Animal Testing - Right or Wrong?

[lucaspa]

So computer modelling is used to test for efficacy? Later you claim the opposite.

 

The computer modeling is used as an initial test for toxicity. Drugs that are obviously toxic are eliminated: "obviously harmful drugs were eliminated"

 

Given the undeniable differences in metabolism inter-speciem 'it's possible that a drug will metabolize to a compound that is harmful' in humans, that the animal 'models' missed, too. If there is conflict in animal data, which there often is, how does one settle this dispute before proceeding to human testing? That is to say, which is the 'authentic' predictor?

 

The different routes of drug metabolism are known. There are differences in the major routes of metabolism, but the routes are all there. For instance, rats tend to sulfate drugs more than humans do. This means that the human P450 system might make a toxic metabolite that rat testing will miss. This will not be picked up until phase I clinical trials.

 

As to "predictors", there are some legal constraints. For instance, if any drug shows any increase in cancer in any species, it can't be used in humans. No matter how little the increase is or how effective and necessary the drug is.

This has caused a lot of discussion in both scientific and political circles as people come to grips with cost/benefit ratios. Otherwise, if the drug is effective in animal trials andshows promise in treating human diseases not treatable by other means, it is usually tried in Phase I clinical trials. If you have a new cancer treatment, that moves forward. If you have a modification of aspirin that is slightly more effective than aspirin, that would not move to clinical trials.

 

Yes, and all of the above factors vary significantly and unpredictably between species, making it impossible to reliably extrapolate between them.

 

That is the fallacy. Pharmacokinetics are remarkably similar between mammalian species. The distribution of metabolic routes of drugs is different, but all the routes are there in different mammalian species.

 

 

Nor can they be accurately 'mimicked' in animal 'models'.

 

That's a bare assertion. Please post the peer-reviewed scientific papers to back that up.

 

 

No two biological systems are identical, the differences between mouse and man are much greater than the differences between two members of the same species, yet it is considered dangerous and unscientific to attempt extrapolation from, for example, adult to child, so how can it be done from laboratory animal to human patient?

 

Because of evolution, the differences between species are not as great as you make out. The differences in fracture healing, for instance, between rats and humans is minimal. The differences between individuals in the rats is about the same as differences in humans. But the biological events -- even the cell types and molecules -- are the same.

 

The 'live animal' experiment only tells you about it's system, not systems in general, hence it is both uninformative and misleading.

 

Again, untrue. Because of evolution many of the biological systems are very similar. For instance, the data for the Carticell treatment of articular cartilage defects was obtained in rabbits. Rabbit articular cartilage, its structure, metabolism, damage, and repair, is the same as humans.

 

Where did you get the misinformation you have?

 

Then the sensible suggestion would be to test it for toxicity in that organ too.

 

I was speaking of organ culture systems. These are in vitro -- in culture -- systems. Organ culture systems for every human organ are not available. So you have to go into an animal to get ALL the various organs.

 

You appear to have contradicted, jdurg, when you earlier state that computer models are used to remove the drugs that 'will not work', i.e. efficacy testing, not toxicity.

 

My apology for the confusion. What I meant by "will not work" in this context are those that will obviously be toxic. If the drug is toxic, it "will not work".

 

An animal experiment can only tell you if the drug 'actually is effective' in the animal tested upon. Not whether the drug is effective in general.

 

As several people have pointed out, this is not true. Due to evolution, there is greater similarity between species with recent common ancestors than you are giving credit for. The actual record is that animal efficacy is a strong predictor of human efficacy.

 

...there is no guarantee that it wont both be useless and potentially deadly in humans.

 

No one said there was a "guarantee". You are moving the goalposts. We said that the testing was necessary to give us better predictors. If the drug turns out to be toxic in animals, it is not used in humans. That the drug is harmless in animals is not a guarantee that it is harmless in humans. That's why there are Phase I clinical trials. If the drug is useless in animals, then it is not used in humans. However,while there is a strong correlation of efficacy in animals to efficacy in humans, there is no guarantee. That's why there are Phase II clinical trials.

 

Or to confirm seen toxicity, in the case of conflicting outcomes in different animal species? A predictor is only any use afterall, if it gives one reliable outcome.

 

Not to confirm toxicity. I can't think of any case where there was conflicting toxicity testing in animals and the drug went to clinical trials. Can you name an instance where this happened?

 

As to the predictor, that is not entirely true. Because of the different emphasis in drug metabolism routes, it's possible that one species that uses a route that is minimal in humans may give a false positive. As I stated, rats tend to sulfate drugs predominantly while humans tend to use the cytochrome P450 oxidation system. 'the sulfated metabolite may be toxic but the oxygenated metabolite may not be. So if the drug is toxic in rats but harmless in primates, then you go ahead. Because primates share a more recent common ancestor, they are a better predictor. (They are also so expensive that they are rarely used as animal models.)

 

...rats with fake conditions that bare little or no resemblance to those natural, spontaneous diseases that occur in humans?

 

What specific conditions and/or diseases are you thinking of? A scientist is not going to use a model that bears no resemblance to the human disease. That makes no sense. In many cases the condition must be induced, but it is done in such a way as to either mimic the human condition or be tougher than the human condition. For instance, rabbits dont' spontaneously develop osteoarthritis, so when we wanted to test a treatment for osteoarthritis we had to surgically create a full thickness defect in the articular cartilage in the rabbit knee. The defect size was such as to be comparable to what is seen when humans present to a doctor complaining of pain in their joints.

 

The first line contradicts the second one.

 

Yes, I typed the wrong word at the end. Here is the corrected version:

"Lots of "cures" out there that worked in mice, rats, or rabbits that never worked in people. But before you get to humans you do everything to ensure that the drug is both safe (the #1 priority) and effective in animals."

 

Clearly a false dilemma, as animal tests are completely uninformative, hence the requirement for human tests and dangerously misleading in most cases.

 

The fallacy is in your first statement. Animal tests are not "completely uninformative". They eliminate toxic and useless treatments and drugs before you get to human clinical trials. They give you an idea that a drug or treatment at least has a good chance of being efficacious in humans. If you give up animal testing, then you must either do all the testing in humans -- with all the risks that involves -- or you freeze medicine at the current levels. If you will not risk harm to animals, how can you justfy risking harm to humans?

 

92% of drugs that pass animal safety/efficacy experiments fail when given to humans on safety/efficacy related grounds. This fact would seem to invalidate your assertion that if a drug works, or is safe, in some other random species that it will 'probably' work, or be safe, in humans.

 

Where did you get this figure? Never mind, found it. It is a news article by Anne Harding in The Scientist describing how the tightening of FDA regulations is resulting in turning down more drugs. But it has been picked up by all the animal rights pages.

 

You're the victim of out-of-context false witness and possible fraudulent information. Another scientific news organization wrote "The FDA was unable to identify the source of these figures for The Scientist by press time."

 

Even if the figures are accurate, the article isn't talking about the failure of the usefulness of animal testing, but instead about the record of the FDA in granting approval. One of the problems the article points out is that companies are skimping on the animal testing! IOW, the figures are dropping because the FDA is letting companies do less animal testing than they should be! It's not that the animal testing is failing, but rather that the companies are failing to do the appropriate animal testing and rushing to clinical trials!

 

Given that the predictive value of any given species for another is less than the toss of a coin,

 

That's not a "given". Again, we need to know the source of this "given". The animal rights group you got it from has to document that.

 

Presumably the 'cell cultures, tissues/organs' are human in origin.

 

I made it clear that the fibroblasts are human. In fact, they are human foreskin fibroblasts.

 

If they conflict with the animal-data as they invariably will, which do you go with? If for example, tests of a chemical compound on human liver cells show that it is toxic, but when tested in dogs it is seen to be 'safe', or vice-versa, which results overide the other?

 

You are missing that this is a step-wise procedure. If the chemical shows toxicity in the human fibroblast cultures, it never goes to testing in animals. That chemical is discarded right there.

 

Animal testing is VERY expensive. That's why the culture is used first. It's a lot cheaper. Only if the chemical/drug passes the culture test is it then used in animals. So your "problem" never arises.

 

Every drug on the market is 'ineffective' or 'unsafe' in some species or another and very effective and extremely safe in others.

 

If the drug is "on the market", then it is effective and safe in humans. Otherwise it wouldn't be "on the market".

 

However, your statement is not correct. Some drugs have been shown to be unsafe in every mammalian system tested. Thalidomide is one example that comes immediately to mind. Some are safe and effective in every mammalian species tested. Morphine comes immediately to mind; it is an effective pain killer in every mammalian species tested.

 

It isn't known until after human experiments which species is an accurate 'model' for the human response, hence why they cannot be predictive. I do not consider a 92% failure rate to be evidence of a system 'working well'.

 

But you are forgetting all the drugs that were eliminated along the way. If we had tested all of those in humans, then you would have found that drugs that we found harmful in animals were also harmful in humans.

 

Can you name any drugs that were ineffective and/or unsafe in animals that turned out to be effective and safe in humans?

 

You are using "selective data".

 

As the dogs in question did not have diabetes i would have to say, 'no'.

 

As iNow demonstrated, the dogs did have diabetes. This is just one example where your "facts" are wrong. You need to get the facts straight before your argument is valid.

Edited August 26, 2008 by lucaspa
multiple post merged

[iNow]

Looking back, the dogs in the study I referenced were not diabetic. However, the point I was making remains the same. The discovery of insulin WAS successfully tested on diabetic dogs, which means that the points being expressed by TheAM remain false.

 

 

http://www.discoveryofinsulin.com/Home.htm

Working at a University of Toronto laboratory in the very hot summer of 1921 Fred Banting and Charles Best were able to make a pancreatic extract which had anti diabetic characteristics.

They were successful in testing their extract on

diabetic

dogs.

Within months Professor J. J. R. MacLeod, who provided the lab space and general scientific direction to Banting and Best, put his entire research team to work on the production and purification of insulin. J.B. Collip joined the team and with his technical expertise the four discoverers were able to purify insulin for use on diabetic patients. The first tests were conducted on Leonard Thompson early in 1922. These were a spectacular success. Word of this spread quickly around the world giving immediate hope to many diabetic persons who were near death. A frenzied quest for insulin followed. Some patients in a diabetic coma made miraculous recoveries.

 

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dm22in.html

By August they had the first conclusive results: when they gave the material extracted from the islets of Langerhans (called "insulin," from the Latin for "island")

to diabetic dogs

, their abnormally high blood sugars were lowered.

[Sayonara]

Looking back, the dogs in the study I referenced were not diabetic. However, the point I was making remains the same.

The dogs don't need to have diabetes for changes in insulin levels to affect their blood sugar levels, so TheAM was creating a false requirement anyway.

[iNow]

Yeah, I know (and agree), but wanted to close the door on that so he couldn't use it in his rebuttal.

 

 

Now, TheAM - Please do let us all know if you think insulin has zero impact on non-diabetic animals. If that's the case, I'd like you to volunteer yourself for an injection.

[Sayonara]

Yeah, I know (and agree), but wanted to close the door on that so he couldn't use it in his rebuttal.

 

I knew YOU would get it; I just wanted it in black and white (or black and blue I guess) for those who don't, so they can't run with the flawed "useless trial" reasoning.

[halogirl]

animal testing for beauty products is totally wrong, but for diseases...i'm not sure. it is cruel, but it may be necessary, like for AIDs reasearch.

[Sayonara]

animal testing for beauty products is totally wrong, but for diseases...i'm not sure. it is cruel, but it may be necessary, like for AIDs reasearch.

 

Urrrggg... we have been around this so many times in this thread.

 

You can't just unilaterally label all testing as "cruel", if in reality it is not. Deliberate torture of animals is cruel, but this is not necessarily the same thing as animal testing. You need to have a comprehensive understanding of animal testing before coming to any conclusions, and the retina-burning images most people see (dogs with wires protruding from an exposed skull, etc) are not in the least bit representative of how lab animals are treated.

[PeacheyCarnehan]

I have copied and pasted excerpts from this discussion. It would have taken too long to use the quote system on all the posts I have responded to - too much going backwards and forwards. I don't think the quotes system tells us where a quote comes from. With all the pages preceding my post there could be some confusion. I will use the quotes system after this.

 

This is a very long post but I couldn't let some of the things that have been said go without comment.

 

Vivisection ? It is wrong because it is cruel. It is also scientifically flawed. No one can tell in advance if results in non-humans can be extrapolated to humans. No wonder that most clinical trials fail after the drugs seemed to work well in non-humans. What a waste of time and money.

 

There has been so much corruption involved in medical research and drug development/marketing , and so much money has been thrown about in bribes and inducements, that the data these people produce cannot be relied upon. You can't even be sure that any data is complete or that whole studies, that don't support the desired outcome, haven't been hidden away. These people often speak with forked tongues.

 

From this point I will start my answers with the initials PC.

 

----------------

Daisy, (post 16):

'What I will say is this....those of you out there who say "there's all sorts of other models we can use other than animals" please tell us what they are??? Are you talking about tissue culture....because if so, you are never going to recreate the situation that exists in a real living organ, such as cell-to cell-communication between different cell types. Not unless you have somehow managed to create an incredibly complex co-culture of cells such as that which exists in the brain. And in addition, those of you who are dead set against animal testing are obviously not undergoing ANY medical treatment EVER. Because just about any treatment you can think of (even surgical) has been tested on animals. So the anti-vivisectionists/anti-animal testing lobby, think about this....there is no modern medical treatment that hasn't been tested on an animal at some stage (even if it was hundreds of years ago) so if you are totally serious in your beliefs, you better not benefit from any of it. And another thing (just by the way) for those of you who think cell culture/tissue culture is the way forward....where do you think the cells and tissue come from....sacrificed animals usually.'

 

PC -There are many things that can be used. Most of the initial discovery and much of the development of drugs involves in vitro (test tube-like testing) and in silico (computers). As well as in vitro and ex vivo, there are computer modelling of how drugs react, different types of imaging devices, epidemiological studies, post mortems, various bio chips, QSAR, and micro dosing. If there are any areas where these can't accurately simulate a human being it must be remembered that other animals can't simulate humans with any reliability. These other methods are being improved., and their evolution could be accelerated if enough funds were made available and there was proper co-operantion between developers. Other animals will never be humans. Even those that have been genetically modified are unreliable. Testing something in an ape or mouse won't give you a reliable indication of what it will do in a human. One difference between apes and humans could change how a drug is metabolised or change its effects. Vivisection could be responsible for the scrapping of drugs that were ineffective in, and harmful to, non-humans but that would have been useful to humans. It's interesting that vivisectors use the word 'sacrifice' when they mean 'kill'. The Aztecs used to sacrifice people. They believed in things as nonsensical as is vivisection. Perhaps people who believe in stupid things think alike.

 

PC - If you, Daisy, are against, say, human exploitation you should never use anything that humans have made because at some point in history it has probabaly been made by exploiting humans. Non-Indian Americans had better leave America because the continent was developed by them by exploiting and slaughtering Indians. Pack your bags and get out by midnight. If you don't, you are as guilty as Custer and Cortez. Or so the reasoning of Daisy would have it.

