harbor infectious organisms. But there are few diseases for which this is still the case—modern methods for vaccine production are safer and more efficient. Animal toxicity tests to determine the potency of drugs such as digitalis and insulin have largely been replaced with sophisticated laboratory tests that do not involve animals.
A Rhetorical Device
Animal “models” are, at best, analogous to human conditions, but no theory can be proved or refuted by analogy. Thus, it makes no logical sense to test a theory about humans using animals. Nevertheless, when scientists debate the validity of competing theories in medicine and biology, they often cite animal studies as evidence. In this context, animal experiments serve primarily as rhetorical devices. And by using different kinds of animals in different protocols, experimenters can find evidence in support of virtually any theory. For instance, researchers have used animal experiments to show that cigarettes both do and do not cause cancer.
Harry Harlow’s famous monkey experiments, conducted in the 1960s at the University of Wisconsin, involved separating infant monkeys from their mothers and keeping some of them in total isolation for a year. The experiments, which left the animals severely damaged emotionally, served primarily as graphic illustrations of the need for maternal contact—a fact already well established from observations of human infants.
Animal experimenters often defend their work with brief historical accounts of the supposedly pivotal role of animal data in past advances. Such interpretations are easily skewed. For example, proponents of animal use often point to the significance of animals to diabetes research. But human studies by Thomas Cawley, Richard Bright and Appollinaire Bouchardat in the 18th and 19th centuries first revealed the importance of pancreatic damage in diabetes. In addition, human studies by Paul Langerhans in 1869 led to the discovery of insulin-producing islet cells. And although cows and pigs were once the primary sources for insulin to treat diabetes, human insulin is now the standard therapy, revolutionizing how patients manage the disease.
Animal experimenters have also asserted that animal tests could have predicted the birth defects caused by the drug thalidomide. Yet most animal species used in laboratories do not develop the kind of limb defects seen in humans after thalidomide exposure; only rabbits and some primates do. In nearly all animal birth-defect tests, scientists are left scratching their heads as to whether humans are more like the animals who develop birth defects or like those who do not.
In this discussion, we have not broached the ethical objections to animal experimentation. These are critically important issues. In the past few decades, scientists have come to a new appreciation of the tremendous complexity of animals’ lives, including their ability to communicate, their social structures and emotional repertoires. But pragmatic issues alone should encourage scientists and governments to put research money elsewhere.
The Authors
Neal D. Barnard and Stephen R. Kaufman are both practicing physicians. Barnard conducts nutrition research and is president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Kaufman is co-chair of the Medical Research Modernization Committee.
Animal Research Is Vital to Medicine
By Jack H. Botting and Adrian R. Morrison
Experiments using animals have played a crucial role in the development of modern medical treatments, and they will continue to be necessary as researchers seek to alleviate existing ailments and respond to the emergence of new disease. As any medical scientist will readily state, research with animals is but one of several complementary approaches. Some questions, however, can be answered only by animal research. We intend to show exactly where we regard animal research to have been essential in the past and to point to where we think it will be vital in the future. To detail all the progress that relied on animal experimentation would require many times the amount of space allotted to us. Indeed, we cannot think of an area of medical research that does not owe many of its most important advances to animal experiments.
In the mid-19th century, most debilitating diseases resulted from bacterial or viral infections, but at the time, most physicians considered these ailments to be caused by internal derangements of the body. The proof that such diseases did in fact derive from external microorganisms originated with work done by the French chemist Louis Pasteur and his contemporaries, who studied infectious diseases in domestic animals. Because of his knowledge of how contaminants caused wine and beer to spoil, Pasteur became convinced that microorganisms were also responsible for diseases such as chicken cholera and anthrax.
To test his hypothesis, Pasteur examined the contents of the guts of chickens suffering from cholera; he isolated a possible causative microbe and then grew the organism in culture. Samples of the culture given to healthy chickens and rabbits produced cholera, thus proving that Pasteur had correctly identified the offending organism. By chance, he noticed that after a time, cultures of the microorganisms lost their ability to infect. But birds given the ineffective cultures became resistant to fresh batches that were otherwise lethal to untreated birds. Physicians had previously observed that among people who survived a severe attack of certain diseases, recurrence of the disease was rare; Pasteur had found a means of producing this resistance without risk of disease. This experience suggested to him that with the administration of a weakened culture of the disease-causing bacteria, doctors might be able to induce in their patients immunity to infectious diseases.
In similar studies on rabbits and guinea pigs, Pasteur isolated the microbe that causes anthrax and then developed a vaccine against the deadly disease. With the information from animal experiments—obviously of an extent that could never have been carried out on humans—he proved not only that infectious diseases could be produced by microorganisms but also that immunization could protect against these diseases.
