I'm not talking about toxicity relative to body mass. Different species react differently to different chemicals - regardless of dosage. For example, strychnine has no effect on monkeys, chickens and guinea pigs, even in amounts which would put an entire human family into convulsions.
ah yes good point... but im sure if the psuedo scientist knew that the substance had a ridiculously different effect on the test subject then they would have used a different animal, maybe.. i don't know im not a scientist.. but that would be the logical conclusion surely.. dont test shoes on a worm coz they have no feet.
hahahaha.... no no no you missunderstand.. i never said they could be trusted. i was merely pointing out that it would make no sense to test on something that greatly differs in reaction to the thing you are trying to use the results for( i dont know if i worded that very well.. it sounds ok in my head.. but that doesn't really account for much). but if your saying that the results are ridiculous and have no baring on the lethal dose for humans then thats excellent news.. means i can take more.. weyhey!!
Well this is the fundamental flaw in animal testing, and one of the reasons why so many dangerous drugs have reached the market. Animal testing really tells us very little about how humans will react to any particular substance. I'm far from militant on these issues, but I've never really understood the logic of animal testing. It seems silly to assume that pigs/cats/dogs/humans/rabbits will respond in comparable ways to a substance. If we'd been using guinea pigs to test penicillin, we'd have thrown it away as a dangerous chemical. Animal testing is more like Russian roulette.
'tis true.. but ( now this is hypothetical) if my child had some kind of illness that could only be cured by a drug that would need to be tested on, say a pig, because that had the closest match to a human whatever... then even tho i dont strictly agree with the whole farming of test animals thing.. i would still say bring it on.. jab the pig and see what happens... now im aware this may not be a particularly nice or liberal way of thinking but being put in a situation like that can radically change a mind-set.
The ethical considerations are a mine field though, and not something that I really want to get into discussing. Whether you think animal experimentation is morally justified or not though, that doesn't alter that fact that it's of very little use for determining substance toxicity for humans. If, hypothetically, I was prepared to see a pig diced 'n' sliced in order to save my child, I'd like to be certain the results of such experiments were actually reliable.
no... hijack away mr. doc i found out what i needed to know.. now its just for conversation and discusion.. the fact that it fell into animal testing is not really an issue.. its developed into a nice little debate.
wouldn't we all. but the whole idea behind testing is that you dont know the outcome until the test has been done. so i would rather the test be done on an animal that was bred specifically for that reason rather than just injecting my child with something that " may or may not work.. dunno we havent tested it yet.. it could make his head swell up and pop like a balloon".
but then i suppose if the baby was going to die if he didn't have the drug then it wouldn't matter if the untested drug killed him by accident coz he was gonna die anyway... geez this is a fucked up conundrum
But it would still make the animal testing a waste of time, money and resources - all of which might have been better used in finding a real cure for the baby. Gawd knows how we've ended up off at this tangent!
I agree with you Doc that animal testing can be Russian roulette as to whether the results obtained are actually reliable or not. I certainly think they need to produce new testing methods, such as using stem cells and cloned tissue, and I think scientific progress will eventually take us beyond animal testing. However even in Russian Roulette, 5 times out of 6 you're not going to blow your brains out. After the animal trials, they do move on to human trials. At the very least the animal phase will often tell you whether the drugs are going to kill the human test patient or not. I'm purposefully leaving aside the ethical implications here, as that's a whole new kettle of fish that doesn't need opening in this debate. Sufficeth to say animal testing is barbaric to the animals involved. Also playing devil's advocate a bit, when arguing with ardent supporters of animal testing I usually argue along the lines you're using....
I agree with you apart from this statement " At the very least the animal phase will often tell you whether the drugs are going to kill the human test patient or not." As Dok stated before, things that are perfectly ok to animals to ingest can be deadly for humans. Leaving the animals rights issue out of the debate, I think that animal testing is bad for humans, it is very very misleading. Like you say, we should move on now for our own sake really
I agree with you Claire. But I would like to point out that I said animal testing will often tell you whether the drugs are going to kill the human test patient or not, I didn't say that it would always. There are obviously many cases where the opposite is true, as you and Dok said. Hundreds of deformed babies are testament to that....
this is true.. it at least gives you somehwere to start...unfortunately the starting point is animals.. but there just aren't enough willing post grad students.
Interestingly British Airways have today banned the transport of animals to be used for medical research. Maybe a step in the right direction....
Which makes it no better than a guess. Just because by lucky coincidence a drug happens to have the same effect on two different species on one occasion, that doesn't make the procedure of animal testing good science. It's still a dangerous waste of time.
