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Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

erichgrunewald.com

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Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#71

Post by foobar33333 »

nceqs3 wrote: post #66
foobar33333 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Use computer models first as much as possible Are we not doing this already? I would assume this is even cheaper than producing the thing and testing it. And I'm not sure how confident I would be with computer models since we don't know a whole lot about how biology works enough to simulate it (given the simulation would mostly be trying to replicate previous potentially flawed studies)

You are correct, if you could build a computer model that could even somewhat predict the efficacy of a drug you would instantly become the wealthiest person in the world.

I imagine the only real way to do such a thing would be to simulate physics on an atomic level and have a perfect atomic map of the body. Which we are no where near achieving yet. But once we have that sorted, all kinds of incredible simulations could be done.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#72

Post by entee »

erwald wrote: post #45
fabian2k wrote: post #10

There's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.

there are a number of replacement methods, though i don't know if they cover all the cases. these include using tissue cultures, diseased humans and software modelling. also, when drugs have been deemed sufficiently safe, they can be further studied using human volunteer trials.

We already do all of this in drug discovery research before putting things into animals. We try computer modeling (very inaccurate but a good pre filter) then cell culture, and only after that do we use animals. Not only is it ethically the right thing, it’s the economical thing. Animal studies are crazy expensive (each mouse costs a couple dollars per day just to keep alive and you need a lot of them) compared to cell culture and modeling.

The problem is that in your scenario, many many more humans would be harmed. While animal models are flawed, there are no cell culture tools that even come close to recapitulating the system wide effects you get in a whole organism. Without animal tests, all the drugs that hurt a mouse (and there are very many that fail in mouse tests for this reason) would instead do it to humans.

You can ban animal research, but if you do, know that virtually none of the medicines you take would exist. It really is that stark.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#73

Post by bambax »

faebi wrote: post #21

Still a better usage of an animal life than eating them. I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally. If you put these numbers in comparison to animal farming, their suffering and their murdering, then it's absolutely worth it. For me it boils down to a simple set of questions. Would you murder 10'000 chickens to save your grandma's life? How about 10'000 cows? How about 10'000 rats? How about 10'000 rabbits? How ab…

> I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human.

That is insane, and psychopathic. But it is shared by many (most?) humans. The result will be that there will be no animals left, and soon afterwards, no humans left either.

Another question is, how many humans are you willing to sacrifice to save your wife? Your child? Is your child worth a specific number of human lives, in your eyes? And what is that number?

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#74

Post by jonlucc »

cute_boi wrote: post #23
fabian2k wrote: post #10

There's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.

I mean company can always do better like giving animal better life before testing and not enthusiast after testing? But what happens now? Those animal are tortured, kept in worst condition and after testing is done you know what happens. Most of the testing is not harmful but the way companies handle the testing is worst to animal. If something is going to human probably means it is safe which should mean safe for an…

For what it's worth, I'm an in vivo pharma researcher, and the standard is to not euthanize unless we need tissue. Unfortunately, I'd guess that 99% of the time, we need to collect blood, spleens, livers, etc. and doing so reduces the number of animals needed in that study as well as the number of studies we run with animals. There are already a lot of pressures to keep animal numbers low, not least of which being that each of the cheapest mice is somewhere around $28 (you can see the prices yourself on their website, but I think my company gets some discount on those prices). Also, my time is valuable, and adding mice increases the amount of my time is spent working on that study.

I'm also on the IACUC for my company, and I can assure you that we do care about animal life. We go to great lengths to ensure that research is being done in ways that maximize animal welfare to the extent that is possible. The FDA requires animal studies for safety and efficacy, and we can debate the morality of testing in mice, then NHPs before humans, but the system as it exists prioritizes de-risking first human doses as much as possible. Given that system, it is the job of the IACUC to oversee and approve every procedure done to an animal in the facility or in our company's name at other facilities. It's a big job that, at least at my place, is taken very seriously by researchers and up the chain of management.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#75

Post by tsbischof »

fabian2k wrote: post #10

There's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.

You do not cut out animal research but you push for a clearer path to safely start research in humans. Instead of repeated and overlapping pre-clinical studies, focus on designing studies to move as rapidly into humans as possible while retaining a reasonable risk profile. The longer people do work on animals the more they optimize for and are invested in the animal solution.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#77

Post by goodpoint »

spodek wrote: post #33
trainsplanes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a viewpoint that's up there with "babies can't feel pain", which was also common until the end of the last century[1], but has completely vanished since then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies

Do they circumcise boys without anesthetic under similar pretense?

Yes

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#78

Post by LeifCarrotson »

bambax wrote: post #58

Specism is based on several flawed assumptions. We decide humans are superior to other animals because we are humans, and us>them. We also decide that because we are superior, we have all rights to do anything to members of "inferior" groups. But: - Superiority is at least debatable and strongly depends on the criteria used fot comparison; - There is absolutely no discernable logical link between being "superior" and…

> We decide humans are superior to other animals because we are humans, and us>them.

That's painting things with a pretty broad brush, not everyone thinks this way. From conversing with people about the issue, those that do, do so mostly because they haven't actually put any conscious thought into it, even a few minutes is enough to knock down that straw man.

Personally, I think humans are superior to other animals because we are more capable of feeling and thinking than they are. A bacterium or plant cannot feel joy, it cannot communicate pride in it's accomplishments to other members of its species, it cannot feel pain, it cannot suffer, it cannot develop into an adult which can do those things, it just is. A pig, dog, or dolphin can do many of those things, a chicken or fish can a little but much less so.

Empirically, to me, this capability criteria sets a 'value' roughly proportional to their number of cortical neurons on a logarithmic scale.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#79

Post by eggsmediumrare »

omega3 wrote: post #76

Unpopular opinion but I'm yet to hear a convincing argument that the reduction of suffering is something that we should strive for. Edit, looking at the replies I'm disappointed in hn, expected better.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument that human life matters at all, but I operate as though it does because it feels like it does and in some sense that's all the reason you should need.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#80

Post by runawaybottle »

eigenket wrote: post #35

As an academic who isn't directly involved in anything close to animal testing (I'm a physicist) I always find it strange that people working in biology have to jump through incredible hoops relating to how the animals they work with are treated, but then the lunch place in the biology department sells sandwiches with chicken, ham etc in with incredibly minimal oversight for how the animals are treated. The differenc…

Death is not the same as torture. Kill me before you ever torture me.
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