 

 

PC - Claims that a certain drug has saved someone's life might just be claims in some cases. How do we know the drug alone did it? It might have been the placebo effect of the drug that did it. Placebos have a placebo effect. A drug that has passed the clinical trials and is believed to be a miracle drug will have an even greater placebo effect - especially if the drug companies put out misleading advertising about it. It might have been the result of the person just getting better - as sometimes happens. It might have been a combination of factors. How do we know that the drug, or an even better one, couldn't have been developed without vivisection?

 

Lance (post 27):

'...but if killing my dog would save my brother then I would do it in an instant.'

 

And Lance (post 37):

'Right, So If your brother had cancer and you knew that killing a rat would save him you would choose to save the rat instead of your brother?'

 

 

PC - But you wouldn't know in advance what results would come from testing on your dog. As dogs are not human, the results could be completely different. And probably would be. The dog might indicate that a treatment was safe. And then the treatment could kill your brother. You wouldn't know until it had been tested on humans. Most drugs tested on humans fail because they are ineffective or unsafe. After being found effective and safe in non-humans.

 

PC - What if testing on one human could save your whole family and everyone in your street? Would you be willing to let some human be experimented on? Perhaps a brain damaged orphan with less capacity than a dog to feel or think?

 

BrainMan (post 44):

'I am willing to bet that those animals suffered less than the luckiest of rats living in the wild. We worked very closely with the animal welfare people, and the total comfort of the animals was ensured every step of the way. They were put down peacefully with gas so we could get to thier brains afterwards (and you just can't do that with humans). They generally had access to food, drink, and sex at a level unprecedented for wild rats. [What else do rats want, anyway?] We even managed to argue with each other a bit over which type of bedding was most comfortable for transport and such. There was some level of necessary suffering (like recieving injections), but I've seen humans put through far worse in experiments and walk away content.'

 

PC - As rats aren't humans, you can't be sure that any neurological testing or any drugs would affect humans in the same way. It doesn't matter how comfortable the prisoner rats were - they didn't choose to be there. Most humans would prefer to lead natural lives, with all the discomforts and dangers, than to be kept safe in a prison. Especially so if they were being experimented on in the prison. The suffering of humans who walk away contented is irrelevant - they chose to undergo the suffering.

 

Cap'n Refsmmat (post46):

'Seriously though, you want your animal happy before he is tested on, since stress can cause such a reaction. If you didn't treat them right, that wouldn't be very representative of the human population, which typically treated OK.'

 

PC - It can't be known how much stress a lab animal is feeling or if the same stress will be felt by others or by the same animal at a different time. The data produced by such animals cannot be relied upon to be accurate. It can't be known what might cause stress at any given time. It could be different each time and with each animal.

 

Cap'n Refsmmat (post 56):

'To program the computer, you need to know a heck of a lot about the animals that we don't know, and that means, yes: DISSECTING THEM!!!!!! Really, we don't know about every compound an cell in animals and humans, it would take an insane amount of research before we did.'

 

PC - Knowing about other animals won't help to produce a computer programme for humans. You need to know about humans. There is already an insane amount of research and most of it is not applicable to humans.

 

blike (post 60):

'If animals are our "equals", then we have no responsibility not to act like one.'

 

PC - But we have the capacity to consider how much suffering we cause. We can empathise with others. Most other animals can't. We don't have to use them as models for our behaviour.

 

Sayonara (post 63):

'That doesn't mean that you can take any random feature of any random animal and assume that there are similar processes behind it just because it looks a bit like a human response.'

 

PC - The same can be said for any response to a drug in one species when comparing it to another species, such as a human.

 

Lance (post 79):

'And those people with the website protesting a single company REALLY need to get a life.'

 

PC - They have lives and part of their lives are dedicated to saving the lives of the innocent. Before you try to counter by saying they should be saving human lives, many AR people also campaign for human rights. And opposing vivisection is opposing bad science that fails to reliably find cures for humans. However much frustration or damage they might cause, they do not torture and slaughter animals, unlike the people they are campaigning against.

 

Newtonian (post 114):

'Interestingly some hair dyes are no longer tested on animals, especially here in the UK.Which has led to some horrific injuries to women.'

 

PC - Well, if they want to dye their hair, they should be willing to take a risk. Or use one that has been used for years and is known to be safe.

 

Mokele (post 156):

'What about terminal animal experiments that aren't of medical use? Ones where the goal is simply to find out how the animal itself works; knowledge for the sake of knowledge. What would various people consider justifed?'

 

PC - No, it wouldn't be justified. Just as medical experiments on non-humans are not justified.

 

jdurg (post 157):

'Here's another way to look at it. If you went into an organic chemistry lab and threw some things together, would you be willing to put whatever you created right into your mouth? In a sense, by removing animal testing that is exactly what you'd be doing with any new "drug".'

 

PC - You can't know what the drug will do in humans until after you try it in humans. The earlier non-human testing cannot be relied upon to predict what the drug will do in humans. As is seen when a drug is found to be unsafe in the phase 1 trials. Or later.

 

Lance (post 190):

'Why should we ease every animal from harm. Why shouldnt we take advantage of animals? '

 

PC - In that case, why shouldn't we take advantage of humans?

 

Mokele (post 192):

'EVERY university that does *any* vertebrate research *must* have an IACUC committee, which oversees all animal welfare and makes sure humane procedures are used.'

 

PC - I'm not sure what the US legislation says but the UK one is so worded that any researcher can claim that the suffering that will be involved in their research is essential to the outcome. I'm sure that US 'humane' committees, if they work for the research establishment, just might give a nod to the establishment's needs to do research. Even if these committees are supposed to be independent there is no guarantee that they will really be independent. The committees that sit to decide which drugs should be approved often have people on them with vested interests or conflicts of interest. 'Humane' committees are unlikely to be any different. As I said above, the whole system is shot through with corruption and nothing these people say can be reliably taken as gospel.

 

PC -Mokele said that intelligence evolved so we could take advantage of others. There are a lot of intelligent rapists, paedophiles, confidence tricksters and villanous polititians. The Nazi and Soviet leadership used their intelligence to subjugate and slaughter millions of humans. Such noble examples of human intelligence. Others use their intelligence to torture rats, dogs and monkeys, to turn chickens into caged egg machines, cows into bloated milk machines, ships into ocean-going fish death rafts, and buildings into slaughterhouses where millions of animals are slashed and stabbed in scenes that are reminiscent of mediaeval paintings of Hell.

 

PC - Sayonara (post 197) mentions optically inverted vitamins. What are they?

 

albertlee (post 208):

'Some of you said that animal testing indeed saves millions of lives, but on the contary, some said that it isn't accurate enough, because they have different physiology......

So, how can an inaccurate test on for eg, medicine save millions of lives????

Secondly, a topic like cloning, why do we examine this unsophisticated-still technology on animals first instead of human??? if it is not going to be accurate, why do we continue, which could be very unprdoctive??'

 

PC - Are millions of lives being saved? Many drugs are used to alleviate something, such as pain, acne, high blood pressure and anxiety. Many of these conditions can be alleviated by a change of lifestyle. Many people are killed by prescribed drugs. One estimate - accepted by the FDA - is that 100,000 Americans die every year, and 2 million suffer serious side effects. Some approved drugs are found to be almost, or actually, useless. Most drugs are just slightly altered variations of existing drugs. Why is cloning done in non-humans instead of humans? One answer is that rats and monkeys never make complaints and are unable to sue. Why is anything done that might not be accurate? For some researchers, the aim is to stay in work and get grants - if they happen to make something useful, it's a serendipitous bonus.

 

jdurg (post 216):

'If you give a drug to an animal test subject and it dies shortly after ingesting the drug, then you have a pretty good idea that it will be toxic to humans.'

 

PC - But you couldn't be sure until a human is given it. And you can't be sure that a drug that does no harm to a rat or a dog won't harm a human. A drug that kills another animal might be a wonder drug for humans.

 

tejaswini (post 248):

'and talking on the pro side it necessary that we test animals . because if we want to mimic the effects that the pathogen will have on human cells. then it becomes a esssential act.'

 

PC - Very often, the pathogen does not do in one animal what it does in another. Three animals can all give different answers. You won't know which might apply to humans until you test it on humans - and it might do something completely different in them. The species differences are too great and unpredictable.

 

staceisace (post 251) replying to YT2095:

'I'm sorry, but you are an absolute fool.

firstly, when you or your kids get ill, do you turn down treatment? i didn't think so.

we have a real problem here with animal rights campaigners, not just because of some grave robbing and sending threatening letters to elderly shareholders (god they are tough) but because of the misinformation and blatant lies they tell.

if peole bothered to do proper research they would see that very few animals are used in ratio to humans, its not all cute rabbits and endangered monkeys.

secondly, humans are used to test drugs after and this has been common practise since the 60s after the thalidamide disaster.

i'm sorry, but unless you refuse drug treatment, do not use cosmetics and only shop for organic foods then you have no moral high ground whatsoever.'

 

PC - If you or your children get ill, would you turn down treatment that had been tested on unwitting African children? Or something that had been developed by the Nazis with tests on Jews? The drug companies and many medical researchers tell more lies and much more egregious ones than any that AR people may have told. The lies of the drug dealers can, and do, lead to human deaths and disablement. Millions of non-humans are used in research every year. Many more than the humans who take part in clinical trials. Yes, humans are used to test drugs but, legally, most often only after they have been tested on other species. As for moral high grounds, because of the present, corrupt system, the only mainstream medical treatments available have all been tested on non-humans.

 

Dr. Dalek (post 253):

Often rare side effects aren’t detected until the drug reaches the market.

Now many people opposed to Animal testing for drugs point out that

using human cell cultures, and "simulated" organs such as Micro-brain (used to study cancer), pose no means of harming animals and are cheaper than using animals.

However one has to ask the question, if these systems are cheaper than why aren’t the greedy, money grubbing corporations using them? Its because despite the use of said cell cultures one cannot get an accurate picture of what happens to a whole organism with many interacting parts from a cell culture, or a simulated organs. An organism is many interacting cells, tissues, and chemicals, not all of which are present in cultures.

Now, I don't exactly like the idea of animals suffering, however I'd say that when introducing a new drug, some animal testing may be needed. Granted animals don't always react exactly as a human would to a drug, it would be good to know before using Human subjects if all the pigs, and rabbits died a month after the drug was administered.

After all the effects of the drug might not be apparent or even existent for a long time, it might have a slight effect on the endocrine system, for example, and slowly cause a chain reaction within the body over a series of months. If that was found in even one of the types of animals used it would make people think twice about administering it to volunteers.'

 

PC - There are many systems that can be used in the testing of drugs. They are very expensive to develop. It is not always easy to get them approved by the regulatory bodies. Competing companies and organisations own the patents on them. They don't want just anybody using them and learning their secrets. The greedy, money-grubbing corporations would use them if they were forced to do so. However, in a court of law more weight will be given to tests done on living animals than to those done on bio chips and computers. The tests done on living animals can protect the drug companies from law suits as they can say they did everything in their power to test for safety. There are many people who depend on the use of vivisection, from those who have never done any other work to those who breed and trade in lab animals. These people have a vested interest in keeping the present system.

 

PC - You cannot get a reliable picture of what a drug will do in one species by testing it in another. There are too many differences. A whole organism does have many interacting parts but each species has differently interacting parts, and data from one cannot be reliably extrapolated to another. A drug might have an adverse effect on the endocrine system of a rat after one week, and on a monkey after one year. But it might have no such effect at all on a human even after 20 years. It is only when a drug has been tried in humans that you can know what it will or won't do.

 

zyncod (post 254):

'Actually, such cell cultures are far from cruelty-free. I'll be decorous for once and not say how exactly they get the fetal calf serum that is an integral part of mammalian culture systems, but it's pretty disgusting.'

 

PC - They take it from the still beating heart of a foetus in a slaughtered cow in a slaughterhouse. It is thought that foetuses feel pain and might feel it more intently than adults. This foetus might be close to birth time. Serum-free culture should be used. Bovine culture can contain diseases and cells that could affect the outcome of experiments.

 

===================

IN THIS SECTION, 'S' IS USED FOR SAYONARA, 'B', FOR BOSUN. MY COMMENTS ARE IN UPPER CASE.

 

Sayonara (post 259):

Originally Posted by bosun

I would just like to say that animal testing is WRONG! we shouldn't sacrifice an animals life for humans it is selfish and inhumane.

 

S: These are called "conclusions". They come after the reasoning, not before it.

BOSUN CAN PUT CONCLUSIONS ANYWHERE. THIS IS NOT A MEDICAL STUDY WITH AN ABSTRACT, METHODS, MATERIALS, CONCLUSIONS, ETC.

 

B: People are saying that you can't prove that animals suffer pain but why risnk it?

 

S: Because the current alternatives suck even more.

IF BY 'SUCK' YOU MEAN THEY ARE NOT GOOD, THE VIVISECTION METHODS ARE MUCH MORE UNGOOD.

 

B: im sure none of you would like to be caged up and only let out to be tested on.

 

S: No, probably not, but that doesn't really mean anything does it?

IT IS AN OPINION. PEOPLE ARE ALLOWED TO SAY WHAT THEY THINK.

 

B: If humans want to live then it is them who should be sacrificed.

 

S:Do you not see the fatal flaw in this approach? (pun intentional)

THE MEANING IS QUITE CLEAR - SOME HUMANS WOULD HAVE TO SUFFER AND DIE FOR THE COMMON GOOD SO THAT OTHERS MIGHT LIVE.

 

B: Why dont we test our products on rapists and murderers and pedofiles then there not just rotting away in a prison there being made use of.

 

S: Because (a) that would be a severe breach of human rights, and (b) it would be worse than the "inhumane" behaviour you are currently decrying.

VIVISECTION IS A BREACH OF ANIMAL RIGHTS. BEFORE WE HAVE TO START TALKING ABOUT RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITIES, VOTING RIGHTS, AND STATUTORY TEA BREAKS, I MEAN THE RIGHT TO NOT BE IMPRISONED, TESTED ON AND KILLED. HUMANS HAVE NO RIGHT TO DO ANY OF THOSE THINGS. IF ANYONE BELIEVES THEY DO, THEN I WOULD HAVE THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE THAT I HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL THAT PERSON IF I WANT TO.

 

B: It is not fair because animals have no vioce and no way of defending it self it is slavery.

 

S: The responses to this have already been made in the thread. Refute those replies instead of stating the same position again.

PEOPLE CAN SAY WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE SAID. NOT EVERYONE HAS READ THIS THREAD FROM THE BEGINNING. I DON'T BLAME THEM AS MUCH OF IT IS IRRELEVANT.

 

B: Humans have took over everything and now they think they own the world

 

S:Yes, you generally do own something when you take it over. It might not be top draw for all the fluffy bunnies but that's the way the trophic web crumbles and if they don't like it, they had better just go and evolve faster.

DO YOU BELIEVE THAT IF I ENTERED SOMEONE'S HOUSE AND SMASHED THEM TO THE GROUND, I WOULD OWN THEIR HOUSE?

 

B: Any way be sides the piont animal testing is wrong and should be band and especially for produncts like shampoo and body spray because that is even more pethetic!!

 

S: Yes, let's ignore pharmaceuticals and life saving drugs. That will work.

HOW DO YOU KNOW VIVISECTION IS NEEDED TO MAKE PHARMACEUTICALS? BECAUSE THE DRUG COMPANIES AND MEDICAL RESEARCHERS TELL YOU?

