A relevant aside: there are some companies and startups that aim to replace a good chunk of animal testing with in silico testing. Here's one that my fund is an investor in called VeriSIM: https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2019/08/14/veri...
If in silico was an alternatives, everybody would have switched already. And everybody will switch as soon as it becomes one. Everybody wants in silico models.
If you are using that to argue that alternatives exist, you are unknowingly lying. They will probably exist some day, and everybody will use them without you having to ask.
Not sure why you're accusing me of lying, I just said that there are companies working on this.
I think the key thing here is that while eliminating 100% of animal testing is an ambitious -- and perhaps ultimately unreachable -- goal, data and computer simulations can make testing more effective.
If you use data to prioritize animal tests, or in some cases conclusively predict if some test won't any have value (e.g. the dosing is toxically high or ineffectively low) then that is a win. Both in terms of reducing animal tests, and in terms of speeding up drug development and making it less costly.
VeriSIM seems to be targeting drug discovery, rather than drug testing. I don't think scientists regularly use animal models for drug discovery, if at all, because it's really not that efficient (animals aside, you'd have to synthesize a dose of everything you want to try, which is non-trivial). With drug discovery, what you need to do is just shotgun a bunch of molecules and test that they're even bioactive, let alone therapeutic (you don't even need to find all the bioactive molecules, just yield enough for further testing).
For actual testing, there are also microfluidic systems and organ-on-a-chip systems that are a field of active research. I think most researchers are more confident in these systems than in-silico (even though organ-on-a-chip systems are a field of active research and have their own shortcomings) because biological systems are active on several different physiological scales, and simulating all of these is rather rough around the edges to say the least. C elegans and fruit fly simulations are still the target of research, and I think fruit flies aren't simulated accurately from the cellular level (though if anyone knows better let me know). Simulating anything more complicated is likely to require either enormous computational resources as well as actual discovery, since you'd need to first characterize everything before you can simulate it.
And also some companies (not really a startup but a huge established company) working to replace human transplants with organs "donated" from pigs, on an industrial scale.
I have a background in drug development and computational models
Computational models are decades, at the very least, away from being a replacement for animal models
There is no replacement for animal models, except trials in humans, so if the alternative is that we do more, riskier trials on humans, then I'd much prefer animal testing
> There is no replacement for animal models, except trials in humans, so if the alternative is that we do more, riskier trials on humans, then I'd much prefer animal testing
Totally true, but, at the same time---
Computational models have prevented all kinds of unnecessary animal testing of things that can be shown computationally to be unlikely to work. So, computational models avoid us doing more, riskier trials on animals.
Of course, we've not reduced animal testing-- instead we've just pursued more compounds and ideas. I'd argue it's worth it for speeding up the pace of medicine. But these things are not completely orthogonal.
Yes, and there is the chance the animal model doesn’t represent human responses well, too.
We still use both to weed out treatments, for both ethical and cost reasons. Better to errantly eliminate a working drug occasionally than to let a lot of unhelpful stuff through.
Just to add to this, the last thing that will be taken over by computers is tox testing. This is the last step that says "this drug is safe enough in primates to test in humans". It's the most complicated type of animal testing, because it is necessarily the interaction of every system in the body that could cause a tox issue.
So sure, we use modeling, and it's getting better, but it's not going to replace toxicology studies any time soon, unless every other human system is replicated in silico first.
A comment by bsdz links a research paper and says that a computer model for cardiotoxicity has higher accuracy than animal models. The paper title mentions in silico as well.
Are those the same things you're talking about or is there something I'm missing. I'm not that familiar with drug development.
The paper linked by bsdz checks for one specific cardiac side effect, it is not anywhere close to being a model for cardiotoxicity as a whole, a very important distinction.
Or we halt the research until computational models become viable. You make it seem like we have no choice but to test on animals. I’m sure that is how the researchers rationalize it to themselves.
We could do that, but the amount of preventable suffering that decision would cause, to me, makes that a bad decision.
I'm sure an argument to stop research in lifesaving medicine is easy to rationalize if you're in a privileged position where you don't have to deal with your children dying from malaria or being born with HIV, your elder family members slowly disappearing to Alzheimer's, or your partner's body withering away to cancer
I have had to deal with at least one of those things. It still doesn’t change my opinion.
