Not to sound like a fuckin hippie but please for the love of god start noticing and appreciating the natural world around you. You don’t have to go hike the entire Appalachian trail or anything and I get that not everyone has access to the outdoors for various reasons, but just fucking … look around you when you’re outside. Notice the sky and the sun and the birds and creatures. Start caring about them. I’m begging you.
I could function in a society that had an actual nightlife that isn’t synonymous with just clubbing. Where are the night markets what if I want to go to the library at midnight
the cognitive dissonance from people who want the products of modern medicine but get weird about animal research. like im sorry but this is necessary for the survival of the society we currently live in. and the scientists who work on these things are not evil cackling psychopaths. anyone you talk to in animal research has incredibly complex feelings about their work and incredibly complex relationships to the animals in their care. there are regulations and oversight and penalties in place to make the work as humane as possible and scientists are overwhelmingly the ones enforcing and advocating for better care.
@velvetdemon I’m doing a full reply because I want to give this question the time and space it deserves, and I really do appreciate your curiosity about this.
The short answer: It is deeply unethical. There are nowhere near enough willing patients in the world to be able to do this, and it would be criminal to put them through this.
The long answer: The one side of the equation you’re focusing on is: how much of a drug is too much, to the point where it will cause negative side effects or even death? And this is crucial to know. But it’s not just a matter of finding out the lethal dosage of a heart cholesterol medication, you need to know that it can actually lower the cholesterol of any living thing. There is no way to know this without giving it first to…a living thing.
But beyond this, I need to emphasize: The goal of a drug trial is to effectively cure people who are already suffering from disease, who are living on limited time.
Drug trials don’t just happen on any member of the public, they need to happen specifically on people affected by the disease you’re trying to treat. There is at any time a very limited and very marginalized population of the world affected by early onset, familial Parkinson’s disease. Because you cannot ethically induce disease in a human being, you are working with, speaking with, and helping patients and their families who are hopeful and desperate for a cure.
If you were to jump straight to human trials from petri dishes, not knowing absolutely anything about how the drug functions in a living, breathing animal body, it would look like this:
We didn’t know that minute quantities of the drug interact lethally with x, y, z medication that people are commonly also taking. X number of patients have died as a result.
We didn’t know that the drug is fatal to people with [common variant] in their genetics. X more patients have died.
We didn’t know the drug exacerbates x, y, z chronic illnesses. X number of people have acquired permanent, lifelong disabilities.
We didn’t know the best way to deliver the drug, so we tried multiple ways: the people who received it intravenously are now suffering from a painful, costly, and debilitating condition that did not happen with the ingested form.
I could go on, and on, and on.
The vast majority of these problems can be nearly or almost entirely averted by testing other animals first.
These are all people who possibly could have waited for the normal progression from animal testing to human testing and thus received better outcomes. Some people will pass away in the time it takes to get to that point, and that’s heartbreaking, and we all wish science could be faster.
But the cost of expediting science could mean a life of profoundly greater suffering or an even shorter life than the one where no intervention happens at all. And at that point, you have completely exhausted your trust, your goodwill, and your patients’ hope, after you’ve failed to do anything or even worsened the lives of people who are already deeply suffering.
hi, i’m an animal research professional. making sure laboratory animals stay alive, healthy, and enriched has been my full-time job for several years now.
animal research is not the mad scientist wild west that PETA wants you to think it is. there are extremely strict federal laws in place to protect the well being of these animals. animal welfare organizations like AAALAC ensure that lab animals are treated with dignity & respect and are given enough specialized care & enrichment to be happy and content in captivity, just like AZA accreditation with zoos.
not a single animal from a zebrafish to a mouse to a dog to a macaque goes unaccounted for. if an animal gets moved to a new cage, paired for breeding, has a procedure performed on it, gives birth, gets sick or injured, dies, etc. it is legally required that this information is recorded and kept on file for the US federal government to access. failing to record & retain this information is very much punishable by US federal law.
let me tell you - if you abuse or kill an animal, even a mouse - you are almost certainly getting both fired & blacklisted from the industry. if you abuse or kill a more ‘advanced’ animal, such as a dog or monkey, you will likely face criminal charges. killing a monkey is as serious and disastrous as a nuclear meltdown. you are expected to reasonably explain every illness, injury, or death of an animal under your care. you must record all of this information. animals that are clearly suffering with low QOL are required to be euthanized according to AVMA guidelines.
research animals are highly expensive. yes, even the “lesser” animals like mice. the cheapest mice will run you a few hundred $ per individual, with some of the most expensive mice i’ve cared for being $25,000 per individual. in research we have the “three Rs” - reduction (reduce amount of necessary animals to a minimum), refinement (refine processes to ensure research is accurate and animals feel no pain or distress), and replacement (replace animals with non-living research models as they become available). i can assure you no proper research team is wasting animals (*do not* say “b-b-but elon musk–” his research team is actively being investigated for animal abuse by the government).
research methods that do not require live animals are currently being looked into & efforts spearheaded by - you guessed it - the animal research industry itself (notice how the animal rights people are strangely silent & unhelpful when it comes to this?) but current technology is rudimentary and does not compare to live animal models.
some research animal fun facts (US edition):
all species of animals are only allowed to have one single major surgery performed on them in their entire lifetime.
institutions with nonhuman primates must have a behavior program in place (run by knowledgeable primate specialists) to ensure that they are happy and receiving enough daily enrichment and social interaction.
institutions with dogs are required to have physical exercise programs in place. this means every individual dog gets a substantial amount of leashed AND free-roaming exercise daily, including playgroups with other dogs.
a majority of nonhuman primates get to retire to sanctuaries like peaceable primate sanctuary, and almost all dogs get retired and adopted out by organizations like homes for animal heroes. some institutions will also adopt out unneeded young rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, etc.
some strains of mice glow neon green (or orange or blue) under UV light. this is not harmful to them and is commonly seen in cancer research.
so yes, you can rest knowing that laboratory animals are treated with the utmost respect by their caretakers. and you can stop this awful, ignorant talk of human experimentation that will only end in the abuse of nonwhite people, LGBT people, disabled people, indigenous people, and so many others. please just take a look at this wikipedia page if you think “ethical” human experimentation can exist.
