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animal testing

ChemicallyEnhanced said:
But I was quoting you...and then you gave the opposite opinion? I'm confused.
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No I didn't, I made a point of FACT.
It was you that brought up some subjects & I just told you I am fully aware of how NASA got benefit from the death of Jews etc & also what Japan got upto during WW".

Where did I say I was ok with these things?..........
 
Zopiclone bandit said:
No I didn't, I made a point of FACT.
It was you that brought up some subjects & I just told you I am fully aware of how NASA got benefit from the death of Jews etc & also what Japan got upto during WW".

Where did I say I was ok with these things?..........
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When you said I should be "fucking ashamed" of being against animal testing.
 
Zopiclone bandit said:
Testing ANYTHING on animals is sick, sorry but if things have to be tested what the fuck is wrong with testing it on people that have done horrific crimes like raping kids etc? I have NO issue injecting some sex pervert with unknown drugs, fuck their pain & whatever may happen to them I say.

.....

The animals you seem to give less than a toss about are innocent, they have never harmed you or anyone else YET you seem to think it is ok to do horrific things to them, you better know "God" is just & has a really good memory is all I'm gonna say.
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Yes! thanks ZB and CE, I was hoping someone on the other side would post so I could work out why I disagree with you.....

Firstly, I know you, zopiclone, are a meat eater. You are supporting industrial animal rearing for pleasure.The last part of my quote of you can be directly written to you regarding eating animals. chemically enhanced, are you vegan? if not, why is using animals to cure cancer bad but eating them or their products OK? I have been vegetarian for over 20 year. i'm also interested, if you developed type 1 diabetes, would you just die then? or cancer for that matter? if not, why is it OK for you to receive treatment for which animals have suffered, but the people who develop the treatment, out of genuine compassion for humanity, are damned to hell?

Let me explain to you how this would work on humans: first, we find people who are genetically predisposed to the disease of interest. We get them to reproduce for us, for control they have to be in our care for the pregnancy, to avoid anything happening during pregnancy that could effect the results. Their offspring will need to be kept in a controlled environment their entire life so that differences between lifestyles don't affect their results. When we have done that for enough generations that the people produced are reliably going to get our disease, we start experiments. say they've got aggressive brain cancer. they are not receiving other treatment, as this would confound our results. some of the people will mercifully be killed within 24 hours of our treatment, so we can dissect their brains. others will be kept alive much longer. if they're lucky they've been bred to develop a cancer called the terminator, cos then their miserable lives will end in 12-15 months anyway. if its a slower developing cancer they may suffer for years. the treatment doesn't work. they've all lived life in captivity then died in vain. repeat until we get a treatment that works.

unfortunately as selective breeding of humans takes so much longer than using the mice and rat lines we already have, many people would die of our disease of interest before we'd even started their experiment, some of these could hypothetically have been cured if we'd got the research underway quicker. so, this is why we don't just experiment on criminals. even if we had enough with the types of cancer of interest, there are too many unknown variables, we'd need a HUGE sample.
 
Hmm, ZB and CE are in agreement, yet still manage to confuse each other. That says a lot... ;)

If you guys can honestly say you've never used a product that has been safety tested on animals, then your opinion counts. If not, then I think you're on dodgy ground tbh.

It's an unfortunate fact that suffering fuels progress. Hopefully, we will one day progress far enough for that to no longer be the case. But then we'll have to put up with people whingeing about "cruelty to AI's"... ?
 
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chinup said:
Firstly, I know you, zopiclone, are a meat eater. You are supporting industrial animal rearing for pleasure.The last part of my quote of you can be directly written to you regarding eating animals. chemically enhanced, are you vegan? if not, why is using animals to cure cancer bad but eating them or their products OK? I have been vegetarian for over 20 year. i'm also interested, if you developed type 1 diabetes, would you just die then? or cancer for that matter? if not, why is it OK for you to receive treatment for which animals have suffered, but the people who develop the treatment, out of genuine compassion for humanity, are damned to hell?
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I'm well against the way animals are raised to be eaten, I have NO issue myself in going out into a field with a .44 Magnum & blowing off a cows head IF I was going to eat it & use whatever is left to dress myself as that is life. People eat animals & then animals eat people back, maybe go for a swim in the sea just off West Australia & see how long you think this concept doesn't hold water.

As to the comment "i'm also interested, if you developed type 1 diabetes, would you just die then? or cancer for that matter?" the answer is yes, my time is up & there are too many humans on this planet anyway so that isn't a concern to me. If it was cancer just make sure I have enough heroin & I'll be fine thanks.

"why is it OK for you to receive treatment for which animals have suffered?" I NEVER ASKED for this shit to be done did I? I firmly believe we can cure stuff with the natural plants that "God" gave us for a reason you know.
 
How would you verify that said plants were suitable as medicine? Given what I said above about your idea of testing on criminals....
 