 

=====================

 

reyam (post 262):

'umm, they do feel pain. if you kick a dog, it will yelp. if you step on a cats paw, it will yauwll and hiss.'

 

PC - The poster you are answering said that some people have said you can't prove animals feel pain. Some people have, indeed, said that.

 

Mokele (post 263):

'Frankly, is pure, non-applied knowledge worth some death? In my view, yes.'

 

PC - Joseph Mengele would have been right with you on that, I'm sure.

 

Mokele (post 263):

'It's a systems problem. You can test a drug on in-vitro stomachs and find that it cures indigestion without any side-effects, but without organism-scale testing, your company won't know that it also causes birth defects until the lawsuits start rolling in and thousands of lives have been ruined.'

 

PC - You can test a drug in a rat's stomach and a dog's stomach without any side-effects. But it might kill humans. You do not know until you try it in humans if the rat and dog gave the correct answers. You hit the nail right on the head with your reference to law suits. That is why lab animals are used. Their data would be believed but the data from in silico and other non-vivisection methods wouldn't be - because for years vested interests have been spewing out propaganda. I can imagine a lawyer making fun of data from a machine but putting full faith in data from a mouse.

 

Cap'n Refsmmat (post 266):

'But does it feel pain the same way a human does, or is that a reflex reaction to excess pressure?'

 

PC - Do you feel pain the same way as other humans do?

 

Sayonara (post 269):

'Please try to add something to the discussion next time.'

 

PC - The poster was asking a question. Quite possibly in reference to the remark about rabbits having to suffer so someone can use a new shampoo without hurting their eyes.

 

PC - If you are reading this, Sami17, don't be put off. Ask any question you want - as long as it's relevant. The person you were asking just might have had something to say and you could have asked another question or made a statement. And, judging by the responses after your question, some people wanted to answer you. They thought it was worth answering.

 

Dr. Dalek (post 272):

'So you have no good strong argument but you make up for it with a big font?'

 

PC - I think the big font was to emphasise that the poster thinks it is wrong. Some people here have said that ethics are a matter of opinion. The poster offered an opinion. Many think vivisection is wrong. You might not think so. Some people thought that it was not wrong for white people to keep black people as slaves. That was their opinion. Some people thought it was wrong. Their opinion. Not a strong argument for emancipation. Would you have commented about the anti-slavery supporters' lack of strong argument?

 

scicop (post 277):

'As far as those who don't believe in animal experimentation, lets directly go to human experimentation, starting with those who oppose. Let's see if they're willing to step up the plate and take some injections of Avian Bird Flu for the sake of vaccine development

 

'I know some principal investagtors who would love to have a human guinea pig (providing that you sign the necessary waivers for accidental death, financial obligations, associated medical treatments expeditures, and liability).

 

'I don't see any PETA members volunteering themselves for research. I would have loved to test my recombinant constitive active p53 adenvovirus on humans.'

 

PC - You can't be sure that giving bird flu injections to mice or monkeys will give you reliable information about humans. That information will only come after it is given to humans. Anything destined for humans should be tested without other species. The first dose in humans should be determined after other non-vivisection methods have been used, including microdosing.

 

PC - There are humans in Africa who have been given untested drugs. After their governments were given large cash payments. There are humans in Africa who were given untested drugs, apparently without their government's knowledge. There are children in New York, diagnosed as having HIV, who were were given AIDS drugs in what are probably unethical experiments. Human experimentation has always gone on. Usually, we never hear about it. Usually, it is only when someone breaks ranks and tells the truth that we hear about it.

 

Mokele (post 279):

'You have three choices: Animal experimentation, human experimentation on a huge scale (probably on the unwilling too, due to the numbers needed), and a total cessation of all medical and biological advances. There's no other option, period.

 

PC - No. You can use all the existing non-vivisection methods, force companies and institutions who hold patents on new methods to co-operate, and pour massive amounts of money into developing and finding other methods. Massive amounts of money are now wasted on the present system and most drugs fail when tested on humans. A lot of that money is from taxpayers. All that is needed is the political will. But polititians can be swayed by the millions of pounds and dollars and the lobbyists (more than two for every member of the US congress) that drug companies use to get their way.

 

PC - If you keep using the same methods, you will get the same results. Those results are that only about 1 in 10 new drugs that enter the human, clinical trials will be approved for human use. All of them will have had non-human data before they reach human trials. But the big drug companies still manage to make their millions in profits, so they are quite happy. Too risky to start doing proper research with all the costs in time, effort and money.

 

PC - Pure knowledge might be of some benefit at some time. But knowledge based on human data is more likely to be of use to humans. How do you know how much share of the money to give to research that's done in the hope that it just might, possibly, maybe, perhaps be useful one day? Better to use scarce money looking at things that would be more likely to be useful now.

 

Mokele (post 279):

'So basically, in any animal test, we cannot predict the outcome. Cancer drug trials could fail, while some useless work like mine could have implications I've never dreamed of. Either way, it's a gamble, so the ends cannot justify the means, since we have no way of assessing the ends before the experiment.'

 

PC - You have no reliable way of assessing what results might be applicable to humans until after they've been applied to humans. Using non-humans will not reliably give you that knowledge. It's more likely to lead you up the garden path and into a blind alley. Whilst you are being led on this merry dance, humans are waiting for cures.

 

blackhole123 (post 280):

'im going to pretend i didnt hear that.'

 

PC - I have no bones to pick about that statement but it is strange that no one said the poster should try to add something to the discussion.

 

Mokele (post 282):

'First, much of what the Nazis did was applied, not pure.'

 

PC - We'll never know exactly what the Nazis did. Most documents were destroyed. Allied governments will have wanted any data for their own purposes and would not have wanted the source to be known. Nazis who did pure research would not have been able to use an excuse of trying to help humanity or the glorious aryan nation - more likely they would have kept quiet to try to cheat the gallows.

 

lucaspa (post 285):

'Your opinion is not backed by the data. In my work, there is no other way to see if regeneration happens but to use animals. '

 

PC - Once again, the results from non-humans are not a reliable indicator of what might happen in humans. You say there is no other way but that has been said about other things that were thought to be impossible. Perhaps the much-vaunted pure research could throw up something by accident. If enough money is spent. What type of regeneration are you working on?

 

GammaMambo (post 287):

'I've often thought about people on death row or in prison for life....why not?'

 

PC - Because it is wrong. Even if it weren't wrong, how do you know people who have been convicted of a crime are guilty? In the last 20 years here in the UK at least 13 people who were convicted for murder were, years later, released because it was found that they were innocent. No doubt, there are many more innocent people in gaol. Do you think they should have been used for vivisection?

 

lucaspa (post 295):

'Because "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" applies and using them as experimental subjects without their consent violates that. What if someone would say "how about everyone who uses "GammaMambo" as their screen name", why not?'

 

PC - GammaMambo was expressing an opinion. He or she believes it is all right to experiment on certain humans. You are of the opinion that it is all right to experiment on non-humans. That is just an opinion, too.

 

lucaspa (post 296):

'As I noted, male rats are quite capable of looking at newborn rat pups as a tasty snack.

 

PC - Is it normal for rats to behave this way? Would a rat in the wild do this? There are male humans who kill babies; who have sex with four-year-old girls; who will rape anything that moves. Normal men are not like that. Are these rats like normal rats? Or are they stressed by the abnormal conditions in which they live?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/apr/18/highereducation.research

 

PC - Several sites about rats say that rats make good fathers. Of course, they are talking about rats that are not tortured and that haven't been driven insane in rat Belsens.

 

PC - Some of these vivisection-supportng comments seem as if they are designed to mislead. lucaspa said, (post 302):

'Many years ago I witnessed an experiment where the rats were being injected in the abdomen every day for several months. After the first 3-4 days, I saw the researcher simply reach into the cage and pick the rats up by the scruff of their necks. No gloves, just his bare hand. The rats just hung there passively while the researcher used his other hand to stick a long 20 guage needle into their abdomen and inject the material. No squirming, no squeaks, NOTHING. If anything, they acted "bored". So, were they feeling pain or were they suffering? Not from any outward sign.'

 

PC - Some animals have an instinctive behaviour that makes them go still when a predator catches them - they might struggle at first but soon stop. They don't thrash about much or vocalise. No thoughtful person would think they weren't feeling pain or alarm. Some humans, who are used to abuse, make no sounds when they receive their habitual beating. Are they feeling pain or are they suffering? Are they just bored? Perhaps they grow to like it. They give no outward sign. Animals that adopt this strategy may have an increase in opiates in their blood to dull pain - or may not - but would anyone like to test this by jumping into a tiger's cage to see if they become insensitive to pain?

 

PC - Do you, lucapsa, know how to recognise pain in rats? It seems to me that either you don't or you are deliberately trying to mislead. As your job depends on causing pain or terror to animals, anything you say about vivisection should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

 

PC - We really need to be careful when considering anything a vivisector says. They make their living causing pain and fear. They will say anything to try to justify what they do.

 

lucapsa (post 307):

'The testing doesn't kill the animal. Instead, research animals are painlessly euthanized at the end of the experiment. There are only a few methods of euthansia allowed, and all of them are painless, unlike the hypobaric chambers used to kill unwanted pets.'

 

PC - Why do vivisectors have to use euphemisms? When they talk about euthanising, they mean killing. It is killing, not sacrificing. Another euphemism, 'Final Solution', sounds nicer than the reality of what it meant.

 

lucapsa (post 307):

'Now, I have used rabbits as experimental animals to test a new treatment for osteoarthritis. This treatment would completely cure arthritic knees and prevent people from having total hips or knees done because of the pain and crippling of arthritis. Would you have me stop? If I do, then you and any of your loved ones will never get that cure.'

 

PC - Has your research found a cure? I would have you stop what you are doing. I would have you do human-based research, which would use every non-vivisection method that was needed.

 

lucapsa (post 307):

'Even at a 1,000 animals a day -- the number YOU quoted -- that is only 365,000 animals a year! You need to get your own facts straight'

 

PC - Sciecewiz originally said that over a million animals a month are killed in vivisection. In the UK alone, more than 3 million animals were used last year. I'm sure that at least 2 million of these will have been killed. It is estimated (estimated because not all animals are recorded) that well over 100 million animals are used each year in labs. How many are killed? Probably most of them. This estimate comes from anti-vivisection advocates the BUAV and also the Hadwen Trust. Some people here might not believe the figures. Perhaps they would prefer to believe the lies and propoganda of the drug-dealing companies.

 

lucapsa (post 307):

'Do you know what an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee is'

 

PC - Do you know how much corruption there is in medical research and drug making? Can any committee be fully trusted when the drug companies want profits and have millions to use in bribes?

 

Cap'n Refsmmat (post 308):

'You do realize that the video was probably horribly biased, don't you?'

 

PC - I don't realise that. I know people who have been in those hell holes. And they've told me that chickens are crammed into cages, and dead and injured birds are in cages.

 

Mr Skeptic (post 310):

'Animal testing speeds up research and in doing so saves human lives and increases human comfort.'

 

PC - How do you know it speeds up research? How do you know it is not holding up research? Don't ask the vivisectors, they are biased.

 

lucapsa (post 315):

'In the United States ALL clinical research MUST go through an IRB -- Institutional Review Board. The purpose of the IRB is to safeguard the interests of the test subjects.'

 

PC - Did you know that many, or sometimes most, members of IRBs have financial connections of some sort with drug companies? Can these people be trusted? Perhaps many, or most can be. Perhaps not. The same can be said for those bodies that look into drug safety, drug recalls, and everything to do with drugs. The whole system needs changing to ensure corruption can't raise its ugly head.

 

PC - lucapsa then said that he or she doesn't know of payments for phase 1 clinical trials. The recent phase 1 trial for TGN1412 involved payments to volunteers. Non-patients will likely always be paid for taking part in trials. It would be hard to get them otherwise. Unless they are in Africa or India where they are duped into thinking they are getting some revolutionary, already tested and safe, drug.

 

Mr Sceptic (post 316):

'Competition and natural selection are not kind. Life is a competition, and we can compete pretty well.'

 

PC - But humans can be kind, if they choose to be. We don't have to take 'Nature red in tooth and claw' as our model.

 

lucaspa (post 317):

'Larry Niven did a series of science fiction stories exploring the unintended consequences of this policy -- as well as requiring those on death row to be organ donors. Basically, if your life and the quality of your life depends on criminals, it becomes VERY tempting to legislate more and more crimes as deserving the death sentence. In one story, the end result was that too many traffic tickets within a period of time was a capital crime!'

 

PC - A certain communist country in the far east has a very high execution rate. One theory about why they sentence so many people to death is that they want to harvest their organs for transplants. I wouldn't put it past them.

 

Sayonara (post 325):

'1 - We definitely know that testing on animal subjects relieves massive human suffering,

2 - We do not yet know whether or not testing on animal subjects causes animal suffering.'

 

PC - Do we know that vivisection relieves massive human suffering? I and many others say it doesn't and that it is holding up the relief of massive human suffering. And that any relief is more likely not due to the vivisection but is in spite of it. Can we know if others suffer? As for vivisection victims, we know they can and do feel pain, terror and stress. That is enough for me and many others.

 

Sayonara (post 327):

'Well this is the thing, isn't it? Does a flinch response to pain or a learned evasion response indicate a form of suffering which is comparable or analogous to the human perception of suffering? Read back a few months for previous discourse on that issue.'

 

PC - If a human is seen writhing on the ground, does this mean they are in pain or suffering? How can we know? They might look to us as if they are suffering something that we have suffered, but how do we know that we are not mistaken?

 

lucaspa (post 333):

'Well, you have just admitted that you are not holding a rational discussion because you won't accept any data contrary to your view.'

 

PC - I took lovejunkie02's meaning to be that he or she wouldn't believe any vivisector who claimed that the lab animals are treated humanely. I would have difficulty believing such a person. People who experiment on anyone who can feel pain and terror would not convince me that they are humane or that they treat their victims humanely. Just as I wouldn't believe the rapist who says that his victims were asking for it.

 

lucaspa (post 333):

'The reason I ask is because the animals I work on -- and yes, I do animal research -- are treated just like human patients. Right now we are doing an bone gap model in rats. The rats are anesthetized with ketamine and acepromazine....'

 

PC - I'm not sure that I would believe anything you say. See above for one reason. How do you know those animals feel no pain? Human patients have reported feeling pain whilst under anaesthetic. Some people here - I'm not sure if you are one - seem to doubt that other animals feel pain or are fully aware of it. Those people would not understand the need to give anaesthetics or analgesics. Animals that feel no pain can still feel fear whilst conscious.

 

lucaspa (post 333):

'After all, we do have to exploit other species as animals. Isn't a farmer's field another type of cage? Would you have use give up farming?'

 

PC - If you are talking about sheep and cows, yes, I would have us give up farming. Animal farming.

 

mooeypoo (post 336):

'Perhaps but the problems start with defining what a "Good Cause" is (to you it can be one thing, to me another, and we each can consider each-other's subjective 'good causes' as absolutely not worth it), and the second problem is what TYPE of actions justify what type of means.'

 

PC - Yes. There were causes good enough for the Aztecs to sacrifice humans. There are causes good enough to lead one nation to attempt genocide.

