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

ah, so practice vivisection on students ?

Gets my vote

Mr Dreadful and Xanatic - you missed the question. It wasn't about whether testing animals was necessary, it was specifically about vivisection.

What purpose does this serve, exactly?


az

Well, it lets you see the body in action. I'd imagine that should tell us a few things we wouldn't get from an animal that had been dead a few days.

You're still missing the point, Xanatic. Why is this necessary in terms of medical science that will somehow benefit society?

az

Because it helps us understand the workings of living things, which in turn helps us develop better medical practices.

Which ones, specifically, Mr D?


az

I don't know off the top of my head. All I know is that vivisection is necessary for certain areas of medical research.

Is there any particular reason why you're determined to dissect this argument so thoroughy? (Yes, I did only write that because I wanted to use the 'dissect' pun)


A while back a bloke I know was trying to give me leaflets explaining why I should never buy Eukanuba/IAMS products for any pets I have because of animal testing... my response was "well, duh..."

<> (Mr D)




az

Either you think that statement was an admission of ignorance (which it wasn't, it just meant I'd need to do some reading which I cannot do at the moment) or there's a pun there which I haven't spotted.

I actually thought you were trying to be funny - ha!


az

I don't get it...

Sorry, Mr D, it's just that vivisection often (though not always) has to do with doing vile things to an animals head - putting brain implants in, slicing off the top while the animal is still alive to watch how the brain works, that sort of thing.

So the 'off the top of my head' remark just struck me as somewhat morbidly funny. Sorry . . .


az

Vivisection is used in drug testing, to see what drugs do to various organs and tissues. It is more targetted than 'let us see what happens when I give this randomly selected chemical to this animal'. The chemical will have shown promise in vitro before they will be stepped up to full model testing. Hope this helps, until later....
BCNU - Crescent

Yes, of course... sorry, I'm a bit thick today.

Yes, what Crescent said.

On a now (probably) defunct project of mine in my chemistry lab I was working on making chemicals that would inhibit an enzyme that is thought to be the therapeutic target of lithium in the treatment of manic depression.
We could come up with dozens of very potent inhibitors of this enzyme but none would be any use as a drug unless they actually work in the body, and moreover, in the exact bit of the body where they are needed. The route of a drug - depending upon the way you take it (orally, injection, inhaler, sepository etc.) - to the target organ (in our case, the brain) has many points at which it can be destroyed by the body's own defense. The liver, for example exists to break down waste products and so is a formidable barrier to any drug having a therapeutic effect.

So for our brain drug to work, and be taken orally - the only really suitable method of delivery for a chronic condition like this - it would have to survive the saliva, the stomach acid, the intestinal juices, the immune system in the blood, probably the liver and then cross the blood-brain barrier which protects brain cells from toxins in the blood.

There simply is no substitute for animal testing sadly to tell how a drug transports within the body. In the initial stages the animals need to be killed and disected to find out where the drug and its metabolites are going. There is no computer programme that can simulate this. As I said elsewhere we are probably as close to interstellar travel as we are to being able to do this.
IN my case, had we got a chemical that was sufficiently interesting then we would first have tested the compound on rat brain slices to see if it can penetrate neurons before anything else was done.
One I made has been tested on slime mold (a bad name, this is an amoeba called dictyostelium. which is a reasonable mode for neurons but still won't solve the drug-transport problem.

As far as I'm aware, one is not allowed to do vivisection such as Azahar describes in the UK. To do animal testing one must show that it will benefit medicine to the licensing authorities before one is given a license for animal testing.

If all that has no bearing and it one finds it morally repugnant to do this work and no amount of human benefit to you outweighs the suffering of animals then fine. But one must understand the consequence of this would be to destroy the pharmaceutical industry. Someone mentioned something earlier about how animal testing might die away as more diseases are eradicated but sad to say we have only managed to actually eradicate one disease ever - smallpox - and that's debatable.
We are just engaged in the same war that all microbes have 4.5 billion years of experience in. We develop penicillin, they evolve around it to give us MRSA. We develop cytotoxins to kill malignant cells, they develop pumps to resist these things over time.
It will always be ongoing sadly. But we have achieved so much, I believe this debate only occurs because we have such comfortable and long lived lives now that such moral issues seem important whereas 100 years ago you might consider a good treatment for diptheria a worthwhile objective.