Sorry about off topic, but last month I drew some molecular structures of previously unknown compounds that can be synthesized with one reaction from natural precursors, they are listed in these threads:

Molecular docking apps

Yesterday, I tried to find online ligand-protein docking simulators to see it they could tell the difference between known dopamine reuptake inhibitors (methylphenidate, altropane, amfonelic acid...) and non-DRIs (ibuprofen, cyclizine, citalopram and some random organic compounds). I downloaded...
www.bluelight.org www.bluelight.org

I Like to Draw Pictures of Random Molecules

^ It must have been a bit of work drawing all of those and making predictions... I tried to put a non-amine version of methylphenidate, with a sulfur atom in place of nitrogen, in the Swiss target prediction app as an input (the oxygen version is known to be a likely DAT ligand). Didn't get a...
www.bluelight.org www.bluelight.org

The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics target prediction application says they all are possible dopamine reuptake inhibitors. Do you know how to perform a real molecular docking simulation to get a better prediction of dopamine transporter binding affinity?
 
polymath said:
Sorry about off topic, but last month I drew some molecular structures of previously unknown compounds that can be synthesized with one reaction from natural precursors, they are listed in these threads:

Molecular docking apps

Yesterday, I tried to find online ligand-protein docking simulators to see it they could tell the difference between known dopamine reuptake inhibitors (methylphenidate, altropane, amfonelic acid...) and non-DRIs (ibuprofen, cyclizine, citalopram and some random organic compounds). I downloaded...
www.bluelight.org www.bluelight.org

I Like to Draw Pictures of Random Molecules

^ It must have been a bit of work drawing all of those and making predictions... I tried to put a non-amine version of methylphenidate, with a sulfur atom in place of nitrogen, in the Swiss target prediction app as an input (the oxygen version is known to be a likely DAT ligand). Didn't get a...
www.bluelight.org www.bluelight.org

The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics target prediction application says they all are possible dopamine reuptake inhibitors. Do you know how to perform a real molecular docking simulation to get a better prediction of dopamine transporter binding affinity?
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Not only is this off topic, it's off subforum... :D
 
F.U.B.A.R. said:
Not only is this off topic, it's off subforum... :D
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Yeah, but no one currently posting in NS&PD seems to know about how to do this... It's a bit of a practical example about the design of new ADHD meds...
 
chinup said:
foreigner, please answer my questions. where is your data? seriously i have the skills to analyse it and can publish, the world deserves not to suffer unnecessarily! do you diagnose breast cancer personally? what biomarkers do you use? how do you differentiate between types? how would you assess whether a cancer has metastasised? what difference does the 'underlying syndrome' make to treatment? when is patient cured? under what circumstances would you advise someone to go to a doctor- i.e. how do you differentiate between someone for whom '5/10 might work' and someone who needs 10/10? if 'maybe 5/10 might work sometimes' is an acceptable standard for alternative medicine, why are 15% of modern medical treatments having no proven efficacy an issue for you?

nobody is claiming that evidence based medicine doesn't have shortcomings, we just claim that it is based on evidence, so nice take down of a straw man.
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It's not my job to provide all this to you. If you want to learn, then go to school, or do some research. I am too busy working with patients. It takes years to learn the things you are asking me. There are plenty of holistic health research communities out there who will cater to your request for evidence. I personally have no desire to enter that kind of discussion with anybody, especially with the patronizing remark in bold.

The other problem is that your question lacks context.

The 10/10 comment was an analogy. I am comparing heroic medicine (which is always extreme and unnatural) to approaches that reinforce the body's own mechanisms. I wasn't talking precise statistics.
 
But people used to die of type I diabetes, appendicitis and some infections that are no problem to treat today with conventional medicine... It's like asking, if you have gangrene on one of your fingers and it's all black, will you do some magic spell on it or have it amputated.
 
exactly polymath!!

foreigner, every one of those questions can be given a rough answer in a few sentences. some of them, i.e. do you diagnose breast cancer personally?, are yes or no questions. regarding biomarkers, most have codes so again it's a one word answer.

every one of those questions, apart from the first, asks what you do, and therefore cannot be answered by research, only by yourself. it took me years to learn the skills i have now, but i can explain what i am doing to my team, i'm the only data analyst, the rest are biologists, its not difficult. so please answer them, i'm genuinely interested and open to changing my mind. i'm not asking to shoot you down.

i am sorry the sentence you bolded came across as patronising. as it stands, i don't believe you, because you are giving me no reason to. i would dearly like to, as i don't want people to suffer unnecessarily, and it seems that you have a way to. the burden of proof for your claims falls to you.

the reason i don't believe you is because i know for a fact that herbal preparations are not used in state of the art cancer treatment. i also know for a fact that researchers working on state of the art cancer treatment are open minded and would use herbs if there was evidence that they were more effective than current therapies. therefore, either there is no such evidence or they are not aware of the evidence. as you apparently have this evidence i don't understand why you wouldn't want to use it to substantiate your claims and save lives beyond those of your patients.
 
