Animal Experimentation
2002-06-09 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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portia posted an offhand comment about animal testing which prompted a rather shrill response from me. Read the initial discussion here. First, I apologize. My post came across more shrill than I intended. It stemmed from fear and anxiety, because I think that animal research is required to cure many of the diseases/injuries from which I and my loved ones will suffer. As a result, in the heat of the moment, I didn't grant you as much respect as you deserve. I'm sorry. If you're willing, let me try again.
Thank you for the link to Veganism--very interesting.
With respect to the adequacy of alternatives to animal testing, I suspect that even if I could show you to your satisfaction that animal testing is required for solving many scientific problems, it wouldn't change your stance, would it?
I think that our differences stem from how we weight the costs and benefits of animal research.
Costs of animal research:
death (to animals)
pain (caused to animals)
discomfort (boredom, cramped living conditions, monotonous food, etc)
expense (cost of housing, care, regulations, etc.)
Putative benefits of animal research
better understanding of human and animal physiology
reduced disease
reduced human pain
longer lifespans
Even if we were to agree on objective measures of relative costs (# of animals killed, # of animals in mild/moderate/severe pain) and benefits (amount of pain reduced/animal killed, # of years of extended life/unit of pain), we might still value them differently.
For example, I value my life and other humans more highly than I value the life of any non-human animal. Given a choice between starving and eating my dog, I would eat my dog. If my daughter suffered a brain injury, and the only way to find a cure for her brain injury was to cause brain injury to dozens of monkeys and thousands of rats, I would cause the injury to the monkeys and rats.
You, on the other hand, appear to weight the value of animal life more equally with human life. You would weight the pain and suffering of the animals higher than I would, and the benefits lower (perhaps). Although you're willing to cause (indirectly) some death and suffering to some animals in order to provide for your car, food, and house, you believe the suffering of laboratory animals outweighs the benefits you might receive from the research.
As a result, you would rather die than support (directly or indirectly) most animal research. At a minimum, you want all laboratory animals to be treated humanely. Preferably, all animal experimentation would be stopped. Is this a fair summary of your beliefs?
I can't change how you weight the value of human life or the cost of animal suffering But perhaps I can increase your perception of the benefits of animal research.
Animal physiology is too different from humans for animal experiments to have much relevance to human health.
Why can dogs, monkeys, elephants, and birds all get drunk? Because they all metabolize alcohol in a manner similar to humans.
Why do we all have similar reactions to alcohol? Because we share much of the same genetic makeup. From the Human Genome Project
"...[there are] only a few cases in which no mouse counterpart can be found for a particular human gene, and for the most part we see essentially a one-to-one correspondence between genes in the two species...."
"...Similarities between mouse and human genes range from about 70% to 90%, with an average of 85% similarity but a lot of variation from gene to gene (e.g., some mouse and human gene products are almost identical, while others are nearly unrecognizable as close relatives)...."
Animal models aren't perfect, and there are obvious differences. But most drugs behave in animals similarly to the way they behave in humans. (They would have to, since they're often acting on the same biochemical pathways that operate in humans).
Animal experiments can be completely replaced with tissue culture, computer modelling, and human research.
Most drugs do nothing, some are harmful, and a few are helpful. A priori, how do you know into which category a novel drug will fall?
Tissue culture and computer modelling are useful screening tools. By themselves, however, for many important medical problems they are inadequate.
For example, I did research in organ preservation for several years. Although we used tissue slices for prescreening putative cryoprotectants (thereby reducing the number of animals) and computer models (for modelling ice interactions), we still had to do whole organ transplants.
The problem is that even relatively simple organs (such as the kidney) are incredibly complex. Computer models can't even predict how simple proteins will fold, let alone how a drug (or cocktail of drugs) will behave in the whole organ.
Head injuries, pain, AIDS, Alzheimer's are all problems which depend on complex interactions between multiple organ systems. It's currently impossible to test those interactions in anything other than the whole organism.
