Air France announces end to research monkey transport
the-scientist.com
the-scientist.com
If you are using that to argue that alternatives exist, you are unknowingly lying. They will probably exist some day, and everybody will use them without you having to ask.
I think the key thing here is that while eliminating 100% of animal testing is an ambitious -- and perhaps ultimately unreachable -- goal, data and computer simulations can make testing more effective.
If you use data to prioritize animal tests, or in some cases conclusively predict if some test won't any have value (e.g. the dosing is toxically high or ineffectively low) then that is a win. Both in terms of reducing animal tests, and in terms of speeding up drug development and making it less costly.
For actual testing, there are also microfluidic systems and organ-on-a-chip systems that are a field of active research. I think most researchers are more confident in these systems than in-silico (even though organ-on-a-chip systems are a field of active research and have their own shortcomings) because biological systems are active on several different physiological scales, and simulating all of these is rather rough around the edges to say the least. C elegans and fruit fly simulations are still the target of research, and I think fruit flies aren't simulated accurately from the cellular level (though if anyone knows better let me know). Simulating anything more complicated is likely to require either enormous computational resources as well as actual discovery, since you'd need to first characterize everything before you can simulate it.
BTW, I really welcome putting brakes on whole this animal testing stuff. I'm not really comfortable that it's still going on.
Computational models are decades, at the very least, away from being a replacement for animal models
There is no replacement for animal models, except trials in humans, so if the alternative is that we do more, riskier trials on humans, then I'd much prefer animal testing
Totally true, but, at the same time---
Computational models have prevented all kinds of unnecessary animal testing of things that can be shown computationally to be unlikely to work. So, computational models avoid us doing more, riskier trials on animals.
Of course, we've not reduced animal testing-- instead we've just pursued more compounds and ideas. I'd argue it's worth it for speeding up the pace of medicine. But these things are not completely orthogonal.
You only hear about the human trials that go wrong.
We still use both to weed out treatments, for both ethical and cost reasons. Better to errantly eliminate a working drug occasionally than to let a lot of unhelpful stuff through.
So sure, we use modeling, and it's getting better, but it's not going to replace toxicology studies any time soon, unless every other human system is replicated in silico first.
Are those the same things you're talking about or is there something I'm missing. I'm not that familiar with drug development.
Is there a meta analysis of such models?
Perhaps you can sell it to patients and their families first before agitating it in the public sphere.
I understand it from a purely utilitarian standpoint, but it doesn’t sit well with me ethically.
I wouldn’t want an advanced alien species to enslave and torture me at their own benefit.
I'm sure an argument to stop research in lifesaving medicine is easy to rationalize if you're in a privileged position where you don't have to deal with your children dying from malaria or being born with HIV, your elder family members slowly disappearing to Alzheimer's, or your partner's body withering away to cancer
I feel that it is ethically wrong to enslave and torture animals for humanities benefit. If that means that I will die from a disease that would have been prevented otherwise, I can accept that. I don’t feel it is right for me to impose suffering on another sentient being for my own incremental benefit.
As soon as your code passes unit tests, do you immediately push to production?
And that is with computing where we have a really good understanding of the fundamental principles.
Our understanding of biology is primitive by comparison.
Therefore we have multiple stages with trade offs of cost vs fidelity to production (release to the general public in humans) going from computation to cell cultures to tissue samples to mice to non-human primates to phase 1/2/3 human trials, etc.
I can see how quickly it ran run off to prison labor and more human testing atrocities circa 1940's world.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28955244/
It's an educational process. A lot of folk just go along with the status quo and feel there's no alternative to animal research.
This model checks for one side effect in one organ system. Animal testing can check all organ systems for thousands of side effects.
Clinical trials are expensive. NHP (Non-human primate) studies are also expensive, but orders of magnitude less expensive than human studies. We pharma researchers don't want to put stuff into humans if there's risk of failure, especially if that failure is a tox finding and not just low efficacy.
So we de-risk as much as possible. We go so far as to prove everything on human cells, then buy mice with humanized portions of their genome to test the target in mice that are more like humans in the way we need them to be. Then we test in NHPs, because it's very unsafe to assume that a drug that works and is safe in cells is safe in primates.