I feel that it is ethically wrong to enslave and torture animals for humanities benefit. If that means that I will die from a disease that would have been prevented otherwise, I can accept that. I don’t feel it is right for me to impose suffering on another sentient being for my own incremental benefit.
> Maybe this move would accelerate the computational biology a little further, no?
As soon as your code passes unit tests, do you immediately push to production?
And that is with computing where we have a really good understanding of the fundamental principles.
Our understanding of biology is primitive by comparison.
Therefore we have multiple stages with trade offs of cost vs fidelity to production (release to the general public in humans) going from computation to cell cultures to tissue samples to mice to non-human primates to phase 1/2/3 human trials, etc.
Actually it's probably the opposite. Using animal models can lead to drugs that are not safe or effective for humans and it can lead to drugs being rejected that might have been safe or effective. 92% of drugs which prove promising in animal trials fail in human clinical trials.
I didn't say that. There are a many alternatives to animal models before "jumping to human trials directly", e.g. testing on human cells & tissues, human-based computer models (like those used for cardiotoxicity) and more recently organ-on-a-chip technologies.
None of those are capable of testing for side effects and negative outcomes as well as testing the drug on a real creature. At the end of the day those all have only limited use. If you want to be able to give the drug to people without any surprises, you have to test on a full organism. Organoids just don't have the complexity of living creatures
Please re-read my original comment. In particular, the 92% bit
> you have to test on a full organism
Are you suggesting testing on humans? Clearly that's the only way to clear those "surprises".
> Organoids just don't have the complexity of living creatures
I think the gist of my argument against animal testing is that animal models aren't very good at predicting outcomes in humans.
Furthermore, there have been some disasterous human clinical trials where drugs have passed all the animal model testing but left many of the human participants dead.
>Please re-read my original comment. In particular, the 92% bit
Better than nothing.
>Are you suggesting testing on humans? Clearly that's the only way to clear those "surprises".
No, I'm just saying a full body with multiple organ systems, hormones, and everything else has many more variables than a cell in a petri dish. So a living organism of some sort is a big plus. It's true that if you tested on humans you'd have even fewer unknowns, but that's obviously unethical.
>I think the gist of my argument against animal testing is that animal models aren't very good at predicting outcomes in humans
They aren't perfect. They're just the best thing we have right now
Clinical trials are expensive. NHP (Non-human primate) studies are also expensive, but orders of magnitude less expensive than human studies. We pharma researchers don't want to put stuff into humans if there's risk of failure, especially if that failure is a tox finding and not just low efficacy.
So we de-risk as much as possible. We go so far as to prove everything on human cells, then buy mice with humanized portions of their genome to test the target in mice that are more like humans in the way we need them to be. Then we test in NHPs, because it's very unsafe to assume that a drug that works and is safe in cells is safe in primates.
In a current project, I'm dealing with the fallout of this exact problem. We did a ton of testing, modeling, in vitro work, rodent work, then we dosed in monkeys and it caused a massive tox signal. We have to go back to the drawing board and explain what happened to the monkeys, how we're going to address it, maybe kill the whole program, and find a new path forward. It passed all of the rigorous pre-monkey testing. And I'm at a major pharma company, where we have pretty specialized teams doing most of this work.
I briefly scanned the paper. This is not a computer model for cardiotoxicity as a whole, it's a model for one very specific type of cardiotoxicity. These things may have their uses, bit they are a long way from replacing animal testing.
This model checks for one side effect in one organ system. Animal testing can check all organ systems for thousands of side effects.
People don’t test on animals because it’s the status quo. They do so because computer models comprehensive and good enough don’t exist. Even from a purely cynical point of view, animal testing is bloody expensive. As soon as pharma companies will be able to get ride of them they will.
In a way, why not - I agree animal testing is good, vs direct to human testing but I'm also surprised there isn't human testing arbitrage where medicine is created in a geographic region that allows it vs more in the west.
I can see how quickly it ran run off to prison labor and more human testing atrocities circa 1940's world.
Presumably there will be transport of monkeys for reasons other than "research" to establish populations within Europe/US, then use of monkeys from those populations (shipped overland) for testing. Adds delay, and creates physical facilities vulnerable to activist attack, but possibly better for monkeys.