 

lucaspa (post 345):

'I really don't think you are aware of the regulations in place currently on the use of animals in research. If you want, I'll attach the forms I have to fill out before I can do research on animals. Each investigator must have his research approved by the IACUC, which consists of scientists and non-scientist members of the community. The purpose of the IACUC is to ensure that the animals are used to develop treatments for diseases and are adequately protected from pain, not to rubberstamp the researcher. As a member of an IACUC, we shut down the research of a scientist for not taking proper care of his animals.'

 

PC - I have already mentioned that committees and regulatory bodies involved in this cruel business can be corrupt. Some have been seen to be corrupt. Whatever is decided, there's no way to ensure researchers stick to the rules. In the UK, at least, there are very few inspectors to inspect thousands of experiments. The ratio of inspectors to researchers will be less than the ratio of police to bank robbers. Bank robbery is against a law. That doesn't stop bank robbers robbing banks. They know there is a high risk of getting caught. They do it all out in the open. The punishment if caught is a long prison sentence. Researchers have little chance of getting caught if they break their laws. They do it all behind closed doors. The punishment - if any - is minor. Safety laws and approval committees are only as good as the personnel involved. And their resistance to bribes.

 

lucaspa (post 345):

'It's not entirely "subjective". We can define what ethical principles we agree on (and these are not derived "subjectively", either) and then reason to conclusions.'

 

PC - I, and many others, would not agree with you on what is ethical.

 

lucaspa (post 345):

'What I find is that a lot of the emotion against using animals for testing comes from examples that are stated but do not exist. Some of the examples are outdated. They did exist but were the reasons regulations and IACUCs were established; to eliminate those situations.'

 

PC - No, I don't believe that IACUCs or the FDA can eliminate those situations.

 

cellbios (post 356):

'The funny thing is that some drugs, etc may be very effective when studied in vitro but are toxic once in vivo.'

 

PC - Another funny thing (but not funny for the rats and monkeys) is that a drug could be effective and safe in rats and monkeys but be useless and dangerous in humans.

 

lucaspa (post 358):

'Nan, are you aware that any animal testing must be done under appropriate pain medication? Euthanasia must be done in a painless fashion. It's part of the requirements every scientist must go thru to get permission to do animal testing.'

 

PC - I might have mentioned this before but I don't believe what vivisectors say. It is law that cattle should be slaughtered whilst unconscious in slaughterhouses (unless they are killed in ritual slaughter) but I know that the workers sometimes don't bother to obey the law. Humans cut corners, they don't always bother to adhere to rules and regulations.

 

lucaspa (post 358):

'We do say this. Because it is true. All the wonderful medical treatments you see today, all the "miracles" of modern medicine, are due to animal research. Do you want us to stop those? Do you want us to stop looking for cures for Alzheimer's because you don't want animals to "suffer"? In particular, think of whether you want us to stop working on a cure for a disease that your parents or your children have.'

 

PC - How do you know these wonderful cures couldn't have been made without vivisection? Or that vivisection resulted in better cures being scrapped? Using non-humans is a lottery. You can't know which data will be applicable to humans. Most of it isn't.

 

lucaspa (post 358):

'Again, already being done! NIH comes out with Requests for Applications for NIH grants on new cell culture and computer modeling techniques to cut down the number of animals used. Go to the NIH website and look at the grants requested and awarded.'

 

PC - I'm sure it's a drop in the ocean compared with the money spent on marketing drugs.

 

lucaspa (post 358):

'ALL lab facilities must be accredited. One of the requirements for accreditation is policies in place that have the animal care attendants report any suffering of the animals.'

 

PC - The same could be said about children's homes and retirement homes. From time to time, reports of abuse emerge. But the residents are not supposed to suffer abuse. Does that stop abuse? Does it heck as like!

 

iNow (post 361):

'I'd argue that most people don't want to harm animals. That makes good sense. Where I struggle is when people are blinded to the reality around them in their attempts to force such testing to stop. The world is complex, and not everything is so black and white. Sometimes we have to do cost-benefit analyses and make tough choices.'

 

PC - Animals are complex and one species cannot be a reliable model for another. When all the steps have been taken to test a drug at the cellular level and its chemistry has been analysed and it is time to test it in a whole, living orgnism, that organism should be a human. By using QSAR, imagining and microdosing. At present, the first human to test anything new IS the first human to test it. Nothing that has gone on before can reliably predict what it will do to that human. At present, all the drugs that are first tested in humans have lab animal data (with some rare exceptions). Most fail when tested in humans. Most of the failures are for safety and efficacy reasons.

 

PC - If there are any perceived or actual limitations in any non-vivisection methods it must be remembered that the limitations in vivisection are legion - as vivisector supporters here have alluded to. Non-human animals will never be humans. Non-vivisection methods can improve. The only possible barrier to their improvement would be caused by political and commercial inertia or rivalry.

 

lucapsa (post 362):

'All those determine the actual concentration of the drug at the particular site you want it.'

 

PC - But the concentration in a rat might not be the same as the concentration in a human. Only after a human has concentrated it can you see how the human has concentrated it.

 

lucapsa (post 362):

'People who want to stop all animal testing must face this reality: to give up animal testing means giving up new drugs/treatments for human health and new cleaning solutions and other chemicals that make our lives easier. If you give up animal testing, you freeze our medical technology and chemical technology where it is today. Is that what they really want?'

 

PC - New cleaning products are not needed - especially not if their development leads to the harm, pain or death of any animal. Non-humans can't be relied on to predict toxicity or efficacy. Has anyone mentioned that before?

 

Mr Sceptic (post 365):

'TheAM, if a drug works for an ass, then it will probably work for you. If a drug is safe for an ass, it will probably be safe for you. This is because you and an ass are both mammals, and are very similar at the cellular level. Basically, animal testing can find medicines that work for all or most mammals, rather than only a certain species, since mammals are so similar to each other.'

 

PC - But one difference anywhere along the line between two species could mean that species A is cured but species B is crippled, sent mad or dies.

 

Mr Skeptic (post 365):

'If you actually had honest doubts about animal testing, consider that it is only one phase in an imperfect process of elimination.'

 

PC - Indeed it is imperfect and it is the vivisection bit where most of the imperfection lies.

 

Mr Skeptic (post 365):

'If you have a better process for finding new medicines, feel free to share.'

 

PC - Do everything the way it is done now but leave out the vivisection. Use QSAR and other in silico, PET, AMS, microdosing, fMRI and uncle Tom Cobley and all to test for toxicity, find therapeutic and starting doses, PK/ADME, PD. If any part of this process isn't as near perfect as it would be liked, spend some money, pull out all the stops, bang heads together, change laws and do whatever is necessary to ensure that it becomes nearer to perfect. Human lives depend on it. You can't continue to *****foot around with the Victorian ideas of vivisection. Vivisection is not perfect and never will even approach perfection. You would have to change other animals into humans before they would become good models and predictors for humans. Far easier to change the system than change the animals.

 

Mr Skeptic (post 371):

'That's the part you are not understanding. If any of the tests show a drug is toxic, the drug gets dumped. Why test it on animals if it kills cells?'

 

PC - The drugs that reach clinical trials have been through these batteries of testing. But many fail in the trials because they are toxic.

 

PC - I interpreted TheAM's question as being about the source of the cells and that they should be human. The second part of his or her statement was, I think, pointing out the absurdity of comparing human and non-human to find something about humans. TheAM's response was to:

 

'Then, the chemical can be tested on live things, working the way up from cell cultures, tissues/organs, animals, and finally people.'

 

PC - Which, to me, means it is tested in non-human cells and then human. What if it shows toxcity in non-human? Is it then tested in human cells? I would say it should be, as the non-human cells, not being human, cannot reliably predict what will happen to the human cells. And then, you have to decide which results to believe. But far better to leave out the non-human cells.

 

lucaspa (post 372):

'That is the fallacy. Pharmacokinetics are remarkably similar between mammalian species. The distribution of metabolic routes of drugs is different, but all the routes are there in different mammalian species.'

 

PC - Slight differences anywhere can have large implications.

 

lucaspa (post 372):

'That's a bare assertion. Please post the peer-reviewed scientific papers to back that up'

 

PC - What, the peers who are vivisectors? That's rather like asking a freemason to back up the story of a fellow mason or to denounce freemasonry.

 

lucaspa (post 372):

'Because of evolution, the differences between species are not as great as you make out.'

 

PC - The differences are great enough. If they weren't you could go straight from mouse to patients with as much confidence as going from Canadian to Russian.

 

lucaspa (post 372):

'Again, untrue. Because of evolution many of the biological systems are very similar.'

 

PC - Not similar enough when condidering how a drug will work.

 

lucaspa (post 372):

' The actual record is that animal efficacy is a strong predictor of human efficacy.'

 

PC - Can you guess what I am going to say? Correct - give that person a cigar! It is not strong enough when considering what a drug will do.

 

It is very late. I can hardly keep my eyes open. To be contiued.

[iNow]

iNow (post 361):

'I'd argue that most people don't want to harm animals. That makes good sense. Where I struggle is when people are blinded to the reality around them in their attempts to force such testing to stop. The world is complex, and not everything is so black and white. Sometimes we have to do cost-benefit analyses and make tough choices.'

 

PC - Animals are complex and one species cannot be a reliable model for another.

How many different ways and how many different times does this point have to be addressed before you realize that simply repeating it does not make it valid.

 

 

When all the steps have been taken to test a drug at the cellular level and its chemistry has been analysed and it is time to test it in a whole, living orgnism, that organism should be a human. By using QSAR, imagining and microdosing. At present, the first human to test anything new IS the first human to test it. Nothing that has gone on before can reliably predict what it will do to that human.

Bullshit. It can absolutely give us insights into how humans will react. It is not 100% reliable, but nobody has EVER argued that it was. Do you know what a logical fallacy is?

 

 

At present, all the drugs that are first tested in humans have lab animal data (with some rare exceptions). Most fail when tested in humans.

Let's see your source on this claim. What citation supports your assertion here? Most fail, you say? Whatever. By the time they get to humans, they are mostly effective. Prove me wrong. Let's see you try.

 

 

 

To be contiued.

 

I can hardly wait. A 380 post thread, and you felt the need to respond to the whole thing in one single post of your own.

 

 

Please do stick with your word and use the quote function moving forward.

[Sayonara]

I have copied and pasted excerpts from this discussion. It would have taken too long to use the quote system on all the posts I have responded to - too much going backwards and forwards. I don't think the quotes system tells us where a quote comes from. With all the pages preceding my post there could be some confusion. I will use the quotes system after this.

When you quote, it does actually give a little arrow icon in the quote which links you to the relevant post if you click on it.

 

There is also a multiquote system, which means you can go through the thread clicking the " icon on all the posts you want to reply to, then hit the quote button when you are ready to start replying. It is quite a time saver.

 

I am not going to spend much time replying to your post for the simple reason that you are decrying vivisection, which is not the topic of this thread. You are confusing vivisection and animal testing.

 

This is not surprising, due to the efforts of people who are strongly opposed to all forms of animal experimentation. They paint all such efforts as the devilish and avoidable mutilation of fluffy animals, despite the fact that this is rarely representative in the slightest of the efforts they are attacking.

 

Vivisection is defined as, and only as, surgery conducted on a living animal. That could be anything from replacing a monkey brain with sawdust to repairing ligaments in your pet dog's leg. Are you against pet dogs receiving such treatment? Probably not, I should think.

 

The lesson to learn here is not to muddy the waters by using terms inappropriately.

 

 

This is a very long post but I couldn't let some of the things that have been said go without comment.

No problem with lengthy posts on this site... just keep in mind that "I can't let that go" is an emotive response, which is not often going to engender refutations of the highest quality.

 

Vivisection ? It is wrong because it is cruel.

As I said, vivisection is surgery on animals. So it cannot all be labelled as "cruel", because you need more specific information about the vivisection you are discussing. It's also not the same thing as animal testing, so you are wasting your own time.

 

It is also scientifically flawed.

On this site, you shouldn't make such a claim without credible supporting evidence.

 

Sayonara (post 63):

'That doesn't mean that you can take any random feature of any random animal and assume that there are similar processes behind it just because it looks a bit like a human response.'

 

PC - The same can be said for any response to a drug in one species when comparing it to another species, such as a human.

Not true. If we assume that a dog which raises its eyebrow is experiencing curiosity, we are anthropomorphising, which is a subjective assessment.

 

The biochemical responses of cellular material to the action of a drug under test conditions are hardly subjective assessments.

 

 

PC - Sayonara (post 197) mentions optically inverted vitamins. What are they?

I didn't remember this and had to go back and look. I think I meant to say that they were enantiomers, which are explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiomer

The basic thrust was that they might not even be assimilated by the human body.

 

Sayonara (post 259):

Originally Posted by bosun

I would just like to say that animal testing is WRONG! we shouldn't sacrifice an animals life for humans it is selfish and inhumane.

 

S: These are called "conclusions". They come after the reasoning, not before it.

 

BOSUN CAN PUT CONCLUSIONS ANYWHERE. THIS IS NOT A MEDICAL STUDY WITH AN ABSTRACT, METHODS, MATERIALS, CONCLUSIONS, ETC.

Fine with me. But without reasoning which precedes the conclusions, nobody is going to take any notice.

 

I could sit here typing "ANIMAL TESTING IS MAN'S GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT!!!!!!1112" over and over, but you are not going to subscribe to that notion without some pretty compelling arguments, are you?

 

B: People are saying that you can't prove that animals suffer pain but why risnk it?

 

S: Because the current alternatives suck even more.

 

IF BY 'SUCK' YOU MEAN THEY ARE NOT GOOD, THE VIVISECTION METHODS ARE MUCH MORE UNGOOD.

Your misunderstandig of the term 'vivisection' aside, this simply demonstrates that you lack any sense of perspective on the issue.

 

B: im sure none of you would like to be caged up and only let out to be tested on.

 

S: No, probably not, but that doesn't really mean anything does it?

 

IT IS AN OPINION. PEOPLE ARE ALLOWED TO SAY WHAT THEY THINK.

Please don't presume to lecture the administrators on what people are "allowed" to say, when there is not even any censorship in effect.

 

As before, Bosun can voice all the opinions he wants, but without any substance to demonstrate why people should take that opinion on board, nobody will. Without any substance to demonstrate why that opinion is significant, nobody cares.

 

B: If humans want to live then it is them who should be sacrificed.

 

S:Do you not see the fatal flaw in this approach? (pun intentional)

 

THE MEANING IS QUITE CLEAR - SOME HUMANS WOULD HAVE TO SUFFER AND DIE FOR THE COMMON GOOD SO THAT OTHERS MIGHT LIVE.

Do you really consider this to be a rational approach? Before you answer, think carefully how your response might affect the way that your arguments are received afterwards.

 

B: Why dont we test our products on rapists and murderers and pedofiles then there not just rotting away in a prison there being made use of.

 

S: Because (a) that would be a severe breach of human rights, and (b) it would be worse than the "inhumane" behaviour you are currently decrying.

