Alternatives to animal testing are finally taking off(spectrum.ieee.org) |
Alternatives to animal testing are finally taking off(spectrum.ieee.org) |
1) Where possible, don't test in animals.
2) When testing in animals, first ensure that there is reasonable confidence the risk and severity of harm from the testing will be minimal. Only begin initial in vivo testing after this has first been achieved.
3) For test animals that are or aren't harmed, allow them to live happy, (relatively) normal, natural lives. Don't end their life early unnecessarily, with exceptions for humane euthanasia if the testing has unexpectedly caused significant, persistent suffering. Treat them as a pet owner would treat their beloved pet rat.
Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans. The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.
> Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans.
I don't consider it an extreme view, as lots of people share that view. But within the scope of pharmaceuticals, as opposed to cosmetics, I disagree with it because I think that's an impractical guideline to follow. Animal testing happens because there aren't good alternative ways to get safety data (on a per-treatment basis) without putting human lives at risk, and it's already a tiered system designed to balance scientific need against animal welfare. This is also why in standard medical trials proving safety comes before proving efficacy.
> The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.
The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject? You need safety data. How do you get the safety data? Right now, the main way is a tiered system that starts on a petri dish and eventually passes through mice, monkeys, etc. before humans.
It is a tiered system, at least if you look at big pharma. There are many stages in the pharmaceutical drug development process.
Also human testing (clinical trials) have different stages/tiers to maximize learning and minimize risk at every stage. A lot of companies trying to innovate here.
I’m exited what more AI can bring to this space.
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Two men who fell seriously ill following a clinical drugs trial remain in a critical condition but four others are showing signs of improvement.
All six are still in intensive care in Northwick Park Hospital, north-west London, after falling ill on Monday.
TeGenero, which manufactures the anti-inflammatory drug, says it has apologised to the men's families.
But yes, it's hard to test immune responses without hurting a living animal, since you'd have to somehow have a non-alive immune system to test on otherwise
also animal research is a huge pain in the ass, nobody is doing it unless they have to
FWIW, just watching a few pigs in an existing herd without interacting with them in any active way requires an extensive ethical approval process. Nobody would go through even that if they could gather the same data from a computer model.
well isn't it mostly other way around? millions of times to LOOK FOR hidden SIDE-EFFECTS?
animal testing is mostly for answering 'is it safe?'
Because that's drug testing in general, even with human subjects.
(Sarcasm but also some potential truth)
Edit: I used to dismiss all that since I figured animals don't have enough neurons or intelligence or whatever for their pain to matter. A quote from Ozy Brennan[1] (five paragraphs down from this hyperlink, though BB's commentary here is important too) changed my mind. TL;DR: intelligence is almost certainly not relevant to feeling pain, and the same pain pathways that exist in the human brain exist in other animals too.
[1] https://benthams.substack.com/i/151605056/2-intensely-what-a...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEOOMYxMvY4 (Note: I have heard Demis Hassabis speak about this topic in a few sources, this was the quickest one I could find where he talks in depth about it)
As the lamb would be exposed to uncontrolled people/pathogens it could not be used for further scientific studies nor returned to the herd. There was doubt it could even be sold for food. So, absent anyone taking it home as a pet, its appearance on stage was more of a death sentence than any scientific study!
They opted for a doll.
the FDA wanted data from organs-on-a-chip or some comparable alternative.
- Sealab 2021
All the while people with massive power and resources are just wasting them on gimmicks and plots to keep increasing their net worth, power, all of that.
The one who don't care have all the power, the ones who care have none.
I am not saying we should not have stopped directly testing in humans or animals. But I am saying that the result has been worse outcomes. And any further shifts away from the biological systems that need the medicine (like using computational crap like LLMs) will further increase this disconnect.
I became vegetarian after reading the original book, and more recently _mostly_ vegan after reading “Now”. (Still a work in progress as it’s only been a few weeks and takes time to adjust my diet).
Factory Farming is definitely horrendous and it’s not only for the animals killed for meat. Animals kept for egg or milk are essentially mistreated during their entire (short) lives.
I’d love to see people take a statistical model. I currently get 50% of calories or maybe protein from animals. If I reduce that to 40%, what would that look like? Maybe 1 fully-plant-based meal a week? That way I can test out a recipe or learn how to make tofu yummy.
