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Comment by seangrant | Hacker News Reader

It's definitely a touchy subject and disturbing to the general populace, but such experiments are necessary for the advancement of the human race.

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I for one am glad to know that dogs in a vacuum spontaneously deficate. I suspect there is a vacuum that develops overnight in the corner of my living room.

Yeah. Now you don't have to blame the dog! :)

See my reply above. I think these experiments were unnecessary.

These animal experiments were done because they were convenient, not because there wasn't an alternative.

Oooh, I realize, that 19th centure statement about this being 'necessary for the advancement of the human race' is just you trolling (or sarcasm?), and I fell for it. Doh!

It's interesting to think just where would we be if we could retroactively apply our current moral views on science to the past times. With microscopes, X-rays, MRIs and computer simulations we can do science without harming other creatures. But we couldn't do that even as recently as 100 years ago. Would we ever have medicine without thousand of years of animal testing?

Hell, we know what is edible and what is not because in the past few thousand years people accidentally killed themselves by eating crap.

This is exactly what bothers me about makeup companies (and the like) that advertise themselves as never having experimented on animals. While they may not be looking at MSDS sheets [1], they are looking at something that tells them which chemicals are safe. And, in doing so, they are relying on millenia of accumulated knowledge about toxic effects, paid for with a lot of human death and suffering and, possibly, someone else's animal experimentation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_data_sheet

Why does that bother you? The wording doesn't seem misleading (as long as they are just using historical data, not incentivizing current production) and avoiding that knowledge would in fact bring more, not less harm to animals (if we include humans).

To me that sounds a very Augustinian view, in which we can never claim to be innocent of anything, because our life is shaped by past sins which we inherit. Personally, I reject that completely; we should acknowledge that actions by others in the past shape the present, but not feel ashamed of them.

That's a good question, one that would take me a while to explain, so I'll keep it short. I did not mean to imply anything about innocence or lack of it.

I guess I'm deeply bothered by proud statements of accomplishment that ignore profound and costly inheritance. PETA would never acknowledge that "cruelty-free" owes a debt to what they would term "cruelty". It's that lack of acknowledgement that bothers me.

I am a utilitarian. If you can make the argument that an experiment is a net good, then I can support it. The problem is I don't actually believe that this is the case for most experiments.

The smallpox vaccine was famously tested on a child. He was given the vaccine and then injected with smallpox. All based on a crazy theory. And the smallpox vaccine saved millions because of that test.

There are many similar examples from the early days of medicine. People just tested things when they needed to. The first anesthesia had only been tested on a dog, once, before being taken to the operating table.

Now hundreds of people die every year because we can't test things quickly enough. Human testing is expensive, there are a ton of conditions that make it impossible in many cases, there aren't enough subjects, we can't release drugs if there is even the tiniest doubt they might not be safe or effective, etc.

Many lives could be saved if we applied a little utilitarianism. But instead we only selectively apply the argument where it's convenient. The greater good argument is fine as long as it's just hundreds of chimps and dogs being tortured for basically no gain. But don't risk a single child if it could save millions! Or even a consenting adult in many cases.

Drug testing ultimately is an utilitarian tradeoff - on the one hand, testing too slow means people die; on the other, testing too fast increases the risk of releasing a drug that kills people. I feel we're too far on the "testing slow" side, but I honestly don't know enough to be sure.

As for human trials, situation gets complicated because incentives. I'm all for consenting adults being given experimental drugs, but there are so many avenues for abuse (and people are so good at using them) that I'm not surprised it's heavily restricted or banned altogether. Because today's consenting adult will be tomorrow's prisoner forced to do it, next month's poor schmuck tricked into it by marketing, and next year's every one of us.

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