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

Just read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1786504,00.html

Sums up all the mahjor points in the argument quite succinctly. I would, however, like to add my own. If animal testing is wrong *on principle* then activists should be prepared to defend this principle with arguments as to why it should not be broken. They should not, as they tend to do nowadays, simply *lie* about the efficacy of animal testing.

I don't *like* the idea of animal testing just as I didn't *like* the idea that the RAF bombed Dresden during WWII. In a less than perfect world, we are forced to make difficult choices, but if the choice is between a lab rat and my child, or a hundred thousand lab rats for that matter, the choice is pretty easy for me.

Not before time, I agree.

Curious use of the word "virtually" though: "Mice have virtually the same genes as humans"

Well, I think he means about 99% of the same genes. Feed sodium fluoroacetate to a house mouse and an animal activist and you end up with the same desirable effect at the end of the day.

I get the message about proportion, but in this sort of case 1% makes a considerable difference, no?

Depends. It can make all the difference or none at all. It's a fairly safe bet that an teratogen will have the same effect upon a mouse embryo as a human one, since all vertebrates go through more or less the same embryonic stages. But as for an antidepressant: how do you recognise a depressed mouse?

*Medically* we may be barely different from mice; but . . . there are some differences, that some people (and maybe some mice) would count as non-trivial . . .

About depressed mice, how do we recognise a depressed person?

(How do we recognise a person? Turing test?)

If depression is a clinical state it must have clinical symptoms more precise than saying "I've got pains all down the left side of my diodes" I suppose.

Well, like I said, certain features are the same and certain features aren't. But if in a toxicity test, a milligram of a substance kills all the rats in a sample, then it would be let nowhere near a human volunteer because the odds are that it would be just as toxic to people. Potential medicines are tested on animals for a number of reasons but they all fall under the umbrellas of efficacy and safety.

"Are you a man or a mouse?"

Actually I'm not so sure any more . . .