In a current project, I'm dealing with the fallout of this exact problem. We did a ton of testing, modeling, in vitro work, rodent work, then we dosed in monkeys and it caused a massive tox signal. We have to go back to the drawing board and explain what happened to the monkeys, how we're going to address it, maybe kill the whole program, and find a new path forward. It passed all of the rigorous pre-monkey testing. And I'm at a major pharma company, where we have pretty specialized teams doing most of this work.
edited to correct an error
They might rather not know.
Please re-read my original comment. In particular, the 92% bit
> you have to test on a full organism
Are you suggesting testing on humans? Clearly that's the only way to clear those "surprises".
> Organoids just don't have the complexity of living creatures
I think the gist of my argument against animal testing is that animal models aren't very good at predicting outcomes in humans.
Furthermore, there have been some disasterous human clinical trials where drugs have passed all the animal model testing but left many of the human participants dead.
Better than nothing.
>Are you suggesting testing on humans? Clearly that's the only way to clear those "surprises".
No, I'm just saying a full body with multiple organ systems, hormones, and everything else has many more variables than a cell in a petri dish. So a living organism of some sort is a big plus. It's true that if you tested on humans you'd have even fewer unknowns, but that's obviously unethical.
>I think the gist of my argument against animal testing is that animal models aren't very good at predicting outcomes in humans
They aren't perfect. They're just the best thing we have right now
Would be great if animal testing could continue to be minimized, but I'd like to continue having the benefits of safe and effective drugs. For somewhat irrational reasons I only really am personally bothered by testing on cats; dogs, monkeys, etc. don't particularly bother me, but I recognize this is irrational.
Does that not seem morally questionable to you?
But if what you're suggesting is that we should expend our effort exclusively on the larger of the two until it is fully addressed, then I can see how that has a certain logical appeal, but it isn't really how social movements work. Social movements are necessarily massively parallel, everyone pursues the causes they care about most, and adjacent causes support and are supported by one another.
Not only would it not be feasible to convince all the activists to pick one particular cause, it also would be less effective. It's sort of like the "packing" tactic in gerrymandering.
I have flown with Air France recently. They certainly do serve a lot of meat and cheese.
Pardon me, but it feels like you're engaging in a certain rhetorical tactic where you all-but make a conclusion - you say, I'm not taking any sides, I just want you to consider X, Y, and Z that would naturally lead you to a certain conclusion which I definitely haven't made myself. This serves to launder your conclusion through your audience, as if it were their idea all along. It shields your ideas from criticism and the hazard of taking a position that may be argued against.
And whether or not that is intentional, I'd ask you to stop. I have made specific claims which can be argued against - it's pretty unfair for you to respond in a way that, should I try to argue against it, just shifts around without really responding to what I am saying.
Speaking for myself, while I do eat some cheese, I haven't eaten meat in almost a decade, and I've found I genuinely prefer almond milk. I'm fully aware of the hazards and contradictions in my life. I don't really need you to point these things out to me for me to consider them. We live in a society where each of us is unable to fully live out their values. I'm positive that, if you applied the same scrutiny to your own life, you'd find similar problems. But of course that doesn't mean you don't believe in your values, only that you are a human being who is not omnipotent. It's pretty odd to try and turn that around on another person, right? Almost like criticizing them for breathing.
Not it is not a straw man argument. Non-human primate trials are the last stage before human testing. Eliminating non-human primate trials will increase the risk for human participants(unless they actually stop developing).
Our understanding of biology is nowhere near comprehensive enough to be able to simulate all these interactions and isn’t likely to be for maybe a century.
So if you eliminate non-primate human testing, your options are either to develop therapies at greater risk to humans, or to stop developing them.
Either of those options hurts humans. Thus, you are placing the well-being of non-human animals above the well-being of humans.
Industry would be happy to abuse animals until the end of time.
Framing this as a _preference_ for one kind of life or another is, in fact, a straw man. No such preference is necessary to accept this line of reasoning.
We absolutely should.
What do we do until such technology is developed?
The stuff is already here, it's just inertia that's keeping us from fully adopting it.
> some weirdo who would value my life equally to that of a monkey
Do you feel this over-values the monkey's life or devalues yours? Or is it something else?
The only true alternative to that is an act of self harm, and that is not free from egoism either, so I just don't think too much and enjoy my life, only following my own inner voice as to what choices would be ethical to make.
Do you feel this is a choice you are compelled to make? I don't mean to presume, but I'm going to proceed as if it were affirmative, because I don't anticipate a response, and this seems concerning.
