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i dont know how i feel about this...
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I hate the thought of animal testing / experiments .......
I know we owe several medical advances to such, but it doesn't make me feel any easier on the subject .
Posted 27 months ago.
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Same as what woodworker said. Even lab people have mixed feelings. I know more than a few scientists in the pharmaceutical business who develop bonds with the animals they work on. They're really torn by the whole thing, granted, some of them aren't the most emotionally stable people anyway.
I just wish someone would come up with a good synthetic model to use so this wouldn't be an issue anymore...
Posted 27 months ago.
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I'm getting pretty sick of those heartless evil human. =(
Posted 27 months ago.
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It could be worse. I wont touch most cosmetics after learning they like to test them out on bunnies.
At least this research could actually save lives. There's no excuse for some of the other crap that is done.
Posted 27 months ago.
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As a scientist, I know that animal work is important but it has to be done on the right animal models as shown by the whole thaliamide case. I personally can't do animal work as it would break my heart, it was bad enough having to do disections at uni.
The whole fluorescent thing is to make sure that they know the genes they want to be taken up in to the animal model have been as they are attached together. The fluorescent is just to say yep it has worked.
Posted 27 months ago.
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Rachel Em....they have done this with mice, and pigs, and it didn't hurt them...either...right?
Posted 27 months ago.
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Yes but mice aren't very reliable as models for human treatments. We've cured cancer about a hundred times over in them but the results have yet to be replicated in human testing.
A good example of that is some of the work done in angiogenesis (the growth of new blood vessels) and, if we can stop it in those with tumors, we can basically starve the tumor of the nutrients it needs to grow and, in rat/mice models, eventually killed the tumor entirely.
Since we're still doing things like Run For the Cure, I don't think you guys need me to tell you that it was no where near as successful in human models...
Posted 27 months ago.
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Pam, they have done this with other animal models, the gene that use is from jellyfish. The fluorescence doesn't hurt them under ordinary light they look normal it is just the UV light that makes them glow.
It would be good to get away from animal models but unfortunately we still do have to use them as we don't get the same results with just using cells in a petri dish, we have to see how it affects the whole body. As has been proved when they have gone to human trials and there have been bad reactions. However care has to be taken to get the right animal models.
I hope that is dipolmatic enough for everyone I don't want to cause any offense to anybody as I know it is a very sensitive subject. *science hat off now*
Posted 27 months ago.
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Don't worry Rach, I have a pretty strong science background myself (I wanted to go into oncology but organic chemistry kicked my butt) so I understand where you're coming from.
Actually, the test that proved that tumors need process I mentioned before (angiogenesis) was actually proved in rabbits. While the idea of testing on rabbits makes me shudder, before that test was done, it wasn't know that new blood vessel growth was so important to tumors (without it, they can only get to be 2 mm in diameter).
The guy who proposed the theory was a surgeon who noticed that the tumors he operated on in human patients were abnormally bloody but all of the scientists (using petri dishes) thought it was laughable.
Even if the potential drugs they have tested so far haven't been all that successful, the more we know about cancer, the better chance we have beating it in humans and animals.
A 3D structure is very important in research since, like Rachel said, petri dishes have severe limitations when it comes to the behaviors seen in a test tube vs seen in an actual organism.
Like I said before, it's not like scientists don't care about whats happening to the animals. I know many of them are quite torn about even using rats (which even most animal lovers I know aren't keen about). Thus far, it's just kind of proved to be the lesser of two evils. I don't think any government would ever allow the human testing of a treatment that hasn't been used in some other lifeforms first.
I know this got kind of long but this is something that I, personally, struggled with. I never got far enough to do tests on anything other than flies but I am very aware of where a lot of our knowledge came from and at what expense...
Originally posted 27 months ago.
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Illy-chan edited this topic 27 months ago.
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