 

VIVISECTION IS A BREACH OF ANIMAL RIGHTS. BEFORE WE HAVE TO START TALKING ABOUT RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITIES, VOTING RIGHTS, AND STATUTORY TEA BREAKS, I MEAN THE RIGHT TO NOT BE IMPRISONED, TESTED ON AND KILLED. HUMANS HAVE NO RIGHT TO DO ANY OF THOSE THINGS. IF ANYONE BELIEVES THEY DO, THEN I WOULD HAVE THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE THAT I HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL THAT PERSON IF I WANT TO.

Holding that belief has a name: it is called being a sociopath.

 

Animals do not have rights, save those which are designated by law. Laws are made and changed based on the strength of arguments and the balance of cost versus benefit to society.

 

On what basis would you presume to argue that animals have the right to not be tested upon? Notice here that I say "on what basis". I am, in other words, not asking you to simply repeat the flat and unevidenced statement that they have that right.

 

B: It is not fair because animals have no vioce and no way of defending it self it is slavery.

 

S: The responses to this have already been made in the thread. Refute those replies instead of stating the same position again.

 

PEOPLE CAN SAY WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE SAID. NOT EVERYONE HAS READ THIS THREAD FROM THE BEGINNING. I DON'T BLAME THEM AS MUCH OF IT IS IRRELEVANT.

You should not join a discussion unless you are aware of what has been said already. It makes you look ignorant, foolish, and arrogant when you simply parrot what has already been voiced and demolished beforehand. It also tires out the people who are deigning to write rational and comprehensive answers, putting them to conduct undue volumes of work.

 

Bosun's laziness is not worth that, no matter how intuitive you might find it to complain.

 

Please stay focused on the issues, and not childlike objections to completely reasonable efforts to manage the thread.

 

B: Humans have took over everything and now they think they own the world

 

S:Yes, you generally do own something when you take it over. It might not be top draw for all the fluffy bunnies but that's the way the trophic web crumbles and if they don't like it, they had better just go and evolve faster.

 

DO YOU BELIEVE THAT IF I ENTERED SOMEONE'S HOUSE AND SMASHED THEM TO THE GROUND, I WOULD OWN THEIR HOUSE?

Briefly, yes. However since that bad analogy is not a shift in the weighting of an ecosystem I don't see how it is relevant.

 

B: Any way be sides the piont animal testing is wrong and should be band and especially for produncts like shampoo and body spray because that is even more pethetic!!

 

S: Yes, let's ignore pharmaceuticals and life saving drugs. That will work.

 

HOW DO YOU KNOW VIVISECTION IS NEEDED TO MAKE PHARMACEUTICALS? BECAUSE THE DRUG COMPANIES AND MEDICAL RESEARCHERS TELL YOU?

Let's ignore the vivisection bit, because we have already gone over the idea that you might just be spuriously injecting the wrong word into your argument.

 

We know that animal testing works because like all trials which follow the scientific method, they are repeatedly observable. Also they produce results, which kinda helps.

 

Sayonara (post 269):

'Please try to add something to the discussion next time.'

 

PC - The poster was asking a question. Quite possibly in reference to the remark about rabbits having to suffer so someone can use a new shampoo without hurting their eyes.

Yes, a question which has been repeated ad infinitum throughout the discussion, and dealt with numerous times. Hence he or she was just wasting keystrokes by repeating it yet again.

 

I don't mean to be rude, but your critical reasoning is not the best and you are evidently not well versed in forum etiquette. I would therefore ask you to stop trying to police my posts, as I strongly suspect that I am much older than yourself and have a great deal more academic and life experience.

 

Sayonara (post 325):

'1 - We definitely know that testing on animal subjects relieves massive human suffering,

2 - We do not yet know whether or not testing on animal subjects causes animal suffering.'

 

PC - Do we know that vivisection relieves massive human suffering? I and many others say it doesn't and that it is holding up the relief of massive human suffering. And that any relief is more likely not due to the vivisection but is in spite of it. Can we know if others suffer? As for vivisection victims, we know they can and do feel pain, terror and stress. That is enough for me and many others.

Look, you have clearly come to this site with an agenda and from the first lines of your post it was clear that you don't have a clue what you are talking about.

 

There is more to objective discussion than picking a side and arguing with whatever the people you agree with have told you. Research the issues in depth from non-biased sources, and come to your own conclusions.

 

I appreciate that there is a steep learning curve involved in finding out how to argue effectively using good, properly referenced information, but I can assure you that some of our best long-term members have been people who came here with much crazier views than yours. An objective rationality won't come to you overnight, but it will be worth the effort.

 

However, in order to answer your question (), I suggest you READ THE THREAD. The data and arguments have been presented. You "and others" disagreeing does not mean that you have changed reality to match your claims.

 

Sayonara (post 327):

'Well this is the thing, isn't it? Does a flinch response to pain or a learned evasion response indicate a form of suffering which is comparable or analogous to the human perception of suffering? Read back a few months for previous discourse on that issue.'

 

PC - If a human is seen writhing on the ground, does this mean they are in pain or suffering? How can we know? They might look to us as if they are suffering something that we have suffered, but how do we know that we are not mistaken?

Because they can tell us.

[halogirl]

Urrrggg... we have been around this so many times in this thread.

 

You can't just unilaterally label all testing as "cruel", if in reality it is not. Deliberate torture of animals is cruel, but this is not necessarily the same thing as animal testing. You need to have a comprehensive understanding of animal testing before coming to any conclusions, and the retina-burning images most people see (dogs with wires protruding from an exposed skull, etc) are not in the least bit representative of how lab animals are treated.

 

 

how is it not cruel, you are using animals, other living beings, to our own end, not theirs. i actually do understand alot of what happens along those lines as i wrote an unbiased, 12 page report on the subject.

[iNow]

We eat them, too. Just because they are involved in work which has a great deal of efficacy does not mean we are being "cruel."

 

In my mind, cruelty is putting a cat into a microwave. Cruelty comes in many forms, but the responsible tests done in the name of science does not fit those criteria.

 

To Sayonara's point, this has been repeated numerous times in this thread, shown and supported ad infinitum to the blinded ideological eyes of those who wish to exaggerate the issue and misrepresent its truth.

[halogirl]

We eat them, too. Just because they are involved in work which has a great deal of efficacy does not mean we are being "cruel."

 

In my mind, cruelty is putting a cat into a microwave. Cruelty comes in many forms, but the responsible tests done in the name of science does not fit those criteria.

 

To Sayonara's point, this has been repeated numerous times in this thread, shown and supported ad infinitum to the blinded ideological eyes of those who wish to exaggerate the issue and misrepresent its truth.

 

it's true we do eat them, because that is how we evolved, however we might not be using the exaggerated techniques that generally come to mind, but we are using another being against their will. i'm not saying it isn't necessary, but it is still wrong.

[Sayonara]

how is it not cruel, you are using animals, other living beings, to our own end, not theirs. i actually do understand alot of what happens along those lines as i wrote an unbiased, 12 page report on the subject.

 

Because there is a difference between an act being unfortunately unpleasant, and cruel.

 

Cruelty is an act of deliberate malice.

[iNow]

i'm not saying it isn't necessary, but it is still wrong.

 

I understand, and I also know where you're coming from. Just to be clear, though, there is no objective line between right and wrong, good and evil. All we have are our subjective and personal interpretations.

 

I personally would not be alive today were it not for medical knowledge obtained through tests with animals, so I am both biased and grateful to the little beings who were involved, and these animals will always have my gratitude and support. I just ask that we be realistic and understand that complex issues like this have many shades of gray, and these shades warrant open discussion and responsible understanding.

[TheAM]

The different routes of drug metabolism are known. There are differences in the major routes of metabolism, but the routes are all there. For instance, rats tend to sulfate drugs more than humans do. This means that the human P450 system might make a toxic metabolite that rat testing will miss. This will not be picked up until phase I clinical trials.

 

A roundabout way of admitting that they metabolize substances differently.

 

 

As to "predictors", there are some legal constraints. For instance, if any drug shows any increase in cancer in any species, it can't be used in humans.

 

Dr Vernon Coleman has a book with 50 drugs in it that cause cancer in laboratory animals yet are on the market anyway, the official position being that those results are 'not relevant to humans', which they may or may not be and nobody actually knows without human data to corroborate them. But, given that you claim that any drug shown to cause an increase in cancer in laboratory animals cant be used in humans, why are they there?

 

 

 

That is the fallacy. Pharmacokinetics are remarkably similar between mammalian species. The distribution of metabolic routes of drugs is different, but all the routes are there in different mammalian species.

 

So, you're essentially admitting that different species metabolize the same drugs differently. Hence the different outcomes, eh?

 

 

 

That's a bare assertion. Please post the peer-reviewed scientific papers to back that up.

 

A systematic review of 20 treatments.

 

http://www.bentham-direct.org/pages/content.php?RRCT/2008/00000003/00000002/0002RRCT.sgm

 

and:

 

http://www.curedisease.net/news/080801.shtml

 

 

 

Because of evolution, the differences between species are not as great as you make out.

 

The differences are there, they are real and they make extrapolation impossible, hence the massive amounts of damage and failure of a whole multitude of treatments that worked successfully in animal 'models', i.e. fake conditions created artificially as they do not naturally develop human diseases, in the main.

 

Again, untrue. Because of evolution many of the biological systems are very similar.

 

Again, 'similar' really isn't a word in science. It is just another way of saying different.

 

 

Where did you get the misinformation you have?

 

I do not write 'misinformation'.

 

 

 

I was speaking of organ culture systems. These are in vitro -- in culture -- systems. Organ culture systems for every human organ are not available. So you have to go into an animal to get ALL the various organs.

 

Why are organ systems not available for every human organ?

 

 

 

My apology for the confusion. What I meant by "will not work" in this context are those that will obviously be toxic. If the drug is toxic, it "will not work".

 

Strangely, many people believe that chemo drugs will 'work', despite their being extremely toxic.

 

 

 

As several people have pointed out, this is not true. Due to evolution, there is greater similarity between species with recent common ancestors than you are giving credit for. The actual record is that animal efficacy is a strong predictor of human efficacy.

 

I dont recall evolutionary theory stating that mice/rats etc have a particularly recent 'common ancestor' to humans, yet they are predominantly used for animal experiments. The reasons given for the failure of 92% of drugs that enter clinical trials with positive accompanying animal safety/efficacy data are predominantly safety/efficacy issues. This has always been the figure, more or less, so claims of 'insufficient animal experiments', especially as the numbers have gone up, not down, will not wash. Although this ploy has been used to convince the gullible and the brainless for decades.

 

 

 

No one said there was a "guarantee". You are moving the goalposts. We said that the testing was necessary to give us better predictors.

 

The 'predictive' success is abysmal. It is blind chance that anything useful for humans comes out of it. But then what do you expect when you test a drug in a species that, 1) responds unpredictably different to us to the same drug and 2) doesn't have the condition you wish to treat, just a phoney, unrelated 'replica' !!!

 

 

 

If the drug turns out to be toxic in animals, it is not used in humans.

 

This simply isn't true, there are a wide range of drugs on the market that cause cancer and other problems in some species or another, yet are on the market anyway. Tamoxifen springs to mind.

 

 

That the drug is harmless in animals is not a guarantee that it is harmless in humans.

 

Indeed, 92% of drugs that pass animal safety/efficacy tests fail when given to humans, on those grounds.

 

 

 

That's why there are Phase I clinical trials. If the drug is useless in animals, then it is not used in humans. However,while there is a strong correlation of efficacy in animals to efficacy in humans, there is no guarantee. That's why there are Phase II clinical trials.

 

There are many drugs used in humans that are useless and/or fatal in animals. Aspirin is used in humans yet is highly toxic to cats. Digitalis is useless in dogs, unless you want to raise their blood pressure, yet it has the opposite effect in humans. Morphine stimulates the CNS of cats, and some other species, yet has a depressive effect in humans.

 

 

 

Not to confirm toxicity. I can't think of any case where there was conflicting toxicity testing in animals and the drug went to clinical trials.

 

Tamoxifen has cancer data in some species but not others. At least at human equivilent doses.

 

 

What specific conditions and/or diseases are you thinking of? A scientist is not going to use a model that bears no resemblance to the human disease.

 

Well, given the fact that 98.84% of the 30,000 human diseases are not seen in other species, all of those for a start. Attempts at artificial recreation do not result in anything with any resemblance to the human condition. The methods are too far removed from the natural processes that cause the spontaneous phenomona in humans.

 

 

That makes no sense.

 

Testing substances on mice or rats, as if they were little people 'makes no sense' yet it still continues unabated despite the evidence piling up against it.

 

 

In many cases the condition must be induced, but it is done in such a way as to either mimic the human condition...

 

...and still manages to bear absolutely no resemblance to the human condition it is sought to immitate.

 

 

Yes, I typed the wrong word at the end. Here is the corrected version:

"Lots of "cures" out there that worked in mice, rats, or rabbits that never worked in people. But before you get to humans you do everything to ensure that the drug is both safe (the #1 priority) and effective in animals."

 

Yes, and you typed a lot of 'wrong words' in between also, why apologise about that one specifically?

 

 

The fallacy is in your first statement. Animal tests are not "completely uninformative".

 

The vast majority of animal experiments are wrong. The reasons are species differences, errors in experiment design, etc. But they are wrong all the same. The small few that by chance are not wrong, are lost in amongst the many. As nobody knows whether or not an experiment is by the general way of things, wrong, or by pure chance, right, then all animal experiments are completely useless and non-informative.

 

 

They eliminate toxic and useless treatments and drugs before you get to human clinical trials.

 

Aspirin is 'toxic' according to animal experiments, yet it is useful in humans and has probably saved, or at least prolonged, a fair few lives. It would be eliminated by animal tests so as to 'protect' (by killing) those people that have benefited from it. Digitalis would be removed also, as it has the opposite effect in dogs to that which it has in humans. There is an extremely long and practically never ending list of other drugs or substances that would be eliminated by animal tests, that are beneficial to humans. Animal experiments do NOT remove 'toxic' drugs, in general, they only remove drugs that are toxic to the species tested upon, assuming they are even listened too.

 

 

 

They give you an idea that a drug or treatment at least has a good chance of being efficacious in humans.

 

Most of the drugs they claim will be safe or efficivacious fail when tried out in humans, many times with devastating effects, vioxx, thalidomide, et al.

 

 

If you give up animal testing, then you must either do all the testing in humans -- with all the risks that involves

 

Yes, using the scientific methods available, such as micro-dosing, which is much safer than animal toxicity data, which is worse than tossing a coin.

 

 

 

Even if the figures are accurate, the article isn't talking about the failure of the usefulness of animal testing, but instead about the record of the FDA in granting approval. One of the problems the article points out is that companies are skimping on the animal testing! IOW, the figures are dropping because the FDA is letting companies do less animal testing than they should be! It's not that the animal testing is failing, but rather that the companies are failing to do the appropriate animal testing and rushing to clinical trials!

 

Pull the other one. Animal experiments have increased year on year out. This is simply another deception on behalf of the animal experimenters who believe in their practice so much they actively try to sabotage any scientific evaluation of the process!!

 

 

 

That's not a "given". Again, we need to know the source of this "given". The animal rights group you got it from has to document that.

 

There is a mountain of evidence for this, if you care to look for it:

 

In 1962, the side-effects of six different drugs, reported during clinical practice, were compared with those originally seen in toxicity tests with rats and dogs (Litchfield 1962).

