Spencer Bigelow
15 October 2014
Ethics in a World Context
Professor Traxler
(Title)
The Society of Toxicology, a group of doctors and scientist dedicated to creating a safer and healthier world through the advancement of toxicology, issued this statement recently, “research involving laboratory animals is necessary to ensure and enhance human and animal health and protection of the environment” (citation). Animal testing, a long debated issue, refers to the use of animals in experiments. It is used to assess the effectiveness of everything from medication to cosmetics. As a practice animal testing can be traced back to the 3rd of 4th centuries BCE when Aristotle and others preformed dissections on live animals. Today, approximately 13-25
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Veterinary medicine has made great strides in the past decades thanks to the efforts of animal experimentation. Diseases, which would have caused millions of deaths such as rabies, distemper, feline leukemia, infectious hepatitis virus, tetanus, anthrax, and canine parvovirus, have been largely irradiated because of vaccine testing in animals (citation). It is now commonplace in veterinary medicine to use such advanced medical practices as stem cell research, laser therapy and chemotherapy. The practices, let alone the idea to apply them as treatment to animals, would be hindered if it weren’t for the efforts of animal experimentation. Animal experimentation has also been a leading factor in animal conservation and has helped to save a variety of different species including the California condor, Bengal tiger, and bald eagle (citation). In particular, koalas, a newly minted endangered species, have been treated with the chlamydia vaccine in order to prevent the animals’ disappearance …show more content…
Primarily, they believe that animals don’t offer an adequate study system because of the inherent differences on the anatomic, metabolic and cellular levels. Paul Furlong, a professor at Aston University in the UK, declares, "it's very hard to create an animal model that even equates closely to what we're trying to achieve in the human," (citation). As such, the success rates on humans of drugs that pass animal testing is far from perfect. During the 1950’s in the United States, thalidomide, a sleeping pill causes over 10,000 birth defects in humans despite the fact that it successfully completed animal testing (citation). While it is true that animal testing isn’t always perfect at predicting the effectiveness of a certain drug’s effect on a human, it is the best option available. For instance, had the thalidomide been tested properly on pregnant animals it would have shown that deformities were prevalent in mice, rats, hamsters, marmosets, baboons, and the New Zealand white rabbit (citation). The success rate of animal testing is also a great misnomer. Thousands of drugs undergo animal testing each year with hundred becoming available on the open market. Inherently, the failures of animal testing such as thalidomide are greatly exaggerated. What go unnoticed are the many successful drugs that wouldn’t be possible without the
The harmful use of animals in experiments is not only cruel and inhumane but also often ineffective. Animals do not get many of the human diseases that people do, such as major types of heart disease, many types of cancer, HIV, Parkinson’s disease, or schizophrenia. There have been past occasions where drugs passed on animals weren’t even safe. There is no excuse for animal testing in today’s techy world, there are now many alternatives for animal testing that would put an end to the pain and suffering endured by these innocent animals during human testing.
Test subjects in medical experiments have always been a controversial topic, but this argument is often only thought of when animals come in to play. What about the humans who get tested on unwillingly, or people who do not possess the capability to consent to such procedures? They are also in need of someone to look out for them. Throughout time, many governments have done extreme testing to move forward their population’s health and for what they call the greater good. Yet, more often than not, these test have no rules or regulations. A moral code has been established slowly after many of these ghastly occurrences became known. Even to this day, we still have people trying to bypass ethical codes such as the Nuremberg code and the
At this moment, tens of millions of animals, such as rats, rabbits, monkeys, cats, and dogs, plus more, are being locked inside cages in labs all throughout the country due to being used in horrific experiments. These animal experiments are used to develop and enhance new drugs and to test the safety of products before being used on humans. Many of these experiments inflict pain to the animals and decrease their satisfactory of life. More than a hundred million animals suffer and die every year in the U.S. from medical education and clinical experiments, as well as merciless chemical, drug, food, and cosmetic tests. Animals also suffer and die in classroom biology experiments and dissection.
Practices used by early Greek physician scientists, such as Aristotle and Erasistratus, are still practiced to this day. One in particular is the use of animals in experimentation. Times have changed and technology has improved since they walked this earth. In recent developments, alternative methods for animal testing have been getting more funding, attention and research done in hopes to improve the scientific community. Testing on animals comes with many risks such as missed side effects due to the differences in animal and human DNA, which leads to wasted money. It also affects animals; over half of the animals used in animal experimentation are killed simply for the experimentations sake. Issues like these
Seventy million of lives are claimed by animal testing facilities and millions more survive through the horrific tests, suffering the psychological and physical consequences. “The use of animals in experiments at leading federally-funded labs has increased nearly 73 percent in the past 15 years, according to a new study conducted by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
Working Thesis: Animal testing continues to be a problem in America, affecting animals and humans through toxic, unnecessary experiments that can easily be avoided through alternative procedures. Berry, Colin. " Hazardous Products: Cut Animal Wastage in Toxicology Testing. " Nature, vol. 523, no. 7561, 23 July 2015, p. 410.