Would be great if animal testing could continue to be minimized, but I'd like to continue having the benefits of safe and effective drugs. For somewhat irrational reasons I only really am personally bothered by testing on cats; dogs, monkeys, etc. don't particularly bother me, but I recognize this is irrational.
C19 vaccine development caused the extreme shortage according to the article.
Always a little terrifying that we dont have any good alternatives that animal testing.
I do beleive that animals used for medical testing ( at least in the west ) are treated a whole lot better than the poor unfortunates we breed for food.
And I dont see anyone declaring the end of transporting those.
Personally, I find it morally questionable every time one of these activist groups puts non-human life above human life, whether it is a dog or a monkey, I don't care. Just feels wrong.
I guess I would not want to be neighbours with some weirdo who would value my life equally to that of a monkey.
This is a bad faith reading of what these activists want. It amounts to a strawman. If you were their neighbor - you probably wouldn't know it. Why should we be systematically cruel to animals? Why shouldn't we develop technology that replaces these techniques? Has it not even occurred to you that we don't necessarily have to have a giant industry of animal testing, that that is a local minima we don't have to accept?
Not sure why you are getting downvoted - the GP is definitely putting forth a heavy strawman. Wanting to stop animal cruelty does not equate to believing that animal lives should be put above human lives. There are more than the two options of killing monkeys for testing or killing humans for testing.
I don't want to take sides in this argument but just would like to point out that our animal cruelty standards are comically inconsistent. The animals that we use for food supply are generally treated horribly and they outnumber the scientific use cases by several orders of magnitude.
This is true and if your argument was that we should be spending more effort there then addressing scientific use than that'd make sense to me.
But if what you're suggesting is that we should expend our effort exclusively on the larger of the two until it is fully addressed, then I can see how that has a certain logical appeal, but it isn't really how social movements work. Social movements are necessarily massively parallel, everyone pursues the causes they care about most, and adjacent causes support and are supported by one another.
Not only would it not be feasible to convince all the activists to pick one particular cause, it also would be less effective. It's sort of like the "packing" tactic in gerrymandering.
People are free to take up whatever cause they deem is worthy. I just hope some will take a pause and appreciate the absurdity of drinking milk and consuming meat AND opposing use of animals in medical research.
I have flown with Air France recently. They certainly do serve a lot of meat and cheese.
Okay. Why? What are you hoping they'll realize? What is it you are trying to say?
Pardon me, but it feels like you're engaging in a certain rhetorical tactic where you all-but make a conclusion - you say, I'm not taking any sides, I just want you to consider X, Y, and Z that would naturally lead you to a certain conclusion which I definitely haven't made myself. This serves to launder your conclusion through your audience, as if it were their idea all along. It shields your ideas from criticism and the hazard of taking a position that may be argued against.
And whether or not that is intentional, I'd ask you to stop. I have made specific claims which can be argued against - it's pretty unfair for you to respond in a way that, should I try to argue against it, just shifts around without really responding to what I am saying.
Speaking for myself, while I do eat some cheese, I haven't eaten meat in almost a decade, and I've found I genuinely prefer almond milk. I'm fully aware of the hazards and contradictions in my life. I don't really need you to point these things out to me for me to consider them. We live in a society where each of us is unable to fully live out their values. I'm positive that, if you applied the same scrutiny to your own life, you'd find similar problems. But of course that doesn't mean you don't believe in your values, only that you are a human being who is not omnipotent. It's pretty odd to try and turn that around on another person, right? Almost like criticizing them for breathing.
Our standards for humans are pretty inconsistent too. There are scenarios in which it is still legal to subject some humans to slavery and death even in the US.
> This is a bad faith reading of what these activists want. It amounts to a strawman.
Not it is not a straw man argument. Non-human primate trials are the last stage before human testing. Eliminating non-human primate trials will increase the risk for human participants(unless they actually stop developing).
Our understanding of biology is nowhere near comprehensive enough to be able to simulate all these interactions and isn’t likely to be for maybe a century.
So if you eliminate non-primate human testing, your options are either to develop therapies at greater risk to humans, or to stop developing them.
Either of those options hurts humans. Thus, you are placing the well-being of non-human animals above the well-being of humans.
If people do not make it known that this behavior is unacceptable, the alternative technology will not be developed.
Industry would be happy to abuse animals until the end of time.
Framing this as a _preference_ for one kind of life or another is, in fact, a straw man. No such preference is necessary to accept this line of reasoning.