That sounds perhaps like intrusive thoughts? I personally struggle with intrusive thoughts that are occasionally violent. They do not need to be acted upon though, and they don't reflect on who you are much more than a compression artifact in a video reflects on the cinematographer - it's line noise in your brain, it's incredibly complex and sometimes throws out signals that aren't useful.
If you feel this way and that it isn't within your control, I'd encourage you to speak with a professional.
That dark part is not serious - at least not in this context. That's just an extreme example, but the point is we do not exist without the karma of our body.
Well my pet has EU passport unlike my friend from Macedonia.
There is a different thread on HN with people who are passionate about not releasing chemicals until they are proven safe for human consumption.
Can we get Dang to merge these two threads and have a mosh-pit of passion and see what comes out?
What are the airlines view on these going to be, will they transport a pig heart for human transplantation? Where does that scenario fall?
Is it more ethical to test treatments with potential long-term health complications on research monkeys or... poor people?
There isn't one rational reason why a human should be worth more than any other animal.
If OP and their family AGREE to, then yes, of course, it would be infinitely better than testing on unwilling sentient beings.
Simple-- because the one pondering it is a human. Expecting humans not to have a bias for their own species is like expecting a lion to choose to go vegetarian; in general they that's not the nature these animals are endowed with.
If we're all animals, why is it okay for a lion to violently follow its nature, but humans cannot?
Are you that bad at contradicting someone?
Animal testing is rarely necessary, it’s just the easiest option, and when it is absolutely necessary to test on a living being, it should be possible to find someone to volunteer. If you can’t find anyone to volunteer, it’s clearly not necessary enough.
There’s already significant restrictions on what can/can’t be done to animals in many countries: I am not suggesting anything radical, just following these restrictions to their logical conclusion — no experiments on beings that haven’t consented.
Consenting ones.
It's more ethical to pay a consenting human generously, than to force an animal to ingest dangerous substances for no compensation of any kind(besides euthanasia when they're deemed useless), it's also a lot more efficient and reliable, humans aren't 150lbs rats.
People risks their lives and health daily for a salary(or for a greater cause, which would still apply here) , why should this be any different? How is it any different from a firefighter?a bodyguard? a miner? a doctor in an ICU?
No matter how poor you are you have a choice, these animals never got one, there is plenty of times where I would have accepted to be a guinea pig for money.
How many people here on HN would jump aboard the first spaceship to mars in the name of human progress, knowing they’ll probably die on the mission? Why can’t that apply to science on earth? The US doesn’t even have universal healthcare, so we can’t pretend the US has some deep love for protecting its people.
For medications they need. But to one is going to want to test the next generation of antihistamines, for example, when there's a safe alternative with a few side effects. So the only medications that people would be willing to test would be those for deadly diseases.
>for example, in my country, you cannot be paid for participation in a clinical trial
Why would anyone volunteer to take experimental drugs for nothing in return? The only reason would be in life and death situations
>Why can’t that apply to science on earth?
I don't know, but asking people to test drugs isn't gonna convince anyone. We need a real alternative to make progress. Hence, monkeys.
>The US doesn’t even have universal healthcare, so we can’t pretend the US has some deep love for protecting its people.
The FDA and medical boards do in fact try to maintain a standard of medical ethics. >
That's not an actual alternative.
It's like nazis saying they have a good alternative for clinical trials: jews, romanis and gays.
Just because it's affecting a different group of sentient beings doesn't mean it's an actual alternative, it's effectively the same thing: violation of consent, abuse and sequestration at a huge scale.
If we can deliver a potential 1% improvement to the effectiveness of anti-histamines but it requires a dozen monkeys suffering through testing along the way, is that okay… because it’s monkeys?
Your argument is much more applicable to testing on poor people than mine — after all, we need to make progress.
"Your suffering isn't worth more than mine." - Monkey or Rat in a lab somewhere Tzu
Don't quote me though, I'm just a brainlet.
Animal testing is a moral quandary. Rats, even if they weren't intelligent (which they are), don't deserve the tortures we put them through.
Gender identity and sentient AI equality have become fenceposts for our populist cross-dressing Musk-rat technocratic movement - but somehow, for many among us, animal rights still doesn't fit in...
The ends do not justify the means. Feminism and equality means giving a voice to those who cannot be heard - women, minorities, LGBTQ, and yes, primates and other animals. You must follow your precepts to their logical conclusions. Otherwise, you are not for true equality, and instead are for convenient equality, shackled to time and place, not forward thinking.
