Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

As an academic who isn&#x27;t directly involved in anything close to animal testing (I&#x27;m a physicist) I always find it strange that people working in biology have to jump through incredible hoops relating to how the animals they work with are treated, but then the lunch place in the biology department sells sandwiches with chicken, ham etc in with incredibly minimal oversight for how the animals are treated.<p>The difference in standards between &quot;science animals&quot; and &quot;food animals&quot; is quite stark. It is very similar to the difference in treatment people require between dogs and pigs. No one really cares if pigs suffer, even though they would be furious if dogs experienced the same treatment.

There&#x27;s certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can&#x27;t do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.

One of the features of arguments for “ethical” treatment of animals is that they are often so unethical. For example, it is often argued that animal research is unnecessary because computer models are sufficient. Of this misleading article that conflates animal research with animal testing. It turns out that living this are complicated, and how they react to chemicals is largely impossible to predict. And humans still die of disease, and are interested in curing those diseases. And, we really don’t think that experimenting on humans first to answer basic biological questions, when almost identical processes occur in rodents, is reasonable. So we learn things first in animals. It’s fine to say that many drugs fail to meet expectations when tested in humans, but pretty much everything a physician learns about metabolism in a biochemistry course was worked out in rats or mice, and most of those things were never validated in human tissues because the human tissue is not, and should not be, available. And patients are better served by doctors familiar with biochemistry.<p>One might argue that since we know so much, we have learned enough and further research in animals is unnecessary (or can be modeled). But while we now know most of the components of the body (at least those encoded by the genome), we are spectacularly ignorant of what those parts do, how they interact, and how those interactions respond to environmental changes (such as disease and drugs). And we can only explore those questions in animals.

Neuroscience is built on animal testing. I can&#x27;t see a realistic was of learning about the brain without animal experiments, unfortunately.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;speakingofresearch.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;10&#x2F;importance-of-animals-in-neuroscience-research&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;speakingofresearch.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;10&#x2F;importance-of-anim...</a><p>Do we want to give up learning the brain? (And other organs but brain is extra special)

The claim that &quot;probability of meaningful transfer between animals to humans can be astoundingly low, far below 50%&quot; requires more scrutiny. Let&#x27;s say drug b is being tested for treating condition A. Assume that it&#x27;s found effective in rats. It seems the claim then is that probability of it also being effective in humans is less than 50% and sometimes 0%. But this in itself isn&#x27;t a good enough argument against animal testing. If one can show that there were drugs c, d, e.. etc that were found ineffective in rats and as a result did not have to be considered for human trials. If there is a good enough probability that not effective in rats A implies not effective in humans, it will still lead to huge benefits to science and clinical trials.

Still a better usage of an animal life than eating them. I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally. If you put these numbers in comparison to animal farming, their suffering and their murdering, then it&#x27;s absolutely worth it. For me it boils down to a simple set of questions. Would you murder 10&#x27;000 chickens to save your grandma&#x27;s life? How about 10&#x27;000 cows? How about 10&#x27;000 rats? How about 10&#x27;000 rabbits? How about 10&#x27;000 monkeys? How about saving yourself? Your wife? Your child? Your children? Tens of humans? Hundreds of humans? Thousands of humans? I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human. We could talk about reducing it, but I would agree only once we replaced the meat industry.

There are shades of grey on this kind of thing. Testing cosmetics seems a less painful ordeal than some of the more brutal examples given in the article.<p>Another thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so.

Much of the problem comes from the fact that there is insufficient incentive for the studies to be effective in the first place. The sample size issue is real and often justified due to a lack of resources, but this results in minimum publishable units which are anecdotal and an over-reliance on meta-studies which attempt to aggregate these positively-biased results. Increasing the sample size is not always possible, but sometimes there are alternative trial designs which can yield different but more reliable outcomes.<p>Another aspect of effectiveness comes from whether the animal studies are actually designed to advance anything at all. For example, if the goal is to develop an imaging technique in humans, then the purpose of animal experiments is primarily to confirm that the idea is not wrong, debug the machinery and protocols, and generally get things to the point that the system is no longer the point of failure when running experiments on humans. Instead it is common to see series of publications on new imaging methods and contrast agents which grind away at small animals with no visible attempts to progress upward, which pushes back the time at which you can actually learn how the system works. Publishing this way is far safer but ultimately pointless: drugs for Alzheimer&#x27;s is a classic case of optimizing for animals and completely missing in humans.<p>This is at least partly why pre-registration of experiments is becoming normalized, as it is in human clinical trials. The goal here is to require basic statements of purpose and methods prior to execution, such that it is possible to improve the (often quite expensive and time-consuming) experiments beforehand and not during the manuscript review process. Many research groups lack this internal quality control and as a result some institutions are stepping in to require or provide it.