I agree. I see this sort of misunderstanding commonly here. Hacker news is filled with individuals who think computers can solve all our problems, and at the same time they lack the most basic understanding of the complexities of biology.
We'll have to do animal testing until the technology is developed and replace it incrementally. The technology will not be developed unless it is made explicit that not doing so is unacceptable.
I have to think that computational models will be infinitely cheaper than animal testing. If they worked as well as animal testing surely some for profit pharmaceutical company would leverage them to reap enormous profits. Because this is not happening I conclude the the models aren't as affective.
If it was just inertia, it means the options have similar outcomes and the only factor is the cost of switching. As you pointed out, there are other trade-offs.
I personally don't place one side over the other, and decided to admit that we sometimes kill lives for our own ego.
The only true alternative to that is an act of self harm, and that is not free from egoism either, so I just don't think too much and enjoy my life, only following my own inner voice as to what choices would be ethical to make.
We are not compelled to either kill or do self harm, no. That is a really concerning dichotomy to suggest.
Do you feel this is a choice you are compelled to make? I don't mean to presume, but I'm going to proceed as if it were affirmative, because I don't anticipate a response, and this seems concerning.
That sounds perhaps like intrusive thoughts? I personally struggle with intrusive thoughts that are occasionally violent. They do not need to be acted upon though, and they don't reflect on who you are much more than a compression artifact in a video reflects on the cinematographer - it's line noise in your brain, it's incredibly complex and sometimes throws out signals that aren't useful.
If you feel this way and that it isn't within your control, I'd encourage you to speak with a professional.
My thinking is that we are in fact constantly compelled to take some lives(thankfully not of our own kinds) by very our own existence. We only exist by consuming energy and energy only comes as some form of exploitation of other lives, even if one had been exclusively consuming fruit on trees that exist to be eaten, unless such hypothetical man is a thinking solar panel in vacuum of space that can convert light into its own energy.
That dark part is not serious - at least not in this context. That's just an extreme example, but the point is we do not exist without the karma of our body.
Not to mention the upcoming wave of Xenotransplantation. The gentleman receiving the pig heart transplant was only the beginning. Now we have a genetically engineered, separate line of swine specifically bred to provide us with spare parts on an industrial scale.
What are the airlines view on these going to be, will they transport a pig heart for human transplantation? Where does that scenario fall?
I’m not sure of your point. The answer is pretty simple: test on humans. If we aren’t willing to test on ourselves, why should we be willing to test on other beings? There’s no contradiction.
It's more ethical to pay a consenting human generously, than to force an animal to ingest dangerous substances for no compensation of any kind(besides euthanasia when they're deemed useless), it's also a lot more efficient and reliable, humans aren't 150lbs rats.
People risks their lives and health daily for a salary(or for a greater cause, which would still apply here) , why should this be any different? How is it any different from a firefighter?a bodyguard? a miner? a doctor in an ICU?
No matter how poor you are you have a choice, these animals never got one, there is plenty of times where I would have accepted to be a guinea pig for money.
The problem is you and I don't wanna test potentially dangerous drugs, even for lots of money as we have other choices for an income. Most of the people willing to test drugs will be desperate, poor people who need to feed their families. Say what you will about testing on monkeys-- but testing on poor people instead so that the people making the rules don't have to feed bad about testing on monkeys, is as dystopian as it gets.
People already volunteer to participate in clinical trials, and we already have restrictions on how animals can be treated. Loosening the rules on what can be tested on humans (but strengthening the consent rules — for example, in my country, you cannot be paid for participation in a clinical trial) and banning animal testing would not stop progress, it would ensure that progress was made when it was justified enough that people were willing to consent to risks for the progress of humanity.
How many people here on HN would jump aboard the first spaceship to mars in the name of human progress, knowing they’ll probably die on the mission? Why can’t that apply to science on earth? The US doesn’t even have universal healthcare, so we can’t pretend the US has some deep love for protecting its people.
>People already volunteer to participate in clinical trials,
For medications they need. But to one is going to want to test the next generation of antihistamines, for example, when there's a safe alternative with a few side effects. So the only medications that people would be willing to test would be those for deadly diseases.
>for example, in my country, you cannot be paid for participation in a clinical trial
Why would anyone volunteer to take experimental drugs for nothing in return? The only reason would be in life and death situations
>Why can’t that apply to science on earth?