Consent - something which the monkeys have not given. Something which their world-splitting cries of agony, anguish, and tortured existence, clearly indicate. It appears their disposition to being used as biological pin cushions is quite oppositional, one could say their entire life is dedicated to saying "No."
Imagine a life dedicated to saying "No." Your mind is disoriented, deteriorating. The world is spinning, and your insides are churning, throbbing, and burning with the pain of a thousand suns. Your skin is peeling, your muscles ache, your bones dull with a hollow pain, and your body feels like it isn't even yours. Implants and incisions, scars and scabs, your body riddled with pockmarks.
It sounds laborious and awful, more than nightmarish.
Would you volunteer for it?
trials are not about who's willing to partecipate, but about the best model available.
monkeys are not asked for consent, true, but they're not picked at random either, because it would be useless.
There's also another matter: who's gonna consent to participate to trials in your proposal, rich people or poorer people?
An finally, how would you ask for consent to monkeys?
Do you ask mosquitos to leave before killing them?
edit: what really baffles me about this discussions is how much the mood of the population swings.
We have seen literally revolts on the streets against COVID vaccines being a way to force untested drugs onto the people but at the same time people complain that there is too much testing on non people
Wait, then why aren't we using humans? Humans are the best model available for human biology, no?
because we can't and do not want to artificially breed and engineer humans for that purpose.
we don't grow kids with rare diseases or tumors just to make them suitable models, not counting how long it would take.
but if you prefer it...
The question is "should monkeys be available for research?"
You state that "we should use the best models available", therefore we should use monkeys for research. But this assumes that monkeys are available in the first place! It doesn't show that we should experiment on monkeys, just that we currently do.
unless you want to test drugs' safety on the actual best model available, they are the second best model available.
> that monkeys are available in the first place!
they are not available as in nature, they are bred to be available.
we're not going to some rain forest to capture them in the wild.
we could do the same with humans, in fact Nazis did it and it worked remarkably well, ethics issues aside.
Anyway, only a few thousands monkeys are used in trials and most of them in non lethal (they do not risk to die) trials, for a short period of time.
Most of the animals used are not primates.
Even assuming researches and pharmaceutical companies are evil and have the worst intentions, monkeys are the most expensive option and it takes a lot of times to breed them, a true evil entity wouldn't waste all that money and time, when a rat gestation time is 21 days and they mature in a few weeks.
trials are not about who's willing to partecipate, but about the best model available.
monkeys are not asked for consent, true, but they're not picked at random either, because it would be useless.
There's also another matter: who's gonna consent to participate to trials in your proposal, rich people or poorer people?
An finally, how would you ask for consent to monkeys?
Do you ask mosquitos to leave before killing them?
Last but not least, do animals reciprocate those feelings?
Do they ask for consent before exploiting other animals?
Comparing monkeys with mosquitos is kind of disingenuous. How many monkeys have killed people in 2022 compared to mosquito?
Lastly, many research takes place for beauty creams, shampoo etc.. that are total useless. There are also many research were animal are disregarded as useless. Maybe sustainable research is needed instead of dumping them uselessly?
Thanks!
That's a popular argument, but it's a false premise.
If the objective is saving animals, why don't we ban flight transport altogether ?
It kills, directly and indirectly, a lot more (a LOT more!) animals than medical trials will ever do.
In the end it's mostly people going on holidays, it's useless.
Probably those who want the benefit of the medication badly enough.
it doesn't make them good models anyway.
not better than peaking up a random animal from the zoo or a random. human from the population.
in fact access to experimental trials is not on a consent only basis, patients need to adhere to some parameter.
for example: my mother in law was rendered almost blind by a degenerative disease.
She volunteered for an experimental trial on a new treatment but she was too old and her condition too advanced to be a suitable candidate. She was fully willing to be part of it, but consent alone wasn't enough.
I'm not happy we have to rely on animals, believe me, but suitable patients are already hard to find, if we don't test drugs for at least a reasonable definition of safe, we risk to kill the research, not simply slowing it down.
and that's much more probable for those diseases that are rare on humans, that are already underfunded and under researched.
Debating as if there needs to be a replacement solution to a problem to justify change - that's Whataboutism style of debate.