Pasteur’s findings had a widespread effect. For example, they influenced the views of the prominent British surgeon Joseph Lister, who pioneered the use of carbolic acid to sterilize surgical instruments, sutures and wound dressings, thereby preventing infection of wounds. In 1875 Queen Victoria asked Lister to address the Royal Commission inquiry into vivisection—as the queen put it, “to make some statement in condemnation of these horrible practices.” As a Quaker, Lister had spoken publicly against many cruelties of Victorian society, but despite the request of his sovereign, he was unable to condemn vivisection. His testimony to the Royal Commission stated that animal experiments had been essential to his own work on asepsis and that to restrict research with animals would prevent discoveries that would benefit humankind.
Dozens of Vaccines and Antibiotics
Following the work of Pasteur and others, scientists have established causes of and vaccines for dozens of infectious diseases, including diphtheria, tetanus, rabies, whooping cough, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, measles, mumps and rubella. The investigation of these ailments indisputably relied heavily on animal experimentation: in most cases, researchers identified candidate microorganisms and then administered the microbes to animals to see if they contracted the illness in question.
Similar work continues to this day. Just recently, scientists developed a vaccine against Hemophilus influenzae type B (Hib), a major cause of meningitis, which before 1993 resulted in death or severe brain damage in more than 800 children each year in the U.S. Early versions of a vaccine produced only poor, short-lived immunity. But a new vaccine, prepared and tested in rabbits and mice, proved to be powerfully immunogenic and is now in routine use. Within two months of the vaccine’s introduction in the U.S. and the U.K., Hib infections fell by 70 percent.
Animal research not only produced new vaccines for the treatment of infectious disease, it also led to the development of antibacterial and antibiotic drugs. In 1935, despite aseptic precautions, trivial wounds could lead to serious infections that resulted in amputation or death. At the same time, in both Europe and the U.S., death from puerperal sepsis (a disease that mothers can contract after childbirth, usually as a result of infection by hemolytic streptococci) occurred in 200 of every 100,000 births. In addition, 60 of every 100,000 men aged 45 to 64 died from lobar pneumonia. When sulfonamide drugs became available, these figures fell dramatically: by 1960 only five out of every 100,000 mothers contracted puerperal sepsis, and only six of every 100,000 middle-aged men succumbed to lobar pneumonia. A range of other infections could also be treated with these drugs.
The story behind the introduction of sulfonamide drugs is instructive. The team investigating these compounds—Gerhard Domagk’s group at Bayer Laboratories in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Germany—insisted that all candidate compounds be screened in infected mice (using the so-called mouse protection test) rather than against bacteria grown on agar plates. Domagk’s perspicacity was fortunate: the compound prontosil, for instance, proved to be extremely potent in mice, but it had no effect on bacteria in vitro—the active antibacterial substance, sulfanilamide, was formed from prontosil within the body. Scientists synthesized other, even more powerful sulfonamide drugs and used them successfully against many infections. For his work on antibacterial drugs, Domagk won the Nobel Prize in 1939.
A lack of proper animal experimentation unfortunately delayed for a decade the use of the remarkable antibiotic penicillin: Alexander Fleming, working in 1929, did not use mice to examine the efficacy of his cultures containing crude penicillin (although he did show the cultures had no toxic effects on mice and rabbits). In 1940, however, Howard W. Florey, Ernst B. Chain and others at the University of Oxford finally showed penicillin to be dramatically effective as an antibiotic via the mouse protection test.
Despite the success of vaccines and antibacterial therapy, infectious disease remains the greatest threat to human life worldwide. There is no effective vaccine against malaria or AIDS; physicians increasingly face strains of bacteria resistant to current antibacterial drugs; new infectious diseases continue to emerge. It is hard to envisage how new and better vaccines and medicines against infectious disease can be developed without experiments involving animals.
Research on animals has been vital to numerous other areas in medicine. Open-heart surgery—which saves the lives of an estimated 440,000 people every year in the U.S. alone—is now routine, thanks to 20 years of animal research by scientists such as John Gibbon of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Replacement heart valves also emerged from years of animal experimentation.
The development of treatments for kidney failure has relied on step-by-step improvement of techniques through animal experiments. Today kidney dialysis and even kidney transplants can save the lives of patients suffering from renal failure as a result of a variety of ailments, including poisoning, severe hemorrhage, hypertension or diabetes. Roughly 200,000 people require dialysis every year in the U.S.; some 11,000 receive a new kidney. Notably, a drug essential for dialysis—heparin—must be extracted from animal tissues and tested for safety on anesthetized animals.
Transplantation of a kidney or any major organ presents a host of complications; animal research has been instrumental in generating solutions to these problems. Experiments on cats helped develop techniques for suturing blood vessels from the host to the donor organ so that the vessels would be strong enough to withstand arterial pressure. Investigators working with rabbits, rodents, dogs and monkeys have also determined ways to suppress the immune system to avoid rejection of the donor organ.
