Not really a victory for the rats since they won’t be bred to start with. In any event, computer modeling and cell tests are hardly substitutes.
From the WaPo:
Not really a victory for the rats since they won’t be bred to start with. In any event, computer modeling and cell tests are hardly substitutes.
From the WaPo:
Here’s an alternative view on the subject:
Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals
http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Cows-Golden-Geese-Experiments/dp/0826414028
Here’s a PDF chapter:
https://www.la.utexas.edu/users/bump/WhiteCoatWelfare.pdf
Here’s an interview:
http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-sacredcows.html
I liked the book because it avoided the whole Babies vs Bunnies emotional hand-wringing slop, contending instead that the whole animal testing thing simply does nothing but offer up an unreliable model. Quite an eye-opener. Offered up for everyone’s consideration, whether you agree with it or not.
Hope this helps.
Just a thought.
VicB3
Anyone who performs research is well acquainted with the limits of animal models, which is why there are always caveats in the conclusions and why these are first steps in research. It must first pass many levels of hurdles among various animal models before human experimentation is permissible, and then must be under strict guidelines and reviewed by committees. This represents more intrusion by politicians and bureaucrats, lobbied by all sorts of environmental and business groups, including trial attorneys, who have vested interests and little understanding or care about scientific methods.
Computer modeling is not a substitute for animal studies, but rather only represents a new first step before using animals. It is not a reliable predictor of the variations in animals, any more than it is for climate.
I guess researchers can now experiment on Democrats.
Lab rats are bred to be especially vulnerable to unusual stimuli – much like whining liberals.
The EU (Empire of eUrope) requires all new chemicals (including pharmaceuticals) to be proven safe (!) before they can be used in consumer products, but animal testing is severely restricted. Without animal testing that will be nearly impossible, so look for a long-term freeze in chemical technology in Europe, and now in the US as well.
The value of animal testing is that a problem that arises in animal testing points to things that *could* be a problem in human use. The correlation is not 100%, but even a 75% correlation will point to things (although not necessarily all things) that need to be addressed before the chemical is loosed into the marketplace.
It avoids the unethical, unscrupulous, illegal, and inhumane testing on live human subjects that the EPA is so fond of.
Oh ohhhhh…even the economy is affecting the rats. Well at least they can still be subjected to cranked-up non-ionizing RF energies for super a unnatural duration to induce cancer
This was foretold in Science Fiction in 1995, with Allen Steele’s ‘The Good Rat’
(http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43651), where the protagonist is a HUMAN lab-test subject – because all animal testing has been banned! Oh yes, and there is also a ‘smokeasy’ where one can also eat beef burgers, swear, and make ‘insensitive’ jokes!
@RW…..That was a 1995 dream….
Now, the local council would send out the smoke/thought/PC/noise/micro-discrimination police to close the place and prosecute the people involved………