I don't know, but asking people to test drugs isn't gonna convince anyone. We need a real alternative to make progress. Hence, monkeys.
>The US doesn’t even have universal healthcare, so we can’t pretend the US has some deep love for protecting its people.
The FDA and medical boards do in fact try to maintain a standard of medical ethics.
>
>I don't know, but asking people to test drugs isn't gonna convince anyone. We need a real alternative to make progress. Hence, monkeys.
That's not an actual alternative.
It's like nazis saying they have a good alternative for clinical trials: jews, romanis and gays.
Just because it's affecting a different group of sentient beings doesn't mean it's an actual alternative, it's effectively the same thing: violation of consent, abuse and sequestration at a huge scale.
So in your scenario, it’s reasonable to subject monkeys to suffering in order to test new anti-histamines that humans have decided they don’t care about enough to test?
If we can deliver a potential 1% improvement to the effectiveness of anti-histamines but it requires a dozen monkeys suffering through testing along the way, is that okay… because it’s monkeys?
Your argument is much more applicable to testing on poor people than mine — after all, we need to make progress.
I think that if the animal testing is so important because it’s fundamental to the future of the human race, you will absolutely find people willing to participate in early medical trials: after-all, we already do! I’m sure many people here have family who have participated in clinical trials.
Animal testing is rarely necessary, it’s just the easiest option, and when it is absolutely necessary to test on a living being, it should be possible to find someone to
volunteer. If you can’t find anyone to volunteer, it’s clearly not necessary enough.
There’s already significant restrictions on what can/can’t be done to animals in many countries: I am not suggesting anything radical, just following these restrictions to their logical conclusion — no experiments on beings that haven’t consented.
>There isn't one rational reason why a human should be worth more than any other animal.
Simple-- because the one pondering it is a human. Expecting humans not to have a bias for their own species is like expecting a lion to choose to go vegetarian; in general they that's not the nature these animals are endowed with.
If we're all animals, why is it okay for a lion to violently follow its nature, but humans cannot?
If it's anything like the in-person discussions I've seen on the matter it's not productive. I'm firmly polarised on one side and was happy to sit in the sidelines and not say anything on the matter in case I also got punched :(
Or maybe use Air France, as it was the last major airline to do so, as stated in the very first line of the article. So it did so for longer than Delta, LuftHansa, British, ANA, ...
Exactly correct. Nobody can have any differing ideals of morality than that. Those ideals are the |abs| correct values and exact center of the universe, and anything divergent must be castigated. There is no gray area. There is no pragmatism.
That's right, the chance of saving a human life is not equal to horrid abuse of other lives, in all but the most twisted utilitarianist, sapien-centric models.
Animal testing is a moral quandary. Rats, even if they weren't intelligent (which they are), don't deserve the tortures we put them through.
Gender identity and sentient AI equality have become fenceposts for our populist cross-dressing Musk-rat technocratic movement - but somehow, for many among us, animal rights still doesn't fit in...
The ends do not justify the means. Feminism and equality means giving a voice to those who cannot be heard - women, minorities, LGBTQ, and yes, primates and other animals. You must follow your precepts to their logical conclusions. Otherwise, you are not for true equality, and instead are for convenient equality, shackled to time and place, not forward thinking.
>Feminism and equality means giving a voice to those who cannot be heard - women, minorities, LGBTQ, and yes, primates and other animals.
Just want to point out something I've noticed. Everyone has a different idea of what exactly feminism is, and everyone thinks their idea of feminism is obviously the real one.
No, I'd prefer to remain free. But at least you are asking for consent - that's a start in the right direction!
Consent - something which the monkeys have not given. Something which their world-splitting cries of agony, anguish, and tortured existence, clearly indicate. It appears their disposition to being used as biological pin cushions is quite oppositional, one could say their entire life is dedicated to saying "No."
Imagine a life dedicated to saying "No." Your mind is disoriented, deteriorating. The world is spinning, and your insides are churning, throbbing, and burning with the pain of a thousand suns. Your skin is peeling, your muscles ache, your bones dull with a hollow pain, and your body feels like it isn't even yours. Implants and incisions, scars and scabs, your body riddled with pockmarks.
It sounds laborious and awful, more than nightmarish.