Listen, y'all.
In my home county, there was a dude with cancer–a longtime radio deejay, John Kanzius. (Yes, I just violated a major rule of internet security by telling you this. I don’t live there anymore or we wouldn’t have names on this post.)
He threw himself into cancer research because traditional methods weren’t working–they were just making him sicker. That’s not to say “oh nooooooo, Big Pharma wants you sick,” it’s to say that chemo is no walk in the park, and for some people the cure can be worse than the disease. So he read an absolutely insane amount of cancer research, taught himself, and invented a way to treat cancer with radio waves.
His cancer went terminal.
He begged for the chance to test the treatment on himself. As he put it, he was going to die anyway–if it killed him quicker, so be it. And if it gave him a few more years, a few more months, a few more days, well….they’d have their Patient Zero to show it was safe to go into clinical trials.
The research team said no.
And they said no because even though it’d successfully killed cancer cells in petri-dish testing, it hadn’t gone through requisite animal testing yet. Everything researchers stated above? True. Correct. They will not put a human at risk, even a dying human, even a dead man walking, until they know the risk is minimal. John Kanzius died in 2009.
Want to know when first-in-human trials started?
July of 2021.
That should tell you a lot about how human experimentation is viewed in medicine. He–and others who’d heard him mistakenly claim he’d “cured cancer” before he understood just how much research still needed to be done–was ready to die for the chance to live. People offered to sign every waiver, release every legal liability. And the answer was still no. Because without seeing how his treatment would work on an actual living being as opposed to just some cells in a dish, there was too much chance someone could spend their final days in unspeakable agony if things went wrong. And unlike a mouse, you can’t provide compassionate euthanasia to a human. It’s illegal. Yes, even if there’s 0% chance of recovery. (Look up Jack Kevorkian if you want a bit of understanding as to why.)
There is a reason animal testing exists. I’m not a fan of it. I wish it didn’t have to be a thing. I also recognize that if we want to successfully research a lot of cutting-edge medicine, it has to be a thing. It is possible to hold both of those positions at once.
i mean all of this but like. they very much have ‘just done human trials’ like i understand where you think you’re coming from tumblr user velvetdemon and others with that perspective but that was a pretty significant thing that has happened. multiple times. and almost every single time it was a case of horrific abuse of vulnerable populations. they very much have done human-only trials.
I present for your consideration, some of the human trials they 'just did’:
Basically everything the Australian government has done to the Aboriginal people, but especially experiments in the 20s and 30s, which tested basal metabolism by forcing subjects to lie still and breath through a rubber tube for hours, or those testing their response to pain.
Testing of a new antibiotic* on children in Kano, Nigeria,during a meningococcal meningitis outbreak, by Pfizer. The lawsuit the families and the Nigerian government brought against Pfizer also alleged that this further reduced the public’s trust in vaccines and contributed to poor uptake of the polio vaccine.
The Tuskeegee Syphillis Study, which is a landmark in medical ethics fuckery that everyone should know about. The US has also carried out variations of this in so many places
*In this case they actually did do animal trials beforehand, which contraindicated its use in children, but I included this because it demonstrates how unethical research practice can impact public health.
**HeLa cells in themselves are also a colossal fuckup of informed consent!
Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.
Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.
I mean, if someone wrote that to me, I’d probably believe they were sick.
“Slutantions” has me crying laughing
i once emailed my professor with a migraine. a mistake.
“I amsick will not to choir because i have a heache. i Hope its very and i am so sorry
love,
blue”
the subject line was “OW”
THE SUBJECT LINE IS THE BEST PART JSJFJSJDJS JUST IMAGINE GETTING AN EMAIL WITH NO CONTEXT OTHER THAN “OW”
As someone who has taught college, please send those emails because 1) We WILL believe that; no one would write that on purpose and 2) we need a laugh sometimes.
On the other side of this, once after getting taken to the ER by ambulance, I got an email from the professor whose class I’d passed out in, and the message had no text, just the subject line “you good?”
Reblogging for the last addition
Claritin makes me weird, but I have allergies so there’s about a month and a half block of time where I’m taking Claritin and am just weird most of the time.
Anyway, my last year of college, I got the flu or something in late March and was also taking Mucinex. I told my professor I couldn’t come to class one day by email except I couldnt think of what to say, so my medicated ass decided to make a Fry meme. I think it said something like “Not sure if I can go to class with a head the size of Texas, bottom text.” I didn’t think until the next day that it probably wasn’t socially-acceptable to tell your philosophy professor you weren’t coming to class via Tumblr style memes. When i got back to class, i found that she’d printed it out and taped it to the classroom bulletin board.
Oh shit you guys i turned on my WinXP laptop that I used to use back then.
IT WAS ON THE DESKTOP. THIS IS WHAT I SENT.
It’s even worse than i remember it
I laugh myself hoarse every time this post comes around, so here it is again.
Once emailed a professor from my hospital bed high on painkillers after a really bad car crash which my heart actually stopped the email “Dead cant class sory”