The list continues. Before the introduction of insulin, patients with diabetes typically died from the disease. For more than 50 years, the lifesaving hormone had to be extracted from the pancreas of cattle or pigs; these batches of insulin also had to be tested for safety and efficacy on rabbits or mice.
When we started our scientific careers, the diagnosis of malignant hypertension carried with it a prognosis of death within a year, often preceded by devastating headaches and blindness. Research on anesthetized cats in the 1950s heralded an array of progressively improved antihypertensive medicines, so that today treatment of hypertension is effective and relatively benign. Similarly, gastric ulcers often necessitated surgery with a marked risk of morbidity afterward. Now antiulcer drugs, developed from tests in rats and dogs, can control the condition and may effect a cure if administered with antibiotics to eliminate Helicobacter pylori infection.
Common Misconceptions
Much is made in animal-rights propaganda of alleged differences between species in their physiology or responses to drugs that supposedly render animal experiments redundant or misleading. These claims can usually be refuted by proper examination of the literature. For instance, opponents of animal research frequently cite the drug thalidomide as an example of a medicine that was thoroughly tested on animals and showed its teratogenic effect only in humans. But this is not so. Scientists never tested thalidomide in pregnant animals until after fetal deformities were observed in humans. Once they ran these tests, researchers recognized that the drug did in fact cause fetal abnormalities in rabbits, mice, rats, hamsters and several species of monkey. Similarly, some people have claimed that penicillin would not have been used in patients had it first been administered to guinea pigs, because it is inordinately toxic to this species. Guinea pigs, however, respond to penicillin in exactly the same way as do the many patients who contract antibiotic-induced colitis when placed on long-term penicillin therapy. In both guinea pigs and humans, the cause of the colitis is infection with the bacterium Clostridium difficile.
In truth, there are no basic differences between the physiology of laboratory animals and humans. Both control their internal biochemistry by releasing endocrine hormones that are all essentially the same; both humans and laboratory animals send out similar chemical transmitters from nerve cells in the central and peripheral nervous systems, and both react in the same way to infection or tissue injury.
Animal models of disease are unjustly criticized by assertions that they are not identical to the conditions studied in humans. But they are not designed to be so; instead such models provide a means to study a particular procedure. Thus, cystic fibrosis in mice may not exactly mimic the human condition (which varies considerably among patients anyway), but it does provide a way to establish the optimal method of administering gene therapy to cure the disease. Opponents of animal experiments also allege that most illness can be avoided by a change of lifestyle; for example, adoption of a vegan diet that avoids all animal products. Whereas we support the promulgation of healthy practices, we do not consider that our examples could be prevented by such measures.
A Black Hole
Our opponents in this debate claim that even if animal experiments have played a part in the development of medical advances, this does not mean that they were essential. Had such techniques been outlawed, the argument goes, researchers would have been forced to be more creative and thus would have invented superior technologies. Others have suggested that there would not be a gaping black hole in place of animal research but instead more careful and respected clinical and cellular research.
In fact, there was a gaping black hole. No outstanding progress in the treatment of disease occurred until biomedical science was placed on a sound, empirical basis through experiments on animals. Early researchers, such as Pasteur and the 17th-century scientist William Harvey, who studied blood circulation in animals, were not drawn to animal experiments as an easy option. Indeed, they drew on all the techniques available at the time to answer their questions: sometimes dissection of a cadaver, sometimes observations of a patient, sometimes examination of bacteria in culture. At other times, though, they considered experimentation on animals to be necessary.
We would like to suggest an interesting exercise for those who hold the view that animal experiments, because of their irrelevance, have retarded progress: take an example of an advance dependent on animal experiments and detail how an alternative procedure could have provided the same material benefit. A suitable example would be treatment of the cardiac condition known as mitral valve insufficiency, caused by a defect in the heart’s mitral valve. The production of prosthetic heart valves stemmed from years of development and testing for efficacy in dogs and calves. The artificial valve can be inserted only into a quiescent heart that has been bypassed by a heart-lung machine—an instrument that itself has been perfected after 20 years’ experimentation in dogs. If, despite the benefit of 35 years of hindsight, critics of animal research cannot present a convincing scenario to show how effective treatment of mitral valve insufficiency could have developed any other way, their credibility is suspect.
Will animal experiments continue to be necessary to resolve extant medical problems? Transgenic animals with a single mutant gene have already provided a wealth of new information on the functions of proteins and their roles in disease; no doubt they will continue to do so. We also anticipate major progress in the treatment of traumatic injury to the central nervous system. The dogma that it is impossible to restore function to damaged nerve cells in the mammalian spinal cord has to be reassessed in the light of recent animal research indicating that nerve regeneration is indeed possible. It is only a matter of time before treatments begin to work. We find it difficult to envision how progress in this field—and so many others in biological and medical science—can be achieved in the future without animal experiments.