The comparisons were restricted to those tests which animals have the potential to predict. Even so, of the 78 adverse reactions seen in patients, the majority (42) were not predicted in animal tests. In most cases, then, predictions based on animal experiments proved incorrect. Another comparison this time based on 45 drugs, revealed that at best only one out of every four side-effects predicted by animal experiments actually occurred in patients (Fletcher 1978). Even then it is not possible to tell which predictions are accurate until human trials are commenced. Furthermore the report confirmed that many common side-effects cannot be predicted by animal tests at all: examples include nausea, headache, sweating, cramps, dry mouth, dizziness, and in some cases skin lesions and reduced blood pressure.

 

 

 

Animal testing is VERY expensive. That's why the culture is used first. It's a lot cheaper. Only if the chemical/drug passes the culture test is it then used in animals. So your "problem" never arises.

 

What about if it is safe in human fibroblasts but then toxic in some random species?

 

 

 

If the drug is "on the market", then it is effective and safe in humans. Otherwise it wouldn't be "on the market".

 

Given the number of drugs on the market that are removed, after some fight, this statement makes no sense. They generally hide behind animal data for as long as possible though, denying the clinical findings, see vioxx, thalidomide, etc.

 

However, your statement is not correct. Some drugs have been shown to be unsafe in every mammalian system tested. Thalidomide is one example that comes immediately to mind.

 

This statement has no meaning without numbers. Thalidomide is non-teratogenic in practically all species at human equilivent doses. Many doctors who saw evidence of birth-defects in their human patients continued using the drug because when they took recourse to animal experiments they could not reproduce the findings.

 

 

 

Some are safe and effective in every mammalian species tested. Morphine comes immediately to mind; it is an effective pain killer in every mammalian species tested.

 

Morphine has a stimulatory effect on numerous species, notably cats. It has the opposite effect in humans.

 

 

But you are forgetting all the drugs that were eliminated along the way. If we had tested all of those in humans, then you would have found that drugs that we found harmful in animals were also harmful in humans.

 

This list would include penicillin, aspirin, digitalis and many, many more. Possibly the entire pharmacopia.

 

 

Can you name any drugs that were ineffective and/or unsafe in animals that turned out to be effective and safe in humans?

 

Plenty, digitalis (raises blood pressure in dogs), aspirin (highly toxic to cats) and lots more besides.

 

You are using "selective data".

 

Yes, i am selecting the facts from the nonsense. Unfortunately, when performing animal experiments there is no way to select any small number of genuinely factual ones from the vast and highly damaging number of incorrect ones, hence why they are all collectively uninformative.

 

 

 

As iNow demonstrated, the dogs did have diabetes. This is just one example where your "facts" are wrong. You need to get the facts straight before your argument is valid.

 

INow has since retracted his/her position, and admitted that the dogs didn't have diabetes, as artificially destroying a dogs pancreas is not diabetes. It is quite different to the natural processes that accumulate over time and create the spontaneous and natural condition, in humans. Hence, my 'facts' are already straight.

[iNow]

INow has since retracted his/her position, and admitted that the dogs didn't have diabetes, as artificially destroying a dogs pancreas is not diabetes. It is quite different to the natural processes that accumulate over time and create the spontaneous and natural condition, in humans.

 

Oh, for the love of Thor, you really just don't get it, do you? I retracted nothing. I made an update knowing your argument style would sieze on a tiny issue instead of the broader point I was making.

 

Now, how exactly is removing/destroying a pancreas functionally any different from diabetes? You also seem to misunderstand the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

 

---

line[/hr]

This is the type of nutter shit that I can't stand:

 

 

http://scienceblogs.com/neurotopia/2008/08/animal_rights_extremists_kill.php

Animal Rights Extremists kill at least a dozen mink by releasing them from a mink farm. This is what happens when you set animals free without regard to the consequences.

 

Now whether you think raising and killing animals for their fur is immoral or not, it takes a special kind of mind to cogitate that an appropriate solution is to spontaneously decrease the mink population by getting them killed.

 

 

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/08/animal_rights_terrorists_firebomb_a_rese.php

Animal rights terrorists firebomb a researcher's house

 

It's happened again, only this time it's escalated. Sadly, this escalation was predictable.

 

<...>

 

Once more, cowardly animal rights thugs, unable to persuade using ideas, resort to violence. That no one was seriously injured or died is incredibly fortunate.

 

 

http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist/2008/07/more_on_animal_rights_extremis.php

Earlier today, I posted a review of The Animal Research War, which details the lengths that animal rights extremists are willing to go to in order to further their cause. Coincidently, the AP yesterday published a detailed article on the rise of animal rights extremism in the US. Here's a taste:

 

 

http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist/2008/07/animal_research_war.php

A common tactic of the animal rights extremists is to take the fight to the researchers' homes, involving their families and neighbors. They publicize the scientists' personal information, target their neighbors with misinformation designed to turn them against the researchers, hold disruptive demonstrations in front of their houses, and even deliver death threats to them and their families.

 

http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist/2007/11/animal_rights_extremists_strik.php

On October 20th, animal rights extremists acting under the banner of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) flooded the home of UCLA professor Edythe London. I don't have too much to say about this latest incident, as it's just one of a series of destructive actions associated with a movement that seems more interested in intimidation than real dialogue. Since animal rights should be and are a paramount concern to the research community, this is quite an unfortunate situation.

 

 

 

Now, pull your cranium out of your colon and wake up to the reality of the world. You're starting to remind me of the fukwits who kill abortion doctors because "life is so precious."

 

 

http://scienceblogs.com/digitalbio/2008/08/book_review_the_animal_researc.php

As I learned in "The Animal Research War" by P. Micheal Conn and James Parker [published by Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN-13:978-0-230-60014-0], there is an animal rights group that goes by the name of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). But this is not the group that runs animal shelters. The HSUS takes the money that well-meaning people think they're giving to shelters and uses it to fund propaganda campaigns. Unlike the other humane societies, this group is aligned with those who find it acceptable to firebomb homes.

 

Conn and Parker provide an interesting field guide to the various groups involved in the animal rights movement. They present gripping tales of what it's like to be a target for extremists and the price that society pays when scientists are driven away from biomedical work. They describe the philosophies and strategies used by different groups and the results. One of the most poignant parts of the book is where they discuss the casualties - the scientists who gave up their work and the students and doctors who've been scared away from working on human disease.

 

An important take home lesson from the book is the discussion of the philosophy that guides the use of animals in research and the rules designed to protect those animals. As Conn and Parker describe, there is a law called the Animal Welfare Act, passed in 1966 that regulates animal research. Another set of regulations comes from the U.S. Public Health Service Act which requires that all institutions receiving NIH, FDA, or CDC funds must adhere to the Guide for Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (National Research Council 1996). Institutions must have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) to oversee all studies that involve animal research. IACUCs are able to stop any study that they think is being carried out improperly and the ensure that studies follow the three R's - that is to replace, reduce, and refine.

 

1. To

replace

means to use alternatives wherever possible. These include computer models, cells or organs grown in culture, or non-mammals like insects and fish. No one likes getting bitten by a rat or mouse or developing allergies to their dander. Most of the researchers I know are not heartless fiends, when there are valid alternatives to rats, mice, or other animals, they use them.

 

2. To

reduce

: researchers are required to use as few animals as possible.

 

3. To

refine

: researchers are required to minimize pain, and use noninvasive techniques wherever possible.

 

The Animal Welfare Act isn't the only law that regulates the use of animals. Conn and Parker discuss the other groups that regulate animal research, too, and describe what they do and their powers of enforcement. I think this information is important to students to know, especially biotechnology students, since they will be following the regulations.

 

"The Animal Research War" would be a good book to add to college and high school libraries and to accompany a bioethics course. It's reasonably priced and provides information that would be helpful for students to know. Many biotechnology programs include courses in bioethics, and since many biotechnology graduates are likely to face animal rights extremists sometime during their careers, it would be good for biotech students to be prepared and to know the facts.

Edited August 28, 2008 by iNow
multiple post merged

[Sayonara]

INow has since retracted his/her position, and admitted that the dogs didn't have diabetes, as artificially destroying a dogs pancreas is not diabetes. It is quite different to the natural processes that accumulate over time and create the spontaneous and natural condition, in humans. Hence, my 'facts' are already straight.

But the point is that whether or not the dogs had diabetes is a non-issue. The effects of insulin on their blood chemistry can be monitored regardless, and since we know the mechanisms of diabetes the data is entirely as useful.

 

I have to say I share your bewilderment over chemotherapy. Considering how advanced much of our medical technology has become, it seems almost a barbaric assault.

[Mr Skeptic]

So, you're essentially admitting that different species metabolize the same drugs differently. Hence the different outcomes, eh?

 

Maybe you don't realize that different people metabolize drugs differently too? I guess that means that human testing is worthless too. Then all testing is worthless. Maybe you should try injecting yourself with mud, as all the medicine has only been tested with worthless methods.

[PeacheyCarnehan]

 

Bullshit. It can absolutely give us insights into how humans will react. It is not 100% reliable, but nobody has EVER argued that it was. Do you know what a logical fallacy is?

 

 

 

Let's see your source on this claim. What citation supports your assertion here? Most fail, you say? Whatever. By the time they get to humans, they are mostly effective. Prove me wrong. Let's see you try.

 

 

QUOTE]

 

Most of the results from the lab animal stages are either not seen when tested in humans or not seen to the same degree. Most new drugs fail because they are not effective in humans or not safe.

 

Are you saying that most new drugs that reach the clinical trials pass those trials and get approved for human use?

 

Thanks, Sayonara for the info about quotes. Trouble is, I sometimes only have a short time to read and compile my posts. I needed to do it the way I did for my first post because I had to read and then write in a separate document to get all the posts in. It took more than one session on the computer. I'll use the quotes in future.

 

Vivisection? Yes, the original meaning is the cutting into live animals but words take on new meanings, sometimes the meaning is narrowed but sometimes broadened. I think most people on the AR side of things use the definition of vivisection that I do. This is that it is any sort of harmful or distressing experiment or procedure (or one that can reasonably be expected to cause harm) that involves the unwilling use of any animal - human or not - for purposes that do not directly benefit that animal. So the British Army use of soldiers in chemical experiments that were supposed to be testing treatments for colds was vivisection.

 

As the original meaning of the elements of the word 'vivisection' mean 'cutting into live tissue', an operation to remove a bunion could be called vivisection. Perhaps even tatooing an image of a Balinese dancing girl on a jolly jack tar's arm.

 

When I said vivisection/animal testing is flawed, I also said why. And that is that it cannot be relied upon to provide accurate data for humans. Only testing on humans can do that.

[lucaspa]

animal testing for beauty products is totally wrong, but for diseases...i'm not sure. it is cruel, but it may be necessary, like for AIDs reasearch.

 

The area of beauty products and chemicals (cleaners, solvents, etc.) is the prime area where cultured human fibroblasts are rapidly replacing animal testing. It's cheaper, more sensitive, and more reliable (in addition to whatever ethical concerns there are). The effect on cell metabolism can be measured by automated systems such that large numbers of cultures can be processed in a short amount of time.

 

For my research -- which is tissue engineering -- it is absolutely essential. There is a recent paper that illustrates this quite well. Limb ischemia (cutting off blood flow to a limb) results in 100,000 amputations in the USA alone per year! This paper used endometrial regenerative cells (ERCs or stem cells isolated from menstrual tissue discarded during menstruation) to prevent limb ischemia: http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/pdf/1479-5876-6-45.pdf

 

Scroll down and look at the picture of the mice in Figure 2. The one on the left is the control; the one on the right is the treated. Human limbs of people suffering from limb ischemia today look like the one on the right. That's why they get amputated. The only way to show that these stem cells would prevent the picture on the right was to do the study in animals. (BTW, both animals got analgesics so that they were not in pain.) Notice this: " All animals were cared for in accordance with the guidelines established by the Canadian Council on Animal Care." These guidelines require appropriate pain-killers be used.

 

Now, do you want to save people from amputation or not? If you value animals so highly that you don't think we can use them for our own purposes, then you have to say "no" and have people with ischemia have their arms or legs amputated. BTW, this same treatment could be used to save people from heart attacks.

[PeacheyCarnehan]

 

The biochemical responses of cellular material to the action of a drug under test conditions are hardly subjective assessments.

 

 

 

l

 

 

I was using your comment to make a point about using non-humans. Not about subjectivity. You were saying that results (or was it observances - I don't have time to check) in one species cannot be used to predict them in another. I used that and applied it to drug testing.

 

 

 

Do you really consider this to be a rational approach? Before you answer, think carefully how your response might affect the way that your arguments are received afterwards.

 

 

No, I don't think it is a rational approach. I am opposed to vivisection on anyone. I was pointing out that Bosun's statement made sense. You suggested it didn't.

 

[quote name='Sayonara³;

 

Holding that belief has a name: it is called being a sociopath.

 

 

 

 

I don't hold that belief. But holding the belief that we can use other species or those weaker than ourselves in cruel ways - causing them harm or fear - means that the believer is cruel.

 

 

Animals do not have rights' date=' save those which are designated by law. Laws are made and changed based on the strength of arguments and the balance of cost versus benefit to society.

 

On what basis would you presume to argue that animals have the right to not be tested upon? Notice here that I say "on what basis". I am, in other words, not asking you to simply repeat the flat and unevidenced statement that they have that right.

 

 

 

[/quote']

 

On the same basis that you shouldn't be tested upon. Or a brain damaged human. Just because something is enshrined in law doesn't make it right. It used to be law that black people could be kept as slaves. Laws are just opinions.

 

 

 

Briefly, yes. However since that bad analogy is not a shift in the weighting of an ecosystem I don't see how it is relevant.

 

 

 

 

You actually believe that might is right? That it is moral for the strong to take what they want from the weak?

 

We know that animal testing works because like all trials which follow the scientific method, they are repeatedly observable. Also they produce results, which kinda helps.

 

 

 

There is the fact that most new drugs fail when tested in humans. They didn't fail in the earlier non-human tests otherwise they would be unlikely to go to human trials. The results, in those cases - the majority - aren't repeated in humans.

 

I don't mean to be rude, but your critical reasoning is not the best and you are evidently not well versed in forum etiquette. I would therefore ask you to stop trying to police my posts, as I strongly suspect that I am much older than yourself and have a great deal more academic and life experience.

 

 

 

And I am trying not to be rude but this forum is very different to other forums I have been on and I find it puzzling. I won't say more as I don't want to be rude.

 

 

 

Look, you have clearly come to this site with an agenda and from the first lines of your post it was clear that you don't have a clue what you are talking about.

 

There is more to objective discussion than picking a side and arguing with whatever the people you agree with have told you. Research the issues in depth from non-biased sources, and come to your own conclusions.

 

 

 

My 'agenda' is to educate those who might be reading this thread and who are being fed misinformation. I have quite a few clues about this subject.

 

I have done research in non-biased sources. I have seen quite a bit of not-too-convincing information on anti-vivisection sites. But much more of that on pro-vivisection sites.

 

I appreciate that there is a steep learning curve involved in finding out how to argue effectively using good, properly referenced information, but I can assure you that some of our best long-term members have been people who came here with much crazier views than yours. An objective rationality won't come to you overnight, but it will be worth the effort.