I don't think foreigner is talking about magic but what some would call traditional "medicine". The problem with most traditional forms of medicine is that they suffer from assumptions about the functioning of the body. For TCM, there is the belief in qi and the flow of this energy through meridian points in the physical body. Most treatments seek to balance or modify that flow but, unfortunately, there is not even a scrap of evidence that something even broadly analogous to this concept exists. If you adminster a treatment to effect something which does not exist, how can it be claimed to be truly effective even when some effect becomes apparent? Any positive results can only be considered educated guesses- and the longevity (the traditional part) of these beliefs means that the pool from which to draw these guesses is quite broad and that is what accounts for results, not age old wisdom past down through generations. But you know what a guess can turn into when you are ingesting plant medicines? Yeah, its a horrible death. You can bet that countless of hideous things happened to people before they were truly able to understand how toxic datura plants can be- and if you don't believe that, consider that humans wore lead-based makeup for thousands of years even KNOWING that this caused extreme toxicity. And if you believe that such a plant mediates its effects by manipulating energy fields and not by blocking the effects of acetylcholine, you're not really going to be able to use it very effectively- so we have datura eyedrops for pupillary dilation and the like in traditional medicine. Don't get me started on the use of animal body parts in such traditional medicines too...

TCM and other alternative medicines are not verified unless they can demonstrate a scientific basis in fact. By that, I mean that all parties who examine this product should be able to elucidate the same principles and repeat their applications and outcomes; it shouldn't take years of experience to know how to adminster a medication that will work. Anyone with some basic first aid training and the right material who adminsters chemotherapy treatments has roughly the same chance of it being effective for the patient. Of course, not everyone who compounds the medication will be able to do it equally; for that, you would need information on precise doses and how the drug works in different bodies- just try titrating a dose of chemo using such concepts as subtle energy fields in the body and lo and behold you have a person with cancer now dying of radiation sickness. You're going to have more success looking at real factors such as body weight, type of cancer, aggression/growth of cancer, the patients biochemistry, etc.

Traditional medicine derives its knowedge solely through observation of cause and effect over thousands of years. Its the length of time that gives it any hint of solid backing, but this basically means that it needs to be tested for thousands of years on humans and any conclusions derived relate to only a small amount of the questions we need to ask a new substance. I guess modern animal testing recognises that and tries to speed up the process and not impact humans.

On the subject of animal testing, I am not entirely against it with a few caveats. I am a vegetarian so I don't actually think using animals for human ends is ethical, but I also believe that in some circumstances refusing to do so can be more unethical. If a thousand mice die, and a million other animals live, under utilitarian ethics that is a reasonable price to pay. The knowledge derived from animal testing has been used to help non-human animals too, so if we are seeing a broad, interpsecies benefit, that may be a reasoably weighted exchange. My main caveat is that I do not think that cosmetics and the like are reasonable to test on animals and that we should avoid as many such products as we can. Pretty much everyone of us consumes animal tested products daily; every modern medicine has been tested on animals but I guess we can take from that they are likely to have actual effects in the real world. I am still in split minds on this sort of topic; Peter Singer is a philosopher worth reading in this field, he is a strict vegan who does concede that animal testing may have 2 justifications; if it serves a vaster good than the harm it causes, and if the suffering of the animal can be conisdered "lesser" than the suffering it is aiming to reduce. Arguably, a mouse is going to suffer less than a human if locked in a box and zapped with electricity for its entire life, only because of the vastly more complex emotional center in humans and our sense of real-time consciousness. Of course, this opens a whole different debate because we have no real way of ranking degrees of suffering against one another. You can only really look at quantities of organisms saved for a more blunt metric; if an order of magntiutude more animals are saved through the sacrifice of a few, the maths suggests that you've injected more "good" into the system than you've removed. If that is the overall aim, than perhaps animal testing in specific circumstances is acceptable. I will never feel comfortable with it though.

TL;DR. Traditional medicine isn't really medicine, its guesswork. Animal testing is sometimes okay but rarely.
 
For a while, I had an idea of creating a braindead rat or mouse (which doesn't feel anything) for experiments like deliberately caused cancer, but it looks like the vegetative state also affects other parts of the body so it can mess up the results...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Evidence of bone marrow downregulation in brain-dead rats - PubMed

Experimental findings support the evidence of a persistent leucopenia triggered by brain death (BD). This study aimed to investigate leucocyte behaviour in bone marrow and blood after BD in rats. BD was induced using intracranial balloon catheter inflation. Sham-operated (SH) rats were trepanned...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Experimental findings support the evidence of a persistent leucopenia triggered by brain death (BD). This study aimed to investigate leucocyte behaviour in bone marrow and blood after BD in rats. BD was induced using intracranial balloon catheter inflation. Sham-operated (SH) rats were trepanned only. Thereafter bone marrow cells were harvested every six hours from the femoral cavity and used for total and differential counts. They were analysed further by flow cytometry to characterize lymphocyte subsets, granulocyte adhesion molecules expression and apoptosis/necrosis [annexin V/propidium iodide (PI) protocol]. BD rats exhibited a reduction in bone marrow cells