The Authors
Jack H. Botting and Adrian R. Morrison have been active in the defense of animal research since the 1980s. Botting, a retired university lecturer, is the former scientific adviser to the Research Defense Society in London. Morrison is director of the Laboratory for Study of the Brain in Sleep at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
Source: Reprinted with permission. Copyright © February 1997 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.
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That… was… long.
Mmmm… Shock Therapy.
The essay strikes me as politically motivated and very unprofessional, and not just because of its biased content. For instance it says, “Animal ‘models’ are, at best, analogous to human conditions, but no theory can be proved or refuted by analogy. Thus, it makes no logical sense to test a theory about humans using animals.” This is silly abstractionism, as ridiculous as saying, “No two humans are alike, they are just analogies of one another, so the study of the human body is futile because we are all different.” A biological organism is enormously complex, and has a million commonalities with even the most distantly related organisms. <i>Any</i> animal could be useful for testing.
The essay talks about “proving” a theory, and this in itself demonstrates the utter inexperience of the author. A theory can be tested and supported, but never proved. If a medicine works ten times on a human, it does not necessarily work the eleventh. Testing a medicine a hundred times on animals can be far more productive than testing it ten times on humans.
I learned in school that animal models can be homologous to humans. And:
(…)a governmental study on whether fish felt pain biting on a hook(…)
I’m speechless.
I haven’t the scientific knowledge to judge or say whether it is a professional essay or not, that’ll have to stand on the editors of Scientific American and Encarta. What I can and will say is that I agree with their conclusion: vivisection is largely unneeded, and that I agree with most, if not all, of the arguments leading to that conclusion.
It isn’t meant for reading unless you’re especially interested.
I wouldn’t say that vivisection is common nowadays. Scientific communities have very strict ethical principles that they must follow and I doubt that vivisection would be overlooked lightly.
Nevertheless, animal research has been crucial, is crucial and will continue to be crucial for the advancement of science. If people can create a mouse with alzheimers and using this mouse line, cure alzheimer’s, I can’t condemn their research as long as it is performed in the appropriate ethical boundaries. I’m not particularly fond of having to kill something or hurt something to learn from it, but animals and animal models provide us and will continue to provide us with a lot of conveniences we wouldn’t have otherwise.
Someone mentionned that sometimes the animal model doesn’t apply to the human. And yes that has happened and will continue to happen. However, that’s the best thing we have.
You can’t just take sick people and start experimenting on them. There aren’t enough of them and there are complicated ethical considerations at hand when you do so. Human experiementation is under far more stringent conditions than animal experimentation and human experimentation provides far more complications for a lot of reasons such as variability between subjects (thus variable responses to treatments or phenotypes of a given disease).
When you’re trying to understand how something works, it isn’t as simple as looking at the DNA, purifying a protein out or looking at cell lines. You often have to look at how it works in the entire organism, how it works in a system and that kind of thing. Sure, it might not be the same in humans as it is in mice, however, there are great similarities between organisms which you can exploit and if these similarities were not useful, the extremely expensive experiments which have been performed would not have been performed. Scientists are held accountable for the work which they do. Before you do a test on people, which may or may not work, you have to check if it works in a system and get an idea of what kind of problems will arise when you perform these tests. That’s one purpose animals have.
Narf!
As you can see, the Vivisection is a very important topic in science today. The original theory was to study Vivi as a whole, but these attempts were fruitless. Vivi was not that simple. When scientists decided to look at Vivi on a larger scale, they decided studying in sections would prove more successful. It was.
Point! So BN, so what are we doing to night?
The Same thing we do every night: Try to take over the World.
Nice one, Shin I enjoyed it.
I wouldn’t say that vivisection is common nowadays.
GOOD ;_; i read about a company that sawed the tops of the heads off of monkies to make them have a stroke and then when their shift was over, they just left them there. So they just died overnight. That just sounds utterly and completely horrible…
I heard about this one time that a scientist crucified a mouse.
True story.
NERD
Poor mouse 
They’re so precious.
Although its for advancing science and medicine, scientists do far worse things to mice than crucify them.
Shit, i was only (obviously) kidding.
I must have more.
Hey, we found the rabies vaccine by drilling holes in dog’s heads in order to properly infect them.
WHAT?! Okay this whole let’s scare Eva thing is NOT going to work. if you guys continue I will…not come into this thread anymore. Sickos.
:moogle: But didn’t you start this thread?
Did they ever find out why we can’t see his face?