 

 

 

I'll keep that in mind.

 

However, in order to answer your question (), I suggest you READ THE THREAD. The data and arguments have been presented. You "and others" disagreeing does not mean that you have changed reality to match your claims.

 

 

 

Which thread? There's no information in this thread that convinces me that vivisection, oops, lab animal testing, is right or accurate.

 

 

Because they can tell us.

 

 

They might not know what pain is. What someone thinks is agony might be a mild ache to someone else. Other animals can tell us by their actions. Anyone with a dog or cat knows when the animal is suffering or fearful. Most countries have laws to protect various animals from cruelty. I am not alone in believing that they suffer and feel pain. Can a brain damaged human suffer? Or a one-week-old human baby?

 

 

In my mind, cruelty is putting a cat into a microwave. Cruelty comes in many forms, but the responsible tests done in the name of science does not fit those criteria.

 

.

 

 

In my mind, using any animal that can feel pain or fear in ways that will cause it pain or fear or that will cut short its life, is cruel. As has been said before, at one time it was not thought cruel to kidnap humans, take them across the sea, and make them work as slaves.

 

Because there is a difference between an act being unfortunately unpleasant, and cruel.

 

Cruelty is an act of deliberate malice.

 

 

 

Cruelty can be an act that will cause pain or suffering to any animal and that you know will cause pain or suffering. Malice can come into it, but not always.

 

I understand, and I also know where you're coming from. Just to be clear, though, there is no objective line between right and wrong, good and evil. All we have are our subjective and personal interpretations.

 

 

 

Quite possibly true. I believe that it is cruel to use anyone against their will in ways that will cause them harm, fear or death. Some people don't believe that. There are even some people who don't think it's cruel to torture humans.

 

iNow, in post 388 linked to some site that denounces AR people. Not all AR people are like all other AR people. Even if any of the actions were carried out by real AR people they are not representative of the majority. And, whatever AR people do it does not invalidate their argument that other animals are treated cruelly.

 

Maybe you don't realize that different people metabolize drugs differently too? I guess that means that human testing is worthless too. Then all testing is worthless. Maybe you should try injecting yourself with mud, as all the medicine has only been tested with worthless methods.

 

This is well known. Probably why there is such an interest in pharmacogenomics. But other species are even worse models for humans than other humans are.

[Sayonara]

Vivisection? Yes, the original meaning is the cutting into live animals but words take on new meanings, sometimes the meaning is narrowed but sometimes broadened. I think most people on the AR side of things use the definition of vivisection that I do. This is that it is any sort of harmful or distressing experiment or procedure (or one that can reasonably be expected to cause harm) that involves the unwilling use of any animal - human or not - for purposes that do not directly benefit that animal. So the British Army use of soldiers in chemical experiments that were supposed to be testing treatments for colds was vivisection.

Animal rights activists use the word vivisection and images of animals with bits missing and possibly metal parts added to galvanise hatred against anyone using animals in research. This is not a valid reason for changing the scope of the definition of "vivisection" to include anything we object to. What it is, is a dirty lie. Or propaganda if you wish to remain diplomatic.

 

The fact is that using "vivisection" to refer to any animal experimentation is deliberately misleading, and factually incorrect.

 

 

Let me give you an example of why your mutation of the definition of vivisection is bad:

 

I am going to redefine "anal rape" in the same way that you redefined vivisection. Anal rape, in this experiment, is the "distressing insertion of any object into the anal passage".

 

Doctors should be sent to prison for trying to diagnose potentially fatal conditions with rectal thermometers, because they are committing ANAL RAPE! Never mind the circumstances, just listen to how it sounds when I say it like this: ANAL RAPE!!!112

 

Do you see my point?

 

 

When I said vivisection/animal testing is flawed, I also said why. And that is that it cannot be relied upon to provide accurate data for humans. Only testing on humans can do that.

You will need to provide substantially better evidence before anyone is convinced.

 

I was using your comment to make a point about using non-humans. Not about subjectivity. You were saying that results (or was it observances - I don't have time to check) in one species cannot be used to predict them in another. I used that and applied it to drug testing.

Transplanting arguments between different but similar goals doesn't always work. If it did, it would sure have made this thread easier to read!

 

I don't hold that belief. But holding the belief that we can use other species or those weaker than ourselves in cruel ways - causing them harm or fear - means that the believer is cruel.

I am relieved to hear it.

 

There has been a great deal of rational discussion in this thread as to whether or not animal testing is "cruel". A sizeable part of the problem is that it is difficult to establish whether animals suffer in the same way we do (bearing in mind that suffering trauma and demonstrating a pain response are two different things).

 

The second level discussion that follows on from that (irrespective of whether or not we decide that animals suffer in the same way as us) deals with the acceptability of such tests in a species context. Which is worse... testing on animals which might feel pain, or allowing millions of people to die from what are often medically trivial causes? Perhaps we are simply doomed to pick the lesser of two evils and live with it, and all the arguments are just pointless.

 

On the same basis that you shouldn't be tested upon. Or a brain damaged human.

I am not like an animal. I am orders more advanced, and so are you. I should not be tested upon because it would compromise or destroy faculties I have which animals simply do not share. Any attempt to protect animals from testing on the same basis needs to present evidence that they do in fact possess such faculties.

 

Just because something is enshrined in law doesn't make it right. It used to be law that black people could be kept as slaves. Laws are just opinions.

"Black people could be kept as slaves" is a red herring. While true, it does not have any relevance to the argument other than to point out that sometimes society takes positions that people don't like very much.

 

Laws are not just opinions (well, at least not in Western democracies). That is utterly incorrect.

 

You actually believe that might is right? That it is moral for the strong to take what they want from the weak?

No. You missed the point entirely. References to constructive possession notwithstanding, the analogy between humans dominating the biosphere and you trying to take someone's house away is only superficially valid. It breaks down because the mechanisms and outcomes are entirely different.

 

There is the fact that most new drugs fail when tested in humans. They didn't fail in the earlier non-human tests otherwise they would be unlikely to go to human trials. The results, in those cases - the majority - aren't repeated in humans.

You have to remember that the tests performed in non-human stages are for toxicity as well as efficacy.

 

And I am trying not to be rude but this forum is very different to other forums I have been on and I find it puzzling. I won't say more as I don't want to be rude.

If you find something puzzling, it's best to ask.

 

My 'agenda' is to educate those who might be reading this thread and who are being fed misinformation. I have quite a few clues about this subject.

Again, I don't wish to be rude, but if your aim is to educate you are not doing a very good job. You have introduced an entirely incorrect definition of "vivisection" which is well known as being a animal rights campaigners' device, demanded citations without offering any of your own, objected to thread management, argued by weak analogy, and claimed laws are opinion despite your entire view seemingly being no different.

 

I have done research in non-biased sources. I have seen quite a bit of not-too-convincing information on anti-vivisection sites. But much more of that on pro-vivisection sites.

Neither anti- nor pro- is likely to be an objective source, to be honest. It is important to remember though that information is not correct because we are convinced or incorrect because we are incredulous.

 

Which thread? There's no information in this thread that convinces me that vivisection, oops, lab animal testing, is right or accurate.

It is disingenuous to use the terms vivisection and animal experimentation interchangeably - please stop it. This thread has never been about vivisection, and if this carries on it is going to result in strawman warnings.

 

I don't think that anyone is arguing that animal testing is "right". What most of the people who argue against the anti- position state is that animal testing is (a) a necessary evil, and (b) not anywhere as bad as campaigners make out.

 

Look at the state of the arguments that most of the anti- posters have written in this thread. Mostly they come here from a google search, post an emotional and fact-free diatribe about how animal testing is awful and cruel and such, then vanish when they are told that actually, lab animals have quite a good life and that they would be doing more good campaigning against the cruel treatment of domestic pets.

 

They might not know what pain is. What someone thinks is agony might be a mild ache to someone else.

Do you think that this is likely, in any but freakishly rare cases?

 

Other animals can tell us by their actions. Anyone with a dog or cat knows when the animal is suffering or fearful.

Yes, and as I said, if you read the thread you will see that we have extensively discussed the difference between an animal showing a pain response and an animal experiencing suffering in the same order as a human, and we have not yet seen any compelling evidence that the two things approach being the same state. By all means pitch some evidence in to that part of the discussion because all the other participants seem to have run dry,

 

Most countries have laws to protect various animals from cruelty.

And yet they still allow animal testing. I wonder why that might be?

 

In my mind, using any animal that can feel pain or fear in ways that will cause it pain or fear or that will cut short its life, is cruel.

What if that condition is limited to the confines of your mind? Although I am sure you have real conviction in your belief, it is possible that you are simply wrong about the way that animals work. Anthropomorphising hard-wired responses is a folly when you are trying to present a rational position.

 

As has been said before, at one time it was not thought cruel to kidnap humans, take them across the sea, and make them work as slaves.

Yes, however this was due to the appalling conditions (of both transport and treatment after sale), and the use of sentient, self-aware, and self-determining beings as unpaid, "owned" labourers.

 

The second objection is not applicable to animals. The first is not manifest in the vast majority of animal test organisations, due to the incredibly strict regulatory practices which have already been described at length in this thread.

 

Your argument's reliance on the slave trade parallel is, in principle, no different to the fatal logical flaw that resulted in Godwin's Law.

 

Cruelty can be an act that will cause pain or suffering to any animal and that you know will cause pain or suffering. Malice can come into it, but not always.

Yes, let's change another definition just enough to allow more evocative phrases at the cost of being accurate and intellectually honest.

 

Cruelty is always deliberate and directed for its own sake. That is what the word means. Malice is therefore a pre-requisite.

 

iNow, in post 388 linked to some site that denounces AR people. Not all AR people are like all other AR people. Even if any of the actions were carried out by real AR people they are not representative of the majority. And, whatever AR people do it does not invalidate their argument that other animals are treated cruelly.

It is a common problem in threads like this for a poster to talk about a group within a group, unintentionally tarring them all with the same brush. I would take it as a given that iNow does not truly believe all animal rights campaigners are the same.

Edited August 29, 2008 by Sayonara³
multiple post merged

[iNow]

It is a common problem in threads like this for a poster to talk about a group within a group, unintentionally tarring them all with the same brush. I would take it as a given that iNow does not truly believe all animal rights campaigners are the same.

 

I don't know, you did say it was all anal rape, and I'm pretty sure I'm against that. I have a hard time seeing subtle distinctions, you know.

 

 

That reminds me, I should probably go schedule a colonscopy.

[lucaspa]

A roundabout way of admitting that they metabolize substances differently.

 

Not really. There are 2 claims here:

1. Other mammalian species have metabolic routes that humans don't and humans have metabolic routes that other mammalian species don't.

2. Both humans and other mammalian species have the same metabolic routes but that some mammalian species use the routes in different proportions than humans do.

 

You are stating claim 1 and I am stating claim 2. Both rats and humans sulfate drugs and use the cytochrome P450 system to oxygenate them. What I am saying is that, for drug A, rats might have 75% sulfation and 25% oxidation while humans would have 75% oxidation and 25% sulfation. IF the oxidation route produced a toxic metabolite, then humans might produce enough of the metabolite to show symptoms while the rat would not.

 

Is that clear now?

 

Dr Vernon Coleman has a book with 50 drugs in it that cause cancer in laboratory animals yet are on the market anyway, the official position being that those results are 'not relevant to humans', which they may or may not be and nobody actually knows without human data to corroborate them. But, given that you claim that any drug shown to cause an increase in cancer in laboratory animals cant be used in humans, why are they there?

 

This is the law I told you about. Congress enacted laws in 1960 with the "DeLaney Clause" that stated that the FDA could approve no drug or addictive that caused cancer in any species at any dose. Note the "any". This began to be challenged over the addition of the sweetener in "Tab" (which was pulled from the market). Massive amounts of the sweetener were given to rats and there was a slight increase in the rate of cancer in the rats. Very, very small but with enough numbers it was statistically significant. However, the amount of sweetener the rats were getting would mean that humans would have to drink about 1,000 cans of Tab per day. This was decided to be unreasonable and the animal trials were decided to be unrealistic due to the massive doses of chemical -- far higher than humans would ever ingest. Since then the Delaney Clause has been modified or dropped, especially in terms of drugs. It is still in effect in terms of food additives and some pesticides.

 

A systematic review of 20 treatments.

 

http://www.bentham-direct.org/pages/content.php?RRCT/2008/00000003/00000002/0002RRCT.sgm

 

1. It's not a systematic review. There is no indication from the Abstract how the reviews were picked.

2. You missed this sentence: "The poor human clinical and toxicological utility of animal models, combined with their generally substantial animal welfare and economic costs, necessitate considerably greater rigor within animal studies, and justify a ban on the use of animal models lacking scientific data clearly establishing their human predictivity or utility."

 

So the article does not recommend discontinuing animal trials, but instead wants more rigor in the animal studies. Animal studies are still necessary, but what it is saying is that people apparently are not doing them properly.

 

http://www.curedisease.net/news/080801.shtml

 

You seem to have misread the article:

"An article in the prestigious science journal Nature has decried the use of mice as "models" for testing drugs intended for use in humans as "nearly useless"."

 

This does not say that animal models are useless. It is only saying that, for this particular set of diseases, that mice are useless. Nor that animal testing in all forms does not predict.

 

This is science at work. Orthopedic surgery went thru the same process in terms of animal models for cartilage repair. It turned out that a company -- Geron -- leaped from rabbits to humans (because of the profit motive) and skipped tests on larger animals. The treatment -- Carticell -- still works in a limited set of cases but not in the wider set that Geron claimed. The extrapolation from rabbits to humans was invalid. Now all treatments for cartilage repair have to go thru a sheep model, which is a much better predictive model for humans. This is science looking for the best animal model, not saying that animal models are no good at all.

 

The differences are there, they are real and they make extrapolation impossible,

 

If extrapolation was "impossible", then NONE of the treatments that work in animals would work in humans. However, even your data (and history) shows that this isn't true.

 

Massive amounts of damage and failure of a whole multitude of treatments that worked successfully in animal 'models', i.e. fake conditions created artificially as they do not naturally develop human diseases, in the main.

 

No one said the system was going to be perfect. That's why there are Phase I and II clinical trials. The major purpose of the animal experiments is to eliminate those that have no chance of working in humans. Please document what you mean by "massive amounts of damage".

 

Again, 'similar' really isn't a word in science. It is just another way of saying different.

 

LOL! No, it's a word used in science. And you are wrong. As I noted, fracture repair in rats is "very similar" to that in humans. So is wound repair in general. The difference is not in the steps, cells, or molecules used, but instead in the timing. Fracture repair and wound healing happens about 4 times faster in rats than humans. That's a difference that can easily be compensated for in moving from rats to humans.

 

I do not write 'misinformation'.

 

I am documenting that it is misinformation. Plain denial won't help. I asked for the sources of your information. Significantly, you ducked and didn't provide your sources. So I'll ask again: where are you getting your (mis)information about science?

 

Why are organ systems not available for every human organ?

1. Most human organs involve many different systems and it's impossible to provide them all in vitro. For instance, cartilage requires mechanical stimulation and that is difficult to provide.

2. Many of the human cells required are available in very small numbers. Remember, we have to get human cells from fresh cadavers and require the permission of the family. That severely limits the number of cells. Not many people are going to donate a full muscle or allow harvesting of their articular cartilage.