As a thougth. Is it OK to experiment on virii and bacteria? what about Nematode worms or amoeba such as Dicty. What about earthworms or fruitflies? Frogs?
At what point does the animal/organism in question become sufficiently 'fluffy' for experimentation to become unacceptable.

>>So for our brain drug to work, and be taken orally - the only really suitable method of delivery for a chronic condition like this -<<

Unless you happen to be french apparently

Just to throw a couple of statistics into the hat.

Life expectancy at birth for people born in 1851 was 40.2 years for men and 43.6 years for women.

Compare that to now in the countries we are posting from. Alongside this 1 in 20 women died in childbirth, 40% of children died before the age of 5.
Compare that to the recent storm over a 1 in 10000 increase in risk of cancer. from breathing passive smoke. Most people of old would not have lived long enough to get such cancer in the time when infectious diseases were rife.
The increase in life expectancy correlates exceptionally well with our gradual improvement in this period with our ability to control infectious diseases.

I'll give the apple cart a little shove.

My line is probably a lot further on the anti-vivisection side than most here. As has been stated, there are degrees - it is not nearly as simple as cosmetics-bad-medicine-good. The line between cometics and medicine is pretty blurry these days anyway.

Most of the opinions here seem to assume that if there is any potential health benefit to humans at all, even to the extent of improving the quality of life of a small minority, then wholesale slaughter is justified (apologies for the emotive term). In fact I don’t imagine for a minute that the posters are genuinely that brutal or selfish.

All the examples cited in these arguments are genuine treatments for debilitating conditions; success stories in effect. No-one ever mentions the potential drugs that never make it to market, the increasing number marketed for “lifestyle” purposes, the number of similar products competing for the same market niche, or the animal testing that has nothing to do with drug development, but is rather intended to demonstrate the negative effects on human health, or merely to gather empirical evidence of an already-known effect – the smoking beagles for example.

Doubtless there are benefits to animal testing, but whether the end justifies the means in any particular case cannot be known until the end. Researchers already have to cite potential benefits to gain a licence, but of course *any* potential benefit to human health, no matter how trivial or unlikely to be realised, is likely to elicit blanket approval.

I can also accept that computer models can't reliably replace all animal tests, but if the lethal dose of a new variation of an existing substance can be judged based on a computer model and existing data, rather than by how many animals it kills, then why not? I gather that computer models can also rule out many potential drug ingredients at an early stage, before they even proceed to animal testing.

Regulations on animal welfare are improving, but the number of animals used in experiments is still increasing. To steal Orcus' examples, where a few years back we might have sacrificed 1,000 animals to dramatically reduce deaths during childbirth, we now sacrifice 1,000 animals merely to ascertain that the increased risk of cancer from passive smoking is 1 in 10,000. Our society virtually guarantees that the number of medical treatments available will increase, together with the number of animals used in tests, while many of the treaments themselves will become increasingly trivial.

And despite controls, some basic research is still carried out that is clearly pointless even from a medical point of view; for example to offer some empirical evidence to back up the blindingly obvious. My personal favourite example is one from NS recently, where rats were given ecstasy and then subjected to white noise at night-club volumes for three hours. Surprisingly enough they didn't like it very much. Here we have animal suffering for a study that is designed to eke out *any* potential danger the drug might pose - no doubt for political reasons - even though there is no shortage of human subjects and ample evidence that the risk, if it exists at all, is tiny. And of course the drug is taken recreationally anyway, so if there were any medical benefit, it is not to people who are actually ill.

IMO the line is currently drawn far too far in our favour.

"As has been stated, there are degrees - it is not nearly as simple as cosmetics-bad-medicine-good. The line between cometics and medicine is pretty blurry these days anyway."

Could not agree more. I could mention a few "cosmetics" companies that produce skin care products for treatment of chronic skin conditions. It may not be a prescription drug but is it a "cosmetic"?

Well, you may be able to mention "a few" cosmetics companies that do this, but for the most part they make unnecessary luxury items for people with more money than sense.

IMHO

az