Despite the fact that the scientific world continues to embrace the use of animal testing, many scientists consider this act barbaric and ruthless (Food and Drug Administration 34). They go ahead to argue that the reliability and validity of this method are significantly questionable because to use an animal to predict how a certain product will react to human beings has a lot of uncertainty. In addition to that, some drugs may work excellently in animals and terribly fail in human beings. A good example is Thalidomide in Germany in the 1970s, which had been tested on a number of animals in their thousands and was declared safe for human use and released in the market in 1950s. It was a highly rated sedative for breastfeeding and pregnant mothers because the scientists involved argued that it affects neither the mother nor the child (Hackman 123). Never the less, most children whose mothers had embraced the use of Thalidomide were born with extreme deformation across the world. Another good example on how unreliable animal experiments are is Clioquinol. This drug was declared safe in stopping or controlling diarrhea in 1970s in Japan. Ironically, this drug was a catalyst in causing diarrhea and as a result many people died in thousands and many others remained blind. In addition to the examples above, the medical journal in Britain evaluated a number of scientific reviews concerning the
Animals are not the same as humans as you should know. So when testing products you need something that is going to replicate a human almost exactly. A new product is coming out called organs-on-chips. These chips are lined with human cells and basically mimic the function of that organ. The micro-engineered devices predict human situations more accurate. The creators of the chip are located at Harvard’s Wyss Institution and said the chips have “human airway cells from the air sac on a membrane that’s porous. On the other side of the membrane are human capillary blood vessel cells. There’s air on one side and there’s flowing medium with human blood cells in it, like blood on the other si.. on the capillary side. And then
Along with computer models, mathematical models are used as well. These models are closely associated with computer models because many of the computer models use mathematical models within them. They are “simplified versions of reality that … are especially helpful in cases in which several factors may affect the outcome” (Day, 101). Mathematical models are even more useful than computer ones because they can account for more than one factor. This helps to further improve computer models because scientists don’t have to look at one thing at a time; they have an overall perspective on everything. By using these models, scientists save a great amount of time during their studies. They also save money and animals because they don’t have
Animals are like humans they feel pain. So why do we want to hurt them and do human tests on them. Animals are very important in life. They have long lives and we are just wasting them. Animals are tested for our needs.
The Animals are currently being tested but should they be tested. In the modern day, more than millions of different animals are being tested.But actually animal they should not.
. I think that Many people feel that experimentation on animals is wrong and should be stopped immediately because animals feel pain and there are other alternatives.I think it is a problem because one day we are going to run out of animals that help us a lot. We know that This is a form of testing. People are scared that we might die of trying it without testing so we chose animals so we torture animals just to get what we want. We have an estimated 26 million animals are used every year in the United States for scientific and commercial testing. that means there are more that was just two, Over a millions animals are used in research every year to test drugs and their efficacy against various diseases.
Should animal testing be allowed? Animals have a soul and do not deserve to be treated poorly. People should treat animals with respect. Animals testing to the animals are probably so exhausting. Animals do not deserve to get treated like this because, what if animals were like us and did testing over humans? Animal experiments do not reliably predict results in human beings, animals can suffer like humans do, and medical breakthroughs involving animal research may still have been made without using any animals.
According to the American Anti-Vivisection Society there are three main ways animals are used in science; testing, biomedical research and dissection. In this paper I’d like to only focus on animal testing which encompasses using animals to “assess the safety of cosmetic, personal care, household products, chemicals, medical devices, and their component ingredients” ("Testing"). Some believe that this type of animal testing is necessary and in some cases it is even mandatory for certain products. I disagree with the necessity of this animal testing and believe it should be banned in the United States, so I will argue the points in this paper.
Nowadays, testing in animals is very common, and this is an issue. Some people say that testing is important because through testing in animal, the people can know the beneficial effect of different factor in biological organisms, and the knowledge of this effect can help the people to improve their health. However, other people say that testing causes damage to animals. In my opinion, testing is important because human can know the beneficial effect of drugs, food and physical agent in biological organisms through testing in animals, although the testing produces damage to animals.