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Animal Testing Ethics
- Thread starter Onyx
- Start date
And they're better biological models. We could use low status minorities as test subjects.
Politesse
Amor Vincit Omnia
You and I may have some differences of opinion concerning ethical informed consent practices. Also, who "we" refers to.
My perspectives on this are in no small part informed by my animistic worldview, which regards "person" to apply to more than just humans. It means that other-than-human persons are relevant subjects for ethical consideration in all cases, which is not the norm in my culture.
When it comes to testing things on other-than-human persons, my rule of thumb is essentially this:
I would not say self-serving harm should never be done, but where it is, there should be some significant recompense given to the persons wronged. This tends not to happen, however. In general, my culture is horrible at giving any recompense for harms done to other-than-human persons. Most don't see them as persons in the first place.
When it comes to testing things on other-than-human persons, my rule of thumb is essentially this:
If the tests on a people are for the benefit of those people, I find this honorable. If the tests are not for the benefit of those persons, and those tests involve harm to those persons, I find such practices questionable. Such a practice means you are asking some others to suffer for your own self-serving benefit.
I would not say self-serving harm should never be done, but where it is, there should be some significant recompense given to the persons wronged. This tends not to happen, however. In general, my culture is horrible at giving any recompense for harms done to other-than-human persons. Most don't see them as persons in the first place.
SabahTheLoner
Master of the Art of Couch Potato Cuddles
Personally I don't agree with it but some form of testing needs to be done. It'd be ideal to have human volunteers but many humans don't want to be a part of it. And then you have the point that much biological information about humans came from horrendous Nazi experiments and gruesome war injuries. Ethically distasteful, scientifically beneficial. Hopefully we'll use the information of the past to create a better future, including artificial biological test subjects and intelligent computer simulations. I think plants and insects should be treated with the same respect that many people want to apply to larger creatures. They are nature, after all.
Akivah
Well-Known Member
Animal testing is a good thing. If there is any hint of danger to a human, then the test should be done first on an animal. It is far more serious to cause harm to a human, than harm to an animal. However, ethics should play a part in animal testing. The testing should minimize the creature's pain and maximize their comfort (during the times that the testing is not occurring). Humans are the only persons on Earth.
Animals, plants, and insects are all valid test subjects.
As I recall, southern apologists used to advance the same ethical principles to the treatment of slaves.
Why would we treat human testing differently than animal tests? Why would we extend moral consideration to humans but withhold it from animals?
Might makes right?
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Black animals should have their tests modified for culture to ensure the test results are an accurate comparison. For example, black bears shouldn't be tested regarding how to hunt baby seals.
VioletVortex
Well-Known Member
I do not think that it is right to test anything on animals or plants. For things that would generally be considered safe (as in the worst possible outcome could involve a rash or something of that nature), testing on consenting humans would be the best option.
When some artificial chemical has to be tested for its safety, it should probably be taken as a sign that people should not be using it in the first place.
When some artificial chemical has to be tested for its safety, it should probably be taken as a sign that people should not be using it in the first place.
Why? Humans are animals. Kingdom animalia, class mammalia, order primates.
BSM1
What? Me worry?
You may have a point. Just think of all those poor child crutches, braces, and 'Iron Lung' manufactures that were put out of business because we had the audacity to test a polio vaccine on some monkeys.
Animal-model experimentation is not predictive of results in humans. Worse, the results often mislead about the safety and/or efficacy of drugs for humans. Animal-model experimentation is more costly in time and money than scientific studies:
An Examination of Animal Experiments
Research on tobacco risks provided some of the strongest evidence that animal experiments can be dangerous and misleading, showing that there is no substitute for human data in searching for the causes of human disease. In the early 1960s, the tobacco lobby used all the political and scientific clout it could muster against health warnings about smoking. One piece of evidence helped their case: animal experiments did not show that inhaled smoke causes cancer. In study after study, animals forced to inhale smoke did not get cancer. As Clarence C. Little wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, June 15, 1961, “There have been many such experiments here and abroad, and none have been able to produce carcinoma of the lung in animals.” Dr. Little worked for the Tobacco Research Committee and for Jackson Laboratory, a large-scale animal breeder. He used the results of animal experiments to argue that lung cancer is not linked to smoking tobacco. Rather, he claimed that lung cancer “is a challenge, an unsolved problem. Its etiology will probably long be an open question.” While Little’s conclusion served both of his employers, it was no help to human health. Indeed, in another editorial published at about the same time, Dr. Donald B. Effler of the Cleveland Clinic argued that animal experiments offered little support for the smoking-cancer link, and that a smoker who does not yet have a chronic cough “assumes little risk to his health.”1 The animal experiments were clearly doing more harm than good, delaying warnings about smoking.
Of course, the key evidence on tobacco came from human studies. Whether one looks at large human populations or at individual smokers, the link between tobacco smoke and cancer is inescapable, even though it was completely missed in animal inhalation experiments. So the question is, have animal experiments led us astray in other areas?
