h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4739376.stm

It's about time somebody spoke on the side of those who are pro-vivisection.

I'd say it's still definitely wrong to test shampoos on animals, but when it comes to drug trials, it's much more difficult to say 'let's not test these before giving them to everyone'. A9445827 has a list of examples of drugs that have gone wrong *with* animal testing - what chance do we have if we don't do the tests?

Testing cosmetics on animals is pointless anyway, and I don't support it... but most of the places people like the ALF attack (and I mean that both figuratively and literally) are doing genuine medical research.

Nice one, I used to work in a Lab on the South Parks Road in Oxford and there were always protesters outside our lab because they wouldn't let them protest outside Zoology where the real animal experiments were going on. Buch of ignorant a**sholes frankly.

The whole subject has become emotive, so polarised and misrepresented unfortunately that it is almost impossible to have a reasoned debate on the subject. Some animal testing is undoubtedly unnecessary, but in drug development it really *is* necessary. Unless of course we wish to just stop bothering. Pharmacologists need to know how drugs transport in living systems for a start- this is probably *always* going to require a certain amount of animal testing as models are only so good and there's nothing like a real system to show you the true answer. It would be legally indefensible (not to say impossible to get a drug licesnsed) to not do this and later find out a serious problem occurred in patients...

Good luck to Pro Test.

*puts on tin hat*

I used to be vehemently ALFish but if it weren't for animal testing I wouldn't have seen ten years old and both my parents would be long gone. When it comes to cosmetics, how about a bit of Caveat Emptor?(sp?) Surely there's enough shampoo/lippy/pit spray in the world already?

Although I am vegetarian and pro animal rights, I understand why our furry friends have been used in medical experiments. But in this age of face transplants, super duper computer programs and stem cell research etc, I can no longer see how animal testing can be justified

Oh, and anyone who has tested cosmetics etc on animals should be put up against the wall and shot.

I work with computer modellers, there is *no way* that a computer could model accurately how a drug acts within a body.
The most powerful computers with state of the art modelling can simulate how an individual protein can move - with highly limited accuracy - over a time scale of - ew - 1 nanosecond.
Such calcultations take many processors *weeks* to do.
We are as close to interstellar travel as we are to be able to accurately predict how molecules interact in the body.

As Orcus said, drug interactions with the body are difficult if not impossible to predict just using software. Interactions with specific types of molecules can be tested in cellular models - grow some cells that express particular receptors then add your drug to see what happens, but this will help you to understand mainly single interactions - and while it is good to know what your drug does to your target receptor (and all the other models you happen to have), it won't allow you to predict the effect on a complete system.

When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry (over ten years ago now!) we did huge amounts of screening for effects at single receptors - we had cells that expressed one particular type of receptor and would screen all the molecules the chemists were producing to see if they would bind to that receptor. Those that did would be taken on to further stages to see how they bound or what they did, then they would try to work out whether this action would be useful in any way. There were huge amounts of testing and speculation before a drug got anywhere near an animal.

This whole process is expensive, and the further down the line a drug gets, the more expensive it becomes - so huge amounts are done in the early stages to eliminate compounds that are not useful, and the experimenters will be hoping for specific effects in their tests. This means that the testing that goes on in animals is reduced - in fact any experiment that uses animals must, when it is proposed to the home office, prove that all efforts have been made to 'reduce, replace, refine'.

The industry doesn't just go around torturing animals for fun

The place I do have a problem is where the research focus is concentrated - in industry it will be towards drugs that will make money rather than save lives per se.

I should probably add that I expect things have moved on a bit since my day, and the models and screening techniques will be even more sophisticated. I still can't see how they could model a whole system just using cells or computers though.

I don't know if anyone's looked at the comments at the bottom of the article I linked but there's one idiot women who thinks there's no justification in 'torturing' innocent animals but says it'd be okay to test on convicted criminals because they're evil... some people are so morally crippled it amazes me.

Hello,

I might turn up to that protest... just to watch, but also cos I'll probably go into town at some point on Saturday anyway.

Did anyone see 'Animals', the C4 docudrama [repeated last month]? It was superb - as convincingly done enough to sow seeds of doubt in the most fervent mind.

Yes I saw that comment Mr D, Josef Mengele here we come.

The trouble is, if you boil it down to a purely moral issue - that testing on animals is morally wrong, end of story - then there's no arguing against that, but we have to realise there are consequences to this. And that consequence would be to totally hamstring the pharmaceutical industry to the point where it would be near impossible to develop new drugs.
If we are prepared to take that consequence then so be it.
If there was a better way to test how drugs affect living systems then the scientist would be doing it. They are the ones who innovate and come up with improved experiments all the time as it is. As Kelli said. they're not torturing animals for fun.

The whoe issue to pharms companies just making drugs to make money is a tricky one. In the end, they have to make money to survive as businesses and that is the upshot unfortunately. They have no list of diseases they won't work on, if they can make money doing something, they will.
I read in Chemistry in Industry (normlly a magazine to cure insomnia) last year that the government in the USA was proposing to give pharms companies patent holidays on their most successful drugs - that is to effectively extend the patent for up to 10 years - if they went off and worked on antibacterial stuff. Because of MRSA and other drug resistant diseases are making development of these very tricky and non-profitmaking (new antibiotics are not used, they are held in reserve now - hence no sales), most pharmaceutical companies have stopped research into this problem. Giving them an indirect profit on this is therefore a fantastic incentive I think
I wonder if we could persuade governments to use this sort of thing in the fight against malaria, sleeping sickness and the like...

I think it's quite interesting that debates about animal rights seem to be a purely western phenomenon. I worked at Glaxo in Italy during my PhD and the whole country put on a fur-coat during the winter. It would never have occurred to them that in the UK they'd probably be lynched. I guess our comortable lifestyles and long, rather healthy lives (as compared to 100 years ago) leave more room for such debates. I doubt there's much of an ALF in Sudan, they've probalby got more pressing concerns on their minds.

The emotions on both sides are so intense as to turn this debate into an instant slanging match. Once you strip the emotions away, this is a battle of philosophies. One one side we have the Christian conception of humans created in God's image, with animals to be exploited in any way that benefits them. Tying in with this we have Descartes' assertion that animals are objects.

On the other side, the Buddhist/Jainist idea of non-harmfulness, that you should not harm humans or animals. More loosely connected is the consequentialist [look at what happens and weigh up the pros and cons] ethics of philosophers such as Peter Singer, who claims that the harm done to animals outweighs any benefit to humans.

That last argument works far more forcefully in the case of factory farming, which ALF members never seem to mention...

Back home there is a huge medical research facility where various members of my family have worked over the years and I would like to point out that all the animals there are treated excellently, which is something at least.

I can't stand the ALF - they give animal lovers a bad name. I knew a member once and she was a nutter. She wasn't even a vegetarian, which I found quite hypocritical.