> Imagine a life dedicated to saying "No." Your mind is disoriented, deteriorating. The world is spinning, and your insides are churning, throbbing, and burning with the pain of a thousand suns. Your skin is peeling, your muscles ache, your bones dull with a hollow pain, and your body feels like it isn't even yours. Implants and incisions, scars and scabs, your body riddled with pockmarks.
Representing this as typical of the research animal experience is disingenuous. You should be able to make your argument without resorting to hyperbole.
We're talking about monkeys, whose biggest use in recent research was in vaccine development. So e.g. Rhesus macaques were given injections of vaccine candidates (and convalescent plasma, etc), and then immune responses were measured. Some were then exposed to SARS-COV-2 to determine if the vaccines were effective. SARS-COV-2 produces much less severe illness in macaques than humans.
I've experienced an allergic reaction to medication before. It was the worst hour of my entire life until I had an injection of Benadryl. Every moment, I felt like I'd rather be dead than experience another moment of the agony.
So sure, experimentation effects may vary but the upper limit is fucking brutal and definitely depends on what stage the drug is in. Early on in development, the effects could be worse than death.
> So sure, experimentation effects may vary but the upper limit is fucking brutal and definitely depends on what stage the drug is in. Early on in development, the effects could be worse than death.
So could the effects of e.g. life in the wild. Anything can go very badly.
IMO: You can't be completely blind to the utilitarian angle. The average and distribution of outcomes matters.
So, we go through an escalating series of tests-- designed to both weed-out drugs cheaply and to avoid suffering; from conceptual models to computation to tissue cultures to organ models to small animals to larger animals to small numbers of humans to large numbers of humans.
If you weed out the last couple of steps before humans, you're going to either try a lot fewer drugs on humans, or increase human suffering a whole lot to protect smaller animals.
The problem with consent is it can easily be pressured. The only people that will consent to being tested on are people that are really desperate. I mean by that logic instead of testing on monkeys, we should test on hungry third world children. They'd surely consent to keep for starving to death. And because it's consensual, we're much more moral than if we tested them on monkeys. What a moral paradise!
By consent I meant, without duress, which I thought was pretty clear. We can quibble about what represents "true" consent but that's aside the point since it is clear that imprisoning and torturing animals is nonconsensual, not in any grey area. In the theory of socialism, consenting to working is illegitimate since the alternative is homelessness.
Do you have any actual arguments or just hypothetical slippery slopes?
That's not really an argument against me, it's one against capitalism, since consent of certain actions is almost always under duress in a capitalistic society.
Your argument is more for socialism, and I would agree with you.
> Imagine a life dedicated to saying "No." Your mind is disoriented, deteriorating. The world is spinning, and your insides are churning, throbbing, and burning with the pain of a thousand suns. Your skin is peeling, your muscles ache, your bones dull with a hollow pain, and your body feels like it isn't even yours. Implants and incisions, scars and scabs, your body riddled with pockmarks.
> It sounds laborious and awful, more than nightmarish.
Powerful stuff. I agree this suffering should be reduced.
trials are not about who's willing to partecipate, but about the best model available.
monkeys are not asked for consent, true, but they're not picked at random either, because it would be useless.
There's also another matter: who's gonna consent to participate to trials in your proposal, rich people or poorer people?
An finally, how would you ask for consent to monkeys?
Do you ask mosquitos to leave before killing them?
edit: what really baffles me about this discussions is how much the mood of the population swings.
We have seen literally revolts on the streets against COVID vaccines being a way to force untested drugs onto the people but at the same time people complain that there is too much testing on non people
The question is "should monkeys be available for research?"
You state that "we should use the best models available", therefore we should use monkeys for research. But this assumes that monkeys are available in the first place! It doesn't show that we should experiment on monkeys, just that we currently do.
> You state that "we should use the best models available", therefore we should use monkeys for research.
unless you want to test drugs' safety on the actual best model available, they are the second best model available.
> that monkeys are available in the first place!
they are not available as in nature, they are bred to be available.
we're not going to some rain forest to capture them in the wild.
we could do the same with humans, in fact Nazis did it and it worked remarkably well, ethics issues aside.
Anyway, only a few thousands monkeys are used in trials and most of them in non lethal (they do not risk to die) trials, for a short period of time.
Most of the animals used are not primates.
