I am aware of the potential promises and discoveries.... and I still think “stahhp” when it comes to gene editing primates. We’ve made it thus far, let’s just not open the box before we really know what’s in it.
Here is the thing, this is probably moot. The genie is probably already out of the bottle.
I doubt that an average person with CF would want testing on primates to be done in their name.
Justifying your ethical position by name-checking a disability group is kind of gross, especially given that animal testing is not a mechanism which typically results in improved treatment.
I’m sure you’ll find people who don’t feel that way. But I can’t overstate enough how horrible it is to go from being a functional adult with all the joys and sorrows that brings to being a much less functional person in pain every day. That is reality for millions of people. I don’t feel that what GP did was gross. I think it reflects reality for people who suffer on a daily basis, and whose loved ones do.
It's your choice to support that; but there are only about four million non-human primates on the Earth/or, 400,000 great apes.
A good percentage of them are already being tested on.
And I’d have any number of them tested on if it meant progress toward a cure for any number of conditions afflicting human beings. I don’t think that’s “gross.”
Most animal research doesn't have therapeutic benefit as a goal or any prospects of contributing to any therapy. Pretty much none is successful on these terms.
e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1781970/
Even so, animal research as a whole is still justified and gets public funds on these terms, without any evidence of results.
Can you name one therapy, confidently, perhaps even without searching, that has clearly come out of animal testing?
[To answer my own question, the only example that I'm immediately aware of is: thalidomide.]
Why, in any other circumstance, would we want to spend a precious resource in unlimited quantity on something that is expensive, unethical, and doesn't work?
However, to claim that animal research hasn't had a massive positive impact on the advancement of biological knowledge and healthcare is not based in reality.
Animal testing has found hundreds of vaccines against HIV that work in primates, but none of them have worked in humans.
How is that a useful thing to spend time on? You have a model, and it's proven that your model doesn't work: I would expect you to throw away the model.
You could spend those excellent researchers and science budget on anything else, and expect better results.
(I get that all drugs have been tested on animals out of legislative requirement, but I hope it's clear we are talking about using animal models for de novo drug discovery).
For a business-oriented forum, I find it hard to understand why people see this as valuable.
Arguing that someone with a disability should support this because they might benefit, without reason or evidence for that, is an appeal (only) to emotion.
I find it ableist, to use disabled people as an abstract hypothetical grouping in this way, only to support a point that is indefensible any other way.
If you don't want me to have an emotional reaction, don't set up an emotive point.
Your point in the other comment was that you would cause suffering to and sacrifice "hundreds of billions" of primates for a small chance to heal yourself.
That's clearly not balanced. I personally don't think that animal testing as it exists today, and given the complete lack of direct results that it has to show us, is balanced either.
Do you really value yourself, as a human, trillions of times higher than a chimpanzee? I don't and won't respect that. You saying that, out loud, only makes me wonder how much you internally value other humans.
The technique described in the article absolutely could result in not just "improved treatment", but an actual cure. We know what causes CF. We know what causes many other genetic diseases. Right down to the individual bad DNA segment.
And there is absolutely no way those treatments are ever going to be approved without animal testing. Sorry, they just aren't.