Alternatives to animal testing are finally taking off
spectrum.ieee.org338 points by rbanffy a day ago
338 points by rbanffy a day ago
As slow as it may be to adopt, it's a welcome change to how people should do research. Why induce suffering on an animal when the potential for failure and or miscalculation is so high? It seems from the article a model/chip can be more insightful on how something will affect humans.
It should be a tiered system, IMO.
1) Where possible, don't test in animals.
2) When testing in animals, first ensure that there is reasonable confidence the risk and severity of harm from the testing will be minimal. Only begin initial in vivo testing after this has first been achieved.
3) For test animals that are or aren't harmed, allow them to live happy, (relatively) normal, natural lives. Don't end their life early unnecessarily, with exceptions for humane euthanasia if the testing has unexpectedly caused significant, persistent suffering. Treat them as a pet owner would treat their beloved pet rat.
Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans. 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.
Most of what you said is already how it's done today, at least in the pharmaceutical industry.
> 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.
> The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject?
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 should be a tiered system, IMO.
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.
I do feel bad for medical mice, especially things like SCID Mice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_combined_immunodeficien..., which are basically only born to be infected with something, and then die. Even more so in a recent case of academic fraud I've seen involving cancer testing, where the data was obviously faked, but mice still died for the data.
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
How do you feel for wild mice, who typically have short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten by a snake, bird, or other predator?
I mean, at least that pain isn't being forced upon them by some higher being for the purpose of scientific fraud or similar, or be deliberately bred to be immunocompromised
Should hunter gatherers be thankful if we kidnapped them and tortured them to death in our labs?
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?
These examples don't work. Hunter gatherers didn't suffer, and the other two are in outlier bad situations. Set them free in a stable situation and they'll live happy lives.
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.
> Hunter gatherers didn't suffer
Of course they did and still do. They have far higher rates of infant and child mortality, death from curable disease, starvation, and violent death.
It’s inconsistent to call the natural condition of wild animals, surviving and dying in nature, "no happy free life," then exempt humans living under that same fundamental condition.
How do we draw the line, from which principle that isn’t ex post facto? Do no wild animals have a happy free life? Do all humans? Most? A minority? Across all of human history?
Even in the most cherry-picked minority of cases, someone born into a wealthy developed country, people are frequently born with or develop agonizing diseases. They die of cancer and dementia despite their wealth. They live in grinding poverty, or barely cling to existence through depression, anxiety and alienation. Many suffer so greatly in fact that they commit suicide.
Suffering isn't a state of existence reserved for animals that humans are exempt from except in rare cases.
So if it is not, then is the fact that people suffer tremendously just as a normal fact of life justification for nonconsensual fatal human testing?
You're trying too hard to find suffering. It should have been clear I was comparing to "short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten" and "torture", not to a paradise without disease.
Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.
The claim above is about mice. I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim.
> You're trying too hard to find suffering
I don't know how you can say this, frankly, unless you do not see or experience any of this suffering yourself. If not, you should be extremely grateful for your luck.
You don't have to try hard, at all, to find it.
> Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.
How are you defining this, and again by which principle do you draw this line which isn't some ex post facto version of "well humans are here, so I'm going to say everything to the left of here"?
> I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim
We should be extremely skeptical of this claim because it's so convenient.
It absolves us of the guilt for the tremendous harms we're causing them by proposing something which we would see as obviously absurd if it were applied to us:
"A short, miserable life of having all sorts of horrifying experiments performed on you in a lab is better than being free to live your life and die in the world at large." - Person who benefits from performing experiments on you in a lab