3. In case you didn't know it, most cells (differntiated cells) have a finite lifespan. It's known as Hayflick's number. For humans, that is about 50. 50 cell divisions of the cells during an entire human lifetime and then senesce and die. So if you do an organ culture of, say blood vessel cells from a 70 year old who died of a heart attack, you get only about 5-10 cell divisions and then they die. Some cells don't divide at all. Cardiac muscle cells, for instance, don't. So it's very difficult to get an organ model for human heart: you would have to harvest large numbers of cardiac muscle cells from a lot of people right after they die. Stem cells, both adult and embryonic, may someday help this problem.

 

Strangely, many people believe that chemo drugs will 'work', despite their being extremely toxic.

Here we have differential toxicity. Chemotherapeutic drugs for cancer are meant to kill rapidly dividing cells. Since cancer cells are rapidly dividing, they are the targets. Cardiac muscle cells, bone cells, muscle cells, nerves, etc. are not affected. At all. Because they aren't dividing. However, there are some cells in the body that are dividing: hair follicle cells, intestinal villa cells, hematopoietic cells, cells participating in wound healing, etc. These cells are affected by chemo drugs, thus the side effects. The dosage is carefully titrated to minimize the effects on these cells (as much as possible) while providing a killing does to the cancer. As we know, sometimes this isn't possible and the cancer kills the patient anyway.

 

Ironically, it was animal studies that provided the initial data for the titration and knowing that the chemo drugs would kill cancer cells.

 

I dont recall evolutionary theory stating that mice/rats etc have a particularly recent 'common ancestor' to humans, yet they are predominantly used for animal experiments.

 

In evolutionary terms, it is "recent". In terms of human lifetimes, of course, it seems a long time ago. Chimps, of course, share our most recent common ancestor. Rats and mice are used because 1) they are evolutionarily close and 2) they are small and cheap.

 

The reasons given for the failure of 92% of drugs that enter clinical trials with positive accompanying animal safety/efficacy data are predominantly safety/efficacy issues.

 

Of course. Those are the 2 things that you are testing: safety and efficacy. What other reason for failure would there be?

 

This has always been the figure, more or less, so claims of 'insufficient animal experiments', especially as the numbers have gone up, not down, will not wash. Although this ploy has been used to convince the gullible and the brainless for decades.

 

The article itself notes that this has not been the figure. Instead, there has been a 2-3 fold drop in percentage of approvals. I guess your "more or less" is very broad. And no, as I noted, the number of larger animal experiments has gone down. Very few primate experiments are done any more, both due to expense and the ethical concerns raised. Also, the expense of getting new drugs to market has quadrupled over the past 2 decades. So drug companies are taking shortcuts on cost whenever possible. That's why we see the leap from proof of concept in neurodegenerative diseases in mice straight to human trials (your reference). There should, at least, have been some cat studies in between.

 

The 'predictive' success is abysmal. It is blind chance that anything useful for humans comes out of it. But then what do you expect when you test a drug in a species that, 1) responds unpredictably different to us to the same drug and 2) doesn't have the condition you wish to treat, just a phoney, unrelated 'replica' !!!

 

Repeating the same fallacies won't make them true. Animal response is not "unpredictable" and the conditions are not an "unrelated replica". Again, you have to remember that all the drugs that DO work in humans went thru the same pathway. And you are forgetting the drugs/treatments that were eliminated. When you include them, the predictive success rises considerably.

 

This simply isn't true, there are a wide range of drugs on the market that cause cancer and other problems in some species or another, yet are on the market anyway. Tamoxifen springs to mind.

 

Tamoxifen reduces cancers in animals! The rats had cancer anyway! Tamoxifen either 1) reduced the risk or 2) reduced the size of the tumor. http://www.google.com/search?q=tamoxifen+cancer+animals&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

 

Again, where are you getting your information?

 

Indeed, 92% of drugs that pass animal safety/efficacy tests fail when given to humans, on those grounds.

 

Wait a minute. I said "That the drug is harmless in animals is not a guarantee that it is harmless in humans. " That is just one thing: safety. You are combining 2 different things: safety and efficacy. The failure due to safety issues is much smaller than 92%.

 

There are many drugs used in humans that are useless and/or fatal in animals. Aspirin is used in humans yet is highly toxic to cats. Digitalis is useless in dogs, unless you want to raise their blood pressure, yet it has the opposite effect in humans. Morphine stimulates the CNS of cats, and some other species, yet has a depressive effect in humans.

 

I think you are trying to say that every species of mammal will respond the same way to humans. No one made that claim. That's why we have different species for different diseases and tests.

 

You are wrong about digitalis. It raises blood pressure: "In moderate doses digitalis slows the heart-action, increases the force of the pulse, and from these effects chiefly, raises blood-pressure." http://www.swsbm.com/FelterMM/Felters-D.pdf The idea that dogs do not mimick human action is a myth. Here is the correct information: http://www.rds-online.org.uk/pages/page.asp?i_ToolbarID=2&i_PageID=1075

 

Well, given the fact that 98.84% of the 30,000 human diseases are not seen in other species, all of those for a start.

 

Where did you get that figure? Think a bit about about it. On the surface that claim is absurd! Since most of our infectious diseases arose by microbes leaping from a previous host to us, you know it must be wrong. A little thinking will convince you the rest of it is wrong. For instance, humans get scurvy. So do guinea pigs. Pigs have coronary artery disease. All mammalian species get cancer.

 

Attempts at artificial recreation do not result in anything with any resemblance to the human condition.

 

Oh good grief. Most of my papers deal with tissue engineering with adult stem cells. I and my colleagues picked animal models precisely because of their resemblance to the human condition. Let me give you just one example. I just finished a grant application to use adult stem cells to treat inververtebral disc (IVD) degeneration. The model we will use is in rabbits and involves punturing the IVD with a needle attached to a syringe and aspirating the nucleous pulposus. In humans, the annulus fibrosus (the tissue surrounding the nucleous pulposus) will develop a crack and the nucleous pulposus will be extruded. IOW, it leaks out. The animal model has already been documented for its resemblance and similarity to the human condition: Masuda K, Aota Y, Muehleman C, Imai Y, Okuma M, Thonar EJ, Andersson GB, An HS. A novel rabbit model of mild, reproducible disc degeneration by an anulus needle puncture: correlation between the degree of disc injury and radiological and histological appearances of disc degeneration. Spine. 2005 Jan 1;30(1):5-14. Read the article for yourself. The whole point of the study was to mimic the human condition!

 

Testing substances on mice or rats, as if they were little people 'makes no sense' yet it still continues unabated despite the evidence piling up against it.

 

Don't make strawmen. No one said they were "little people". Instead, we recognize that they are models for humans.

 

Yes, and you typed a lot of 'wrong words' in between also, why apologise about that one specifically?

 

You need to show how the other words are wrong. Please go ahead.

 

The vast majority of animal experiments are wrong. The reasons are species differences, errors in experiment design, etc. But they are wrong all the same. The small few that by chance are not wrong, are lost in amongst the many.

 

Lost? What about that 8% (by the one figure) of drugs that get approved for human use? You call that "lost"? Look, if you really believe the vast majority are "wrong", then don't let your doctor prescribe you any drug or propose any treatment. Because all of them were worked out on animals. Do you see how ridiculous this is?

 

As nobody knows whether or not an experiment is by the general way of things, wrong, or by pure chance, right, then all animal experiments are completely useless and non-informative.

 

So, should we go back to all the studies that showed no efficacy and toxicity in humans and now run them thru clinical trials? After all, being "useless and uninformative" would also apply to the "failures", wouldn't it? That should be your logical position. And yes, we do know whether an experiment is "wrong" or "right". That's why we have peer-review: to check the methodology. Again, you are inconsistent. You don't mind our acceptance of animal experiments that showed safety problems or no efficacy, do you? But by your statements, those have just as much "chance" of being "wrong" as the ones that prompted clinical trials.

 

Lucaspa: "They eliminate toxic and useless treatments and drugs before you get to human clinical trials."

 

Aspirin is 'toxic' according to animal experiments, yet it is useful in humans and has probably saved, or at least prolonged, a fair few lives.

 

LOL! My, you can build strawmen with the best of them, can't you? ANY chemical/drug has what is called the "therapeutic range". Below that it is not effective and above that it can be toxic. When pharmaceuticals are tested what is looked for is the "therapeutic index" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_index. The higher the therapeutic index the wider window you have between efficacy and toxicity. So yes, you can take enough aspirin to kill you. You can drink enough water to kill you. The point is that animal studies are the primary place that the therapeutic index is worked out. If the therapeutic index is 1 or less, then the potential drug is eliminated.

 

So no, aspirin would not be eliminated. Neither was digoxin, even tho its TI is 2 to 3. But what the animal tests did do was tell physicians how closely they had to monitor the dosage they gave to people.

 

There is an extremely long and practically never ending list of other drugs or substances that would be eliminated by animal tests, that are beneficial to humans.

 

Well, the 2 examples you gave were a) a strawman (aspirin) and b) a myth (digitalis). Would you like to try to give a valid answer?

 

Most of the drugs they claim will be safe or efficivacious fail when tried out in humans, many times with devastating effects, vioxx, thalidomide, et al.

 

1. First, both viox and thalidomide were efficacious. Thalidomide is a potent analgesic.

2. The "devastating" results are not that. The percentage of "thalidomide babies" or people suffering heart problems with Viox were very small. What humans define as unacceptable risk is sometimes irrational. The odds of getting heat attack from Viox are 1,000 less than my odds of being injured or killed in a car accident, for instance. Yet we continue to commute every day.

3. The problem with thalidomide was insufficient animal testing. It was not routine at the time to test for teratogenic effects. Also, it turns out that rats and mice are resistant to the teratogenic effects. You need primates as an adequate model. Now, however, teratogenic testing is required. No one said animal testing would get every toxic effect. In the 1950s the procedure of phased clinical trials was not in place. Thus thalidomide went directly to widespread usage. Even so, phase I or II clinical trials might not have picked this up since such a small percentage of recipients would have been pregnant. Thalidomide is an example where a drug can fool any system. Life isn't totally safe. The only way to avoid having thalidomide babies would be to require primate teratogen testing or give up any new drugs altogether. Which choice do you advocate?

 

Yes, using the scientific methods available, such as micro-dosing, which is much safer than animal toxicity data, which is worse than tossing a coin.

 

Micro-dosing doesn't help. If the TI is less than 1, you are going to have toxic effects on humans -- perhaps even kill them -- while testing. Are you going to volunteer?

 

Pull the other one.

 

It's in the article. Read the whole article and not just the erroneous conclusion you got on animal welfare sites (yes, I see that the article is constantly quoted on all those sites; that's where the web search initially landed me as I was searching for it)

 

Animal experiments have increased year on year out.

 

Can you quote, from the scientific literature, data to support this? Of course, there are more scientists out there year by year and increasing research budgets for biomedical research, but my experience is that animal experimentation is on the decrease. People and pharmaceutical companies are looking for alternatives.

 

This is simply another deception on behalf of the animal experimenters who believe in their practice so much they actively try to sabotage any scientific evaluation of the process!!

 

And yet you cited a paper from Nature where there is scientific evaluation of part of the process! LOL! Undercut your own argument again. Try to get this thru your head: animal experiments are costly and difficult. It is in our best interest to find a way around them. We don't because we can't -- so far. When we can, we will.

 

There is a mountain of evidence for this, if you care to look for it:

 

And yet there is no source even in that molehill. Supposedly 2 studies are cited, but there isn't a full citation so I can look up the original papers.

 

Notice that they are talking about all side effects, including all the minor ones. Not "toxicity". Let's look at the list:

"Furthermore the report confirmed that many common side-effects cannot be predicted by animal tests at all: examples include nausea, headache, sweating, cramps, dry mouth, dizziness, and in some cases skin lesions and reduced blood pressure. "

 

Since animals can't talk, they can't tell us about nausea, headache, dry mouth, cramps, or dizziness. All of these are minor inconveniences, not life threatening. Notice that only "in some cases" were skin lesions and reduced blood pressure not predicted. Apparently sometimes the animals did develop skin lesions and sometimes the experimenter actually took blood pressures on the rats.

 

Which again, is why we still have Phase I and II clinical trials.

 

What about if it is safe in human fibroblasts but then toxic in some random species?

 

It wouldn't be "some random species". Instead, it would be a species used to test efficacy of the drug or treatment. If there was a problem in one species, a second might be tried. If the drug is toxic in both (or maybe just the one) it would be discarded. For instance, suppose the drug passed the human fibroblasts, moved to rats and caused liver toxicity and failure. Goodbye drug.

 

Given the number of drugs on the market that are removed, after some fight, this statement makes no sense. They generally hide behind animal data for as long as possible though, denying the clinical findings, see vioxx, thalidomide, etc.

 

The statement does make sense. Once again, your premises are in error. The "number" is pretty small. Both vioxx and thalidomide passed the animal tests of the time. Vioxx because the number of cardiac problems was so small as not to be noticeable until large numbers of people were involved. When the difference is very small, you need huge numbers to detect it. And, of course, you are not talking pure science here anymore. You get into the integrity of individuals and their desire to 1) make profit and 2) avoid loss.

 

lucaspa: "But you are forgetting all the drugs that were eliminated along the way. If we had tested all of those in humans, then you would have found that drugs that we found harmful in animals were also harmful in humans."

 

This list would include penicillin, aspirin, digitalis and many, many more. Possibly the entire pharmacopia.

 

Not true. Unless you are making the strawman of giving a huge fatal dose instead of a therapeutic dose. And yes, you appear to be making that strawman.

 

Plenty, digitalis (raises blood pressure in dogs), aspirin (highly toxic to cats) and lots more besides.

 

The digitalis is a myth; it raises blood pressure in humans, too. The cat example is not a good one. Aspirin is toxic to cats if they are given a human dose. But if aspirin is given on a mg/kg basis adjusted to the body weight of a cat, then they are OK.

 

Again, you seem to be making a strawman. You are picking a single species, but I was using animals. Cats are not the normal animal model for analgesics: rodents and dogs are. In those animals, aspirin is not toxic. Maybe strawmen arguments are the only ones you can make?

 

Unfortunately, when performing animal experiments there is no way to select any small number of genuinely factual ones from the vast and highly damaging number of incorrect ones, hence why they are all collectively uninformative.

 

You aren't doing that. You are forgetting the large amount of animal data that has been predictive in humans: either for toxicity or for efficacy. Instead, you bring up only 2 or 3 examples (which turn out to be wrong). That is selective data.

 

INow has since retracted his/her position, and admitted that the dogs didn't have diabetes, as artificially destroying a dogs pancreas is not diabetes. It is quite different to the natural processes that accumulate over time and create the spontaneous and natural condition, in humans. Hence, my 'facts' are already straight.

 

Look at INow's later posts. No one destroyed "a dogs pancreas". Rather, the insulin producing cells were destroyed. And that is exactly what happens in type I diabetes! The pancreatic island or beta cells that produce insulin are destroyed by the body's immune system. No insulin production. So the issue is whether administered insulin can regulate blood sugar. All the type I diabetics who are alive today owe their treatment to these animal studies. You simply can't honestly deny it.