Or maybe you’ve heard “I can’t live without steak” or “cheese.” Well, trend towards plant-based except for steak or cheese (while not increasing your consumption of that).
I think an unfortunate thing that has poisoned too much of the talk of animal welfare has been what I consider a small minded and frankly frivolous accusation of hypocrisy. The "hypocrisy" is the price of agreeing to be accountable to a much higher standard. The "consistency" of not even bothering to try is not morally preferable.
Wait until you're comfortable with the changes you've made, and only then introduce more.
Flax eggs are a good substitute for eggs in many recipes.
[1] https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-horror-of-unfathomable-p...
I can't find it (looked for 10 minutes), but there was an article at some point talking about a video that activists took after sneaking into a certain slaughterhouse. It showed cows (or was it pigs?) being put in a cage and slowly lowered down into a pit full of hot smoky gas. They were freaking out all along the way down, and as they were being pushed into the cages. Call me pathetic but it made me think of the people having to choose between burning to death and jumping to death, except in this case there was no choice at all for the animal. And no more than a few thousand people died this way on 9/11, but at just that one slaughterhouse probably orders of magnitude more animals have died in that way.
We share enough mechanisms across genetics, proteins and even our immune systems and that research is capable of asking meaningful questions that matter to us, and frequently has paid off. That's not to justify the ethics of it but I think it's beyond question that research iN mIcE has been an important research platform for things like immunology and lead to nobel prizes. Research writ large is a vast cumulative program of small iterations that are, individually, of provisional significance, and the categorical dismissal of it as not producing instant one-shot cures is at least as bad a misunderstanding of science as overhyped articles are.
The answer is far from obvious for many people and so obvious as to not need discussion for others. But the proportions of the population that fall into each group varies over time, from place to place, etc., as does the fraction of each group deciding for or against animal experimentation.
But even ignoring the ethics concerns, an accurate non-animal model is going to be vastly preferable to a real animal for a lot of stages of research. It's going to be easier to isolate variables, and a lot of research time and resources are taken up by animal models just being real animals.
Zero, if there are alternatives.
If not, the alternatives will cost human lives and suffering.
This is simply a step toward not needing to literally kill animals needlessly, if it succeeds. In the meantime, while stuff like this is really early on, we’re not going to stop animal testing.
Meeting standards is nothing but a formality, a form to fill. The PhDs and lab staff doing the killing, if they have any qualms about the act itself or just the purpose of the killing, generally justify it away as being what they have to do to keep the job. The "humane" killing methods are learned on the job through trial and error, and such errors keep happening regularly to experienced staff.
Prior to lockdowns, many/most lab animals just got killed: interesting quality of life standard.
What's written in lab policies is not at all how it happens in reality.
They do that already? Then how come an estimated 192 million mice are killed each year?
Cost core to our resource allocation system, for better or worse, and if something costs a lot it usually means we can't do it as much. In this framing, cutting out animal testing would (often) mean medical research is slower. In this framing it's a question of where people are willing to put the dial on ethics vs results, and of course pumping the breaks in one place without universal buy-in just means the cruelty moves elsewhere.
I don't think the above 1-dimensional framing is the whole story though. You could imagine more standardized data sharing, so that the data that cost the lives of a few thousand rats could be used by others. And of course you could require (as drug trials do) that the study be registered before any experiment happened, and that the results be published regardless of the outcome. Some of these changes could actually make the science better, in addition to more ethical.
[1]: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-19350.pdf
For most drugs the only reasonable test animals are mice and rats. And they LOVE to naturally get cancer and other diseases, so you need to use large groups to get even a semblance of statistical significance.
Oh, and don't forget that it takes a lot of time to run the tests. And time IS money for pharma.
There are ways that animal testing could be made far more humane (like birth control to prevent the kind of overbreeding that demands mass culling), but those, themselves, would be costly.
And in order to test cures, you must first inflict the animals with the disease. How many do you need? Are you sure? Because waiting to produce more later would also create costs. Cheaper just to breed a huge batch now and then cull the surplus.
... so how many extra do you want?
In theory yes it’s better, in practice, not always.
I eliminated types of meat (e.g no more chicken, then no more beef, etc). Slowly adapting my diet over time.
I think that made it easier to stick with it.
It could and likely is the case that we can make better alternatives to animal testing but we're held back by the kinds of arguments you just made and the inertia in the system so we don't move past a flawed but functional paradigm based around animal testing.