> Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans.
I don't consider it an extreme view, as lots of people share that view. But within the scope of pharmaceuticals, as opposed to cosmetics, I disagree with it because I think that's an impractical guideline to follow. Animal testing happens because there aren't good alternative ways to get safety data (on a per-treatment basis) without putting human lives at risk, and it's already a tiered system designed to balance scientific need against animal welfare. This is also why in standard medical trials proving safety comes before proving efficacy.
> The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.
The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject? You need safety data. How do you get the safety data? Right now, the main way is a tiered system that starts on a petri dish and eventually passes through mice, monkeys, etc. before humans.
I don't think you and GP are actually saying anything different. I interpreted their statement 'The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?"' not to mean don't test on animals if you wouldn't on a human, but to use your reaction and feelings to that to guide your judgement, and help judge what type of animal testing you're at, not to be a binary switch of whether any animal testing at all should be done.
It is a tiered system, at least if you look at big pharma. There are many stages in the pharmaceutical drug development process.
Also human testing (clinical trials) have different stages/tiers to maximize learning and minimize risk at every stage. A lot of companies trying to innovate here.
I’m exited what more AI can bring to this space.
But yes, it's hard to test immune responses without hurting a living animal, since you'd have to somehow have a non-alive immune system to test on otherwise
What about people from Gaza?
Is it acceptable to do human testing as long as you pull the humans out of say east Africa during a famine?
If that description of wild mice is accurate, there is no happy free life. The baseline is very different. I'm not going to try to say how that should affect the rest of the ethics, but it's an important point to consider, and not as easily dismissed as your examples would imply.
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Two men who fell seriously ill following a clinical drugs trial remain in a critical condition but four others are showing signs of improvement.
All six are still in intensive care in Northwick Park Hospital, north-west London, after falling ill on Monday.
TeGenero, which manufactures the anti-inflammatory drug, says it has apologised to the men's families.
Critics of animal testing have cited the case to argue that experiments on nonhuman animals, even in species closely related to humans, are not necessarily predictive of human responses, and cannot justify the harm inflicted on animals or the resultant risks to humansalso animal research is a huge pain in the ass, nobody is doing it unless they have to
Meeting standards is nothing but a formality, a form to fill. The PhDs and lab staff doing the killing, if they have any qualms about the act itself or just the purpose of the killing, generally justify it away as being what they have to do to keep the job. The "humane" killing methods are learned on the job through trial and error, and such errors keep happening regularly to experienced staff.
Prior to lockdowns, many/most lab animals just got killed: interesting quality of life standard.
What's written in lab policies is not at all how it happens in reality.
They do that already? Then how come an estimated 192 million mice are killed each year?
FWIW, just watching a few pigs in an existing herd without interacting with them in any active way requires an extensive ethical approval process. Nobody would go through even that if they could gather the same data from a computer model.
Cost core to our resource allocation system, for better or worse, and if something costs a lot it usually means we can't do it as much. In this framing, cutting out animal testing would (often) mean medical research is slower. In this framing it's a question of where people are willing to put the dial on ethics vs results, and of course pumping the breaks in one place without universal buy-in just means the cruelty moves elsewhere.
I don't think the above 1-dimensional framing is the whole story though. You could imagine more standardized data sharing, so that the data that cost the lives of a few thousand rats could be used by others. And of course you could require (as drug trials do) that the study be registered before any experiment happened, and that the results be published regardless of the outcome. Some of these changes could actually make the science better, in addition to more ethical.
[1]: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-19350.pdf
For most drugs the only reasonable test animals are mice and rats. And they LOVE to naturally get cancer and other diseases, so you need to use large groups to get even a semblance of statistical significance.
Oh, and don't forget that it takes a lot of time to run the tests. And time IS money for pharma.
There are ways that animal testing could be made far more humane (like birth control to prevent the kind of overbreeding that demands mass culling), but those, themselves, would be costly.
And in order to test cures, you must first inflict the animals with the disease. How many do you need? Are you sure? Because waiting to produce more later would also create costs. Cheaper just to breed a huge batch now and then cull the surplus.
... so how many extra do you want?