If we used this line of logic with slavery, we'd still have plantations.
isn't it saying that we lack "the perfect replacement" whataboutism itself?
we lack any replacement.
Or we would be using them already.
> If we used this line of logic with slavery, we'd still have plantations.
slaves are people.
Sorry to point it out, but it makes a little bit of difference to me.
But to further expand, the problem with slavery have been the USA, in Europe, for example, the Catholic Church, following the teachings of Tommaso D'Aquino (Thomas of Aquino for anglophones), considered it a sin and was practically abolished starting from the first centuries of high middle ages. It took USA 5 centuries to catch up with the civilized World.
So at the times an alternative WAS ALREADY AVAILABLE, but white Americans thought slavery was cool (it was also cheap for them).
Researchers do not think animal trials are cool, they know there is no alternative at the moment and would very much prefer to use something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
Do you always debate in a dishonest fashion?
I'm simply not an English native speaker.
So the question goes right back at you, I guess.
Would you prefer to argue in Italian?
I can be much more precise in my native tongue.
p.s. please remind me what false arguments I provided. It would be much appreciated. thanks.
I do not believe that lab animals should exist, period. You are in search for a replacement solution to drug development. I am not. There lies our dispute. I feel that it is okay to not be able to solve this "problem" because our current solution is exploitative and wrong.
I agree that often in human trials, the people who volunteer are poor or desperate, and this is a different issue which goes to the root of capitalism -- since work itself is a coerced form of volunteerism with the societal threat of homelessness.
Pretty much all of capitalism is coerced, just on different degrees or levels. The same applies to most of what is considered voluntary or consenting.
For example, joining the military. One can argue that most who join are lost, confused or poor. And they'd be right.
Or prostitution. Or working a minimum wage job. Etc.
The problem with fake consent in capitalism is much larger than drug trials.
It's the same question, actually.
> I do not believe that lab animals should exist, period.
What you believe it's irrelevant.
> You are in search for a replacement solution to drug development.
I'm perfectly fine with what we have.
You're rhetoric skills must be quite weak if you need to put words in my mouth.
> I am not. There lies our dispute. I feel that it is okay to not be able to solve this "problem" because our current solution is exploitative and wrong.
Then just don't use drugs or any product coming from animals.
Watch this
https://www.ted.com/talks/christien_meindertsma_how_pig_part...
> I agree that often in human trials, the people who volunteer are poor or desperate
Nobody said it and not necessarily.
They are simply ill.
You can't use healthy people to prove a drug works...
> since work itself is a coerced form of volunteerism with the societal threat of homelessness. > Pretty much all of capitalism is coerced,
(・_・ ヾ
Consent of certain actions is almost always under duress in a capitalistic society. These folks' arguments about consent not being "true" are just arguments against capitalism and for socialism, and I would agree with them, you'd probably too?
It's pretty clear cut that these animals aren't consenting, so their arguments are just moving the fencepost to gripes with capitalism.
Representing this as typical of the research animal experience is disingenuous. You should be able to make your argument without resorting to hyperbole.
We're talking about monkeys, whose biggest use in recent research was in vaccine development. So e.g. Rhesus macaques were given injections of vaccine candidates (and convalescent plasma, etc), and then immune responses were measured. Some were then exposed to SARS-COV-2 to determine if the vaccines were effective. SARS-COV-2 produces much less severe illness in macaques than humans.
So sure, experimentation effects may vary but the upper limit is fucking brutal and definitely depends on what stage the drug is in. Early on in development, the effects could be worse than death.
So could the effects of e.g. life in the wild. Anything can go very badly.
IMO: You can't be completely blind to the utilitarian angle. The average and distribution of outcomes matters.
So, we go through an escalating series of tests-- designed to both weed-out drugs cheaply and to avoid suffering; from conceptual models to computation to tissue cultures to organ models to small animals to larger animals to small numbers of humans to large numbers of humans.
If you weed out the last couple of steps before humans, you're going to either try a lot fewer drugs on humans, or increase human suffering a whole lot to protect smaller animals.
> It sounds laborious and awful, more than nightmarish.
Powerful stuff. I agree this suffering should be reduced.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200203215527/http://www.xenosy...
Do you have any actual arguments or just hypothetical slippery slopes?
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...
Your argument is more for socialism, and I would agree with you.
Just want to point out something I've noticed. Everyone has a different idea of what exactly feminism is, and everyone thinks their idea of feminism is obviously the real one.