Ethical treatment of animals is a high priority in sponsored research:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;olaw.nih.gov&#x2F;resources&#x2F;tutorial&#x2F;iacuc.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;olaw.nih.gov&#x2F;resources&#x2F;tutorial&#x2F;iacuc.htm</a>

Unless someone can get out a replacement at least equally effective (and not too expensive), I think we have to rely on animal testing for some of the products.

Has there ever yet been a case of someone saying &quot;animal testing is explotative, but it&#x27;s actually pretty darn effective&quot;?<p>I suspect that it&#x27;s motivated reasoning. If you don&#x27;t like animal testing, it&#x27;s going to distort your perception of how effective it is.

Much as I don&#x27;t like the ethics of animal testing, I don&#x27;t see the cruelty inflicted as any worse than factory farming, and even quite a number of &quot;pastured&quot; or &quot;free range&quot; husbandry operations.

How can one claim it is ineffective when it is the most effective?

As an academic neuroscientist doing animal experiments, my hope is that animal research will eventually be obsolete, but think we are 1-2 centuries away from the required technology to do mechanistic and ethical experiments in ourselves. The article points out some questionable experiments but left out what we have learned&#x2F;developed using animal models. This includes sars-cov-2 vaccines [1], the molecular identity of neurotransmitters [2], and gene therapies for SMA1, which typically kills children before their fifth birthday [3]. Animal activist&#x27;s hearts are in the right place and we try to treat them as ethically as we can. I personally known several patients with ALS who have died and feel incredible urgency as a scientist. Animal testing is currently highly effective and irreplaceable. I would urge people who&#x27;s perspective on animal testing is shaped by interactions with their pets to volunteer with charities that aid families with seriously ill children [4].<p>1 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;america-facing-monkey-shortage&#x2F;615799&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;america-...</a><p>2 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.physiology.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1152&#x2F;classicessays.00026.2005" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.physiology.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1152&#x2F;classicessay...</a><p>3 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nejm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1056&#x2F;NEJMoa1706198" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nejm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1056&#x2F;NEJMoa1706198</a><p>4 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rmhc.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rmhc.org&#x2F;</a>

This makes the argument that a drug working on animals is weak evidence that it works on humans, but skips over the issue of toxicity. If drugs never had side effects, I&#x27;m sure everyone would be perfectly happy to immediately start with human trials. Why waste all that time?

Specism is based on several flawed assumptions.<p>We decide humans are superior to other animals because we are humans, and us&gt;them.<p>We also decide that because we are superior, we have all rights to do anything to members of &quot;inferior&quot; groups.<p>But:<p>- Superiority is at least debatable and strongly depends on the criteria used fot comparison;<p>- There is absolutely no discernable logical link between being &quot;superior&quot; and having a right to do anything to the &quot;inferior&quot; beings. (For example, a human adult is &quot;superior&quot; to a human infant; but it doesn&#x27;t give them the right to torture it.)<p>We torture animals because we can, and because we don&#x27;t think about it. But it won&#x27;t last, because the more we think about it, the less acceptable it becomes.

The author makes a couple of arguments. Some like &quot;we should increase the quality of our research by doing more pre-registration because we are sacrificing these animals in the pursuit of science and when we do bad science we make the sacrifice for naught&quot; yes 100%!!!<p>But when he argues that there is poor translatability from rats to people (true) so therefore we should try doing more in vitro studies or going directly into humans. I think as bad as rat&#x2F;mouse studies are in vitro studies have even worse translatability.

