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Thats interesting iszabelle. But, leaving aside the ethical issue for a moment, I think the picture on my side of the fence, as someone who doesn't know enough about biology, biochemistry and medicine, is still less than clear.
Perhaps I am overestimating the level of knowledge I would really need to comptently judge for myself on the benefits of testing with and on animals in medicine, but I don't think so. And so I have to decide this kind of issue on listening and gauging expert opinion. One thing to be said is that the majority (vast majority?) of the medical profession seem to be in favour of animal testing. That said, there are some exceptions and some of the anti-vivisection (anti all animal testing, in fact) come across as reasonably articulate. I like to think I can spot science bullshit fairly easily, but the Americans Europeans Japanese
For Medical Advancement have a good patter, and this pdf article makes an interesting case (lots of argument and quotes from scientists. I have no idea how good an argument it really is, though one person described animal models as a "glass bead game", which strikes me as very strong language coming from a scientist - David Horribin - working as a chairman of biotech company). There are lots more on the site.
For the layman like me, a couple of things stand out as arguments against animal testing. One, there is the argument that animals are sufficiently different from humans so as to invalidate animal models. Now, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and the fact that this sounds convincing to me (esecially when you throw in words like complexity and emergent behaviour, yadda, yadda) may speak only to my own ignorance. Next, the failure of most scientists to oppose animal testing is explained by some as an upshot of path dependency. That is, animal testing has been used extensively in the past and has an established track record as a "good" way to generate research. The counter claim is that the actual efficacy of animal models is rarely challenged as to do so would upset the funding status quo . In the world of publish or perish, this is difficult to do. To my ears this sounds a *little* fanciful, but there do seem to be scientists who take this view.
Actually, this leads on to my next point which is about animal testing on cosmetics and also the horrific pictures and experiments we know do about. The point is that while many are quick to condemn these, they still go on (though not everywhere). This says to me that there is at least a segment of the scientific community which doesn't give a shit about animal suffering. Is it hard to imagine that that sort of person would see an animal as a good substitute for a test-tube even if there were no significant resarch bonus in that choice? I don't know, but it seems worth considering.
Having said that I am putting ethics to one side, I'm not sure to what extent I have really done that. There are lots of sources that argue that animal testing is crucial to the advancement of medical knowledge, like this one, which also sound convincing. Am I ignoring them because of my own idelogical blinkers? I'm really not very sure. |
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