Scientists don't care how much pain their work causes lab animals.
Scientists generally have no problems with treating animals humanely, if only because doing so is good science. An animal in pain is useless for most experiments because pain triggers biochemical/endocrinological reactions that generally interfere with the experiment under test. Scientists who cause unnecessary pain, are also generally doing bad, useless science.
Animal testing servers no purpose other than to make companies rich (and they erroneously think that animal testing will prevent lawsuits.)
For most companies, animal testing is overhead, not profit. Animal testing is costly, time-consuming, and tedious. Believe me, most scientists would be happy to trade in their animal labs if an alternative could be found.
As for lawsuits, animal testing won't prevent lawsuits, that's true. But it can help successfully defend against them. Can you imagine the trial lawyers glee if they discovered you did no animal testing on a drug that caused harm to humans: "You mean you put this unknown, potentially toxic chemical into humans without testing it animals first? How could you be so negligent?"
Why not use prisoners for medical experimentation?
(I assume that this was mostly said in the heat of argument, but I'll address it anyway.)
First, many people have been put into prison for what you and I would not consider legitimate crimes (for example, Oscar Wilde, or Martin Luther King, prostitutes, marijuana growers/users, etc.).
Second, even those who are in prison for legitimate reasons don't deserve death (as most experiments end).
Third, even if you limit it to only prisoners "legitimately" on death row there are far too few prisoners.
no subject
Date: 2002-06-09 12:53 pm (UTC)1. Any punishment should be proportional to the crime committed. Just because someone's in prison doesn't mean that person loses their right to life or a certain amount of privacy (with the possible exception of those who have actually taken somebody else's life).
2. The proper aim of justice should focus on restitution to the victims rather than punishment of the perpetrators. Only the most violent individuals should actually be locked up. Others should be forced to make restitution, which not only includes compensation to the victims for actual losses, but also for the cost of enforcement. The nicely solves the problem of victimless "crimes", for if there is no victim (or their family in the case of murder) to whom restitution can be made, there can be no crime.
no subject
Date: 2002-06-09 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-06-09 08:41 pm (UTC)However, I've never actually heard one admit that she would rather die than be treated with medicine. I wonder if she realizes she would be dead already if not for animal testing of all kinds.
I personally support animal testing of any kind, because I recognize that animals do not have rights, because they are not self-aware users of reason, as humans are.
AMPEF is an organization I have supported since I was in college. A fellow student once pointed out to me why none of our professors had on-campus offices-fear of "animal rights terrorists" and bombings. People like "Portia" don't seem to mind if people are killed, as long as we don't hurt any fruit flys.
www.ampef.org
no subject
Date: 2002-06-09 09:49 pm (UTC)I also get impatient with animal rights activists, especially when they propogate misinformation (such as when they imply that tissue culture, computer modelling, etc. can wholly replace work with whole animls.)
Even so, I also think it's important to carefully consider the anti-vivisectionist arguments--after all, it was not that long ago that many westerners regarded blacks as sub-human, incapable of reason, and unworthy of full human rights. Infants, the mentally handicapped, and the senile are also not self-aware users of reason. Chimps exhibit intellects roughly equivalent to those of 2 year old children. If we don't allow experimentation on human 2-year-olds, why do we allow it upon chimps? In addition, advances in genetic engineering and computer science may at some point result in genetically modified animals or robots with human level sentience. When that happens, the question of when, and to what extent, we grant full human rights to non-human intelligences will become even more important.
The above are borderline cases, however. I value human life much higher than rabbits, rats, pigs, dogs, and cats. I have no more problem preying upon them than they would upon me, if they had the need and power to do so.
no subject
Good for you. I disagree.
"People like "Portia" don't seem to mind if people are killed, as long as we don't hurt any fruit flys."
You obviously have no idea what I believe in or why. Please don't insinuate something that ugly about me when you are completely ignorant of my values and beliefs.
no subject
Date: 2002-06-09 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-06-10 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-06-11 01:11 pm (UTC)