TLDR: instead of testing on animals we should use computer simulations and tissue cultures instead.<p>The authors comparison of kernel bugs to lab testing mice is ridiculous to be honest.<p>The author cherry picks examples like cosmetics to justify their view, failing to acknowledge a long history of successful testing on animals that led to drugs that help reduce human suffering.<p>All in all I think the post is bad

&gt; <i>You may have heard of a recent scandal where researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (UMN) intentionally tried to introduce bugs into the Linux kernel codebase as part of a research project. [...] This upset a lot of people – the Hacker News thread has received over 3000 points and around 2000 comments as I write this.</i><p>I remember when that thread hit the HN front page.<p>About 1-2 days before that, another article was on the front page: It was about how Facebook was experimenting on it&#x27;s users by manipulating the newsfeed and inducing certain emotions - e.g., filtering posts such that positive news dominate the feed or such that negative news do. There was some outrage in academia and larger society over Facebook&#x27;s behaviour and Facebook was largely accused of doing unethical research on nonconsenting subjects.<p>The overwhelming opinion in the HN comments was that Facebook&#x27;s actions were perfectly ethical: Facebook&#x27;s users somehow already gave general consent to be experimented on when they signed up.<p>Then days later, the kernel research story dropped and everyone was suddenly up in arms and quickly turned into fervent supporters of informed consent in research.<p>Now talk is about actual lab animals and most posts apper very concerned about the various shades of gray on this subject.<p>I find that does tell a lot about the priorities of the HN readership.

Given the small sample sizes it wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if this was contributing to the reproducibility problems in biology.

Can it be made more effective?

Would you rather have your drugs tested on potatoes?

Lets also consider how much more money and brainpower would be redirected to the development of significantly more advanced technologies if experimentation on animals was to be even partially banned. Things like more advanced simulations, tissue&#x2F;organ engineering and better non-invasive testing of humans. &quot;Necessity is the mother of invention&quot; and currently animal testing is often the &quot;easy&quot; and &quot;obvious&quot; way to do something.

I like how the article starts with talking about software, because I find the case for ethical software, and ethical treatment of animals to be linked.<p>There should be no animal exploitation. If humans want human things they should test on humans which volunteer to be tested on. Everything else is exploitive to others.

&gt; try to imagine that we live in a world where no one has ever used animals in research before, and someone proposes it for the very first time<p>Why do I have to imagine? We live in that world. At some point in our history people decided to use animals in research.<p>It seems like this is a slight-of-hand - it&#x27;s asking us to imagine <i>ourselves</i>, <i>now</i> in that environment. But most of us are far removed from hunting, killing animals for food, raiding, etc. and don&#x27;t live in a time where most kids died before adulthood and where pricking your thumb on a rose could cause an infection leading to death.<p>In our history, we know that people treated other people pretty poorly, and animals even worse. There was no problem in using animals in research.<p>&gt; Even if you can find one particular invention – insulin is often brought up<p>Manned flight and space travel were both preceded by animal experiments.<p>The first unmanned balloon flight had a sheep, a duck, and a rooster - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_ballooning#First_unmanned_flight" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_ballooning#First_un...</a> : &quot;The sheep was believed to have a reasonable approximation of human physiology.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monkeys_and_apes_in_space" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monkeys_and_apes_in_space</a> comments &quot;Before humans went into space in the 1960s, several other animals were launched into space, including numerous other primates, so that scientists could investigate the biological effects of spaceflight.&quot;<p>A few examples drawn from medical history:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Christiaan_Barnard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Christiaan_Barnard</a> - &quot;Barnard performed experiments on dogs while investigating intestinal atresia ... Barnard was able to reproduce this condition in a fetus puppy ... Jannie Louw used this innovation in a clinical setting, and Barnard&#x27;s method saved the lives of ten babies in Cape Town. This technique was also adapted by surgeons in Britain and the US.&quot;<p>Same page - &quot;Gil Campbell who had demonstrated that a dog&#x27;s lung could be used to oxygenate blood during open-heart surgery. (The year before Barnard arrived, Lillehei and Campbell had used this procedure for twenty minutes during surgery on a 13-year-old boy with ventricular septal defect, and the boy had made a full recovery.)&quot;<p>I picked Barnard because I know he was one of several doctors who practiced on dogs to get experience on how to do human open heart surgery.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adrian_Kantrowitz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adrian_Kantrowitz</a> - &quot;Using dogs and other animals as experimental subjects, Kantrowitz developed an artificial left heart, an early version of an oxygen generator for use as a component in a heart-lung machine and a treatment for coronary artery disease&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vitamin_C" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vitamin_C</a> - guinea pigs were discovered to be a good laboratory animal model for scurvy and the identification of vitamin C. Note that while Lind did human testing to identify that citrus fruits prevented scurvy, that didn&#x27;t pinpoint vitamin C.

Most of toxicological studies are cargo cult level science, so yeah it&#x27;s hardly surprising it&#x27;s &quot;ineffective&quot;. The worst part is that it is codified in regulations and it&#x27;s now a political problem to fix it, which makes it a lot harder.

There is no alternative for animal testing.