Alternatives to animal testing are finally taking off

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.

> 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

No matter how many checks, there's a human trial, and that may not go to plan either: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4811626.stm

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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 humans

this is already what they do, you have to justify usage of animals and meet standards for quality of life to do any research at a real institution

also animal research is a huge pain in the ass, nobody is doing it unless they have to

That's already how it works.

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.

I think that oversimplifies it. One approach is use animals early because if there is no effect in animals, then you don't have an effect.

Once you have an effect, use in vitro models/cell culture to figure out potential mechanisms, then test again in animals to confirm.

If you are doing a PhD (or whatever), do you want to spend 5 years not knowing if your discovery only works in test tubes?

> reasonable confidence the risk and severity of harm from the testing will be minimal

this sounds good, but how do you actually define that? how harmful do you consider giving an animal a UTI (which has the chance to infect kidneys, etc if untreated)?

> For test animals that are or aren't harmed, allow them to live happy, (relatively) normal, natural lives

I agree on principle but for infectious disease you can't really do this without potentially releasing lab strains into the wild.

Something you didn't mention would be to try to use as many parts of an animal that you sacrifice as possible, but then again you're just cluttering expensive -80C freezer space with random tissues if you don't use them. But sometimes when doing ex vivo experiments you can turn one mouse intro multiple samples if you cut the tissues up and expose each one to different conditions, rather than treating the whole mouse. That can save mice..

I agree. If it’s a question of just cost - (animals being cheaper to just test on quickly and faster) animal testing shouldn’t be allowed.

Time to feed my beloved pet snake.

> But without trying for millions of times, scientists won’t find the one drug that works.

well isn't it mostly other way around? millions of times to LOOK FOR hidden SIDE-EFFECTS?

animal testing is mostly for answering 'is it safe?'

Well, when people say "organ on a chip" it sounds completely synthetic, but some organ-on-a-chip designs (and many organoid platforms) actually require the killing of untold numbers of mice to generate the matrix compounds. So that would just be an industrial obfuscation of who is doing the killing: now it is not the scientist doing all the killing but the Matrigel manufacturer. But to be fair, this will likely change over time as more synthetic approaches are developed. And the lung-on-a-chip described in this article does not use Matrigel. So I think it is actually a pretty good example of moving away from animal use in biomedical research.

Trying to go plant-based too much at once is really difficult and almost always leads people to this all or nothing mentality (and speak for you directly obviously—just my observations).

I’d love to see people take a statistical model. I currently get 50% of calories or maybe protein from animals. If I reduce that to 40%, what would that look like? Maybe 1 fully-plant-based meal a week? That way I can test out a recipe or learn how to make tofu yummy.

Or maybe you’ve heard “I can’t live without steak” or “cheese.” Well, trend towards plant-based except for steak or cheese (while not increasing your consumption of that).

You're still doing more than most, and if everyone in the world made choices like yours it would still cash out in massive changes to animal welfare even if it was short of 100% perfect.

I think an unfortunate thing that has poisoned too much of the talk of animal welfare has been what I consider a small minded and frankly frivolous accusation of hypocrisy. The "hypocrisy" is the price of agreeing to be accountable to a much higher standard. The "consistency" of not even bothering to try is not morally preferable.

Another option is to go organic. There is organic yoghurt, milk, eggs and of course meat. At least you know that the animals have had a better life.

If you end up needing to keep dairy, you can do things like only buy dairy from 100% grass-fed, pasture-raised cows. Cheese from Europe is more likely to meet (or approach) that criterion, and yogurt is very easy to make, especially if you have a temperature controller (though it's not critical).

There really is. And it's worth making the effort! Wishing you luck.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good

Go at your own pace. It's more important to succeed a little than to risk failing. Cheese and yogurt still lack really great vegan alternatives. But I switched to oat milk, which lasts longer, is cheaper, and (IMO) tastes better, and I haven't looked back.

Wait until you're comfortable with the changes you've made, and only then introduce more.

Flax eggs are a good substitute for eggs in many recipes.

On the contrary I would say. Animal welfare laws explicitly exclude farm animals, while animal scientific research at least requires an ethics panel review, etc. The types of farms in the US that house many many animals, and hence end up in the majority of the meat supply, often have a truly dire existence before death.

Lab-grown meat is starting to become feasible and it's already being turned into a cultural issue just like electric cars were. It's pretty embarrassing.

"The Horror of Unfathomable Pain" [1]

[1] https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-horror-of-unfathomable-p...

I can't find it (looked for 10 minutes), but there was an article at some point talking about a video that activists took after sneaking into a certain slaughterhouse. It showed cows (or was it pigs?) being put in a cage and slowly lowered down into a pit full of hot smoky gas. They were freaking out all along the way down, and as they were being pushed into the cages. Call me pathetic but it made me think of the people having to choose between burning to death and jumping to death, except in this case there was no choice at all for the animal. And no more than a few thousand people died this way on 9/11, but at just that one slaughterhouse probably orders of magnitude more animals have died in that way.

Frankly, with how pigs are killed, they could have said the holocaust and it would have made more sense (at least to me)

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This is true, but perhaps not for the reason you have in mind. The “failures” are exaggerated by shoddy experimental design—mainly trying to generalize from a single fully inbred strain of mouse. Most murine research is based on this one strain: C57BL/6. This is like conducting a clinical study with one seriously inbred human subject multiple times. Very poor generality even to other types of mice, let alone to humans.

I think it's terribly unfortunate that the the "in mice" meme ever took off. If overhyping science based on preliminary tests is bad, so too is the blanket dismissal of that research that overcorrects in the wrong direction.

We share enough mechanisms across genetics, proteins and even our immune systems and that research is capable of asking meaningful questions that matter to us, and frequently has paid off. That's not to justify the ethics of it but I think it's beyond question that research iN mIcE has been an important research platform for things like immunology and lead to nobel prizes. Research writ large is a vast cumulative program of small iterations that are, individually, of provisional significance, and the categorical dismissal of it as not producing instant one-shot cures is at least as bad a misunderstanding of science as overhyped articles are.

One important lessons in modern biology is that deeply understanding one species is more useful than roughly understanding many. Experiments done on cells in dishes must still be tested in animals, such as dogs, monkeys, and pigs, before being tested on humans. Unfortunately, skipping any of these steps is still difficult.

Odd that in all the comments I have read so far no on has yet mentioned the many apparently faceless octopods, chickens, turkey, lambs, pigs, goats, and cows many of us consume each week and how they ended up in our mouths; the same mouths now discussing mouse welfare. Yes, odd.

If the alternatives are as fast and cheap as lab rat testing, sure.

If not, the alternatives will cost human lives and suffering.

Well, yes, the humanism seems to be on a long decline, that's true, "dogs are inherently better than people" etc.

I think for most people who are against animal testing it is not the death of the animals that is the principal problem, it is the suffering they undergo while alive.