Even assuming researches and pharmaceutical companies are evil and have the worst intentions, monkeys are the most expensive option and it takes a lot of times to breed them, a true evil entity wouldn't waste all that money and time, when a rat gestation time is 21 days and they mature in a few weeks.
As long as we can avoid mosquito we should. That's why I still prefer nets and repellent creams. However, I am not going to judge if some people kills mosquito that sucks their blood or spread dangerous diseases like malaria.
Comparing monkeys with mosquitos is kind of disingenuous. How many monkeys have killed people in 2022 compared to mosquito?
Lastly, many research takes place for beauty creams, shampoo etc.. that are total useless. There are also many research were animal are disregarded as useless. Maybe sustainable research is needed instead of dumping them uselessly?
> Just because there's no perfect replacement solution to something doesn't mean we ought to continue to exploit the current one.
isn't it saying that we lack "the perfect replacement" whataboutism itself?
we lack any replacement.
Or we would be using them already.
> If we used this line of logic with slavery, we'd still have plantations.
slaves are people.
Sorry to point it out, but it makes a little bit of difference to me.
But to further expand, the problem with slavery have been the USA, in Europe, for example, the Catholic Church, following the teachings of Tommaso D'Aquino (Thomas of Aquino for anglophones), considered it a sin and was practically abolished starting from the first centuries of high middle ages. It took USA 5 centuries to catch up with the civilized World.
So at the times an alternative WAS ALREADY AVAILABLE, but white Americans thought slavery was cool (it was also cheap for them).
Researchers do not think animal trials are cool, they know there is no alternative at the moment and would very much prefer to use something else.
> Probably those who want the benefit of the medication badly enough.
it doesn't make them good models anyway.
not better than peaking up a random animal from the zoo or a random. human from the population.
in fact access to experimental trials is not on a consent only basis, patients need to adhere to some parameter.
for example: my mother in law was rendered almost blind by a degenerative disease.
She volunteered for an experimental trial on a new treatment but she was too old and her condition too advanced to be a suitable candidate.
She was fully willing to be part of it, but consent alone wasn't enough.
Sometimes, people will be suitable candidates, and sometimes they won’t. In the cases they aren’t, we’d just have to accept that this will slow down the development of the medication.
I'm not happy we have to rely on animals, believe me, but suitable patients are already hard to find, if we don't test drugs for at least a reasonable definition of safe, we risk to kill the research, not simply slowing it down.
and that's much more probable for those diseases that are rare on humans, that are already underfunded and under researched.
The dishonesty stems from the intent and tactics - not from a specific statement. Asking a lot of questions is really not a valid form of debate - it's moreso a form of argument.
I do not believe that lab animals should exist, period. You are in search for a replacement solution to drug development. I am not. There lies our dispute. I feel that it is okay to not be able to solve this "problem" because our current solution is exploitative and wrong.
I agree that often in human trials, the people who volunteer are poor or desperate, and this is a different issue which goes to the root of capitalism -- since work itself is a coerced form of volunteerism with the societal threat of homelessness.
Pretty much all of capitalism is coerced, just on different degrees or levels. The same applies to most of what is considered voluntary or consenting.
For example, joining the military. One can argue that most who join are lost, confused or poor. And they'd be right.
Or prostitution. Or working a minimum wage job. Etc.
The problem with fake consent in capitalism is much larger than drug trials.
> The dishonesty stems from the intent and tactics
> Asking a lot of questions is really not a valid form of debate
It's the same question, actually.
> I do not believe that lab animals should exist, period.
What you believe it's irrelevant.
> You are in search for a replacement solution to drug development.
I'm perfectly fine with what we have.
You're rhetoric skills must be quite weak if you need to put words in my mouth.
> I am not. There lies our dispute. I feel that it is okay to not be able to solve this "problem" because our current solution is exploitative and wrong.
Then just don't use drugs or any product coming from animals.
Indeed.
By consent I meant, without duress, which I thought was pretty clear. These folks use logical fallacies like "Appeal to Definition" in order to cloud the debate with arguments about the definitions of words.
Consent of certain actions is almost always under duress in a capitalistic society. These folks' arguments about consent not being "true" are just arguments against capitalism and for socialism, and I would agree with them, you'd probably too?
It's pretty clear cut that these animals aren't consenting, so their arguments are just moving the fencepost to gripes with capitalism.