Inaccurate Results
Nutrition is another area where animal experiments have raised repeated problems. While it is easy to feed vitamins, fat, or fiber to animals and to check whether their disease rates rise or fall, the relevance to humans is limited at best, due to major physiological differences between species. For example, if vitamin C helps prevent cancer, what is the impact on cancer research of the fact that rats and mice synthesize vitamin C within their bodies, unlike humans, who do not? Likewise, rats differ from humans in crucial enzyme functions. For example, rats have much higher activity of the 5-desaturase enzyme system, a part of the body’s machinery for processing fats in the diet. Because of this species difference, rats are “not an appropriate human model” for studying the effects of fats.2
Although rats have been used extensively to test the value of various iron supplements, it turns out that rats absorb iron quite differently from humans and do not give usable information. According to a report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, “Our studies indicate that rodents cannot be used to assess the quantitative importance of dietary factors in human iron nutrition.”3
Research on stroke provides another example. For years, experimenters have used animal experiments to create brain damage that simulates the effects of a human stroke. They then test out various experimental drugs to see whether they reduce the damage to the brain. But a review in the journal Stroke, published by the American Heart Association in January 1990, reported that, of 25 different treatments that worked in rodents, not a single one worked in human patients. As the Stroke editorial lamented, such animal experiments were not only failing to advance science, they were actually impeding progress:
“Each time one of these potential treatments is observed to be effective based upon animal research, it propagates numerous further animal and human studies consuming enormous amounts of time and effort to prove that the observation has little or no relevance to human disease or that it may have been an artifact of the animal model itself.”4
Are animal experiments that lead researchers astray simply rare exceptions or are they typical of animal tests? Broader data come from a U.S. General Accounting Office review of the safety of all new drugs marketed in the decade 1976 to 1985. All had been animal-tested prior to approval. Of the 198 new drugs for which data were available, 102 (51.5 percent) were more dangerous than pre-market animal tests and limited human tests had indicated, so much so that they had to be relabeled or withdrawn.5
Of course, the key evidence on tobacco came from human studies. Whether one looks at large human populations or at individual smokers, the link between tobacco smoke and cancer is inescapable, even though it was completely missed in animal inhalation experiments. So the question is, have animal experiments led us astray in other areas?
Inaccurate Results
Nutrition is another area where animal experiments have raised repeated problems. While it is easy to feed vitamins, fat, or fiber to animals and to check whether their disease rates rise or fall, the relevance to humans is limited at best, due to major physiological differences between species. For example, if vitamin C helps prevent cancer, what is the impact on cancer research of the fact that rats and mice synthesize vitamin C within their bodies, unlike humans, who do not? Likewise, rats differ from humans in crucial enzyme functions. For example, rats have much higher activity of the 5-desaturase enzyme system, a part of the body’s machinery for processing fats in the diet. Because of this species difference, rats are “not an appropriate human model” for studying the effects of fats.2
Although rats have been used extensively to test the value of various iron supplements, it turns out that rats absorb iron quite differently from humans and do not give usable information. According to a report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, “Our studies indicate that rodents cannot be used to assess the quantitative importance of dietary factors in human iron nutrition.”3
Research on stroke provides another example. For years, experimenters have used animal experiments to create brain damage that simulates the effects of a human stroke. They then test out various experimental drugs to see whether they reduce the damage to the brain. But a review in the journal Stroke, published by the American Heart Association in January 1990, reported that, of 25 different treatments that worked in rodents, not a single one worked in human patients. As the Stroke editorial lamented, such animal experiments were not only failing to advance science, they were actually impeding progress:
“Each time one of these potential treatments is observed to be effective based upon animal research, it propagates numerous further animal and human studies consuming enormous amounts of time and effort to prove that the observation has little or no relevance to human disease or that it may have been an artifact of the animal model itself.”4
Are animal experiments that lead researchers astray simply rare exceptions or are they typical of animal tests? Broader data come from a U.S. General Accounting Office review of the safety of all new drugs marketed in the decade 1976 to 1985. All had been animal-tested prior to approval. Of the 198 new drugs for which data were available, 102 (51.5 percent) were more dangerous than pre-market animal tests and limited human tests had indicated, so much so that they had to be relabeled or withdrawn.5
An Examination of Animal Experiments
BSM1
What? Me worry?
However they did start hanging out on the street corners while wearing chains and leather jackets.
In before human exceptionalism. Since we all know that's coming.
Fair arguments can be made for that sort of thing, certainly. I suppose I'd prefer the argument to be made than this unquestioning attitude that humans are oh so special. At a minimum, it is apparent that a case for "more harm" can be made because of the social constructs that exist in most Western societies. This is not be "more harm" in any objective sense, but the social sense matters at least as much because members of a culture are held accountable to those constructs. If your culture makes laws that protect only human persons and no other persons, that's going to impact how you regard those other-than-human persons, for example.
I bet all the people who died of lung cancer after being assured by tobacco companies that smoking does not cause cancer would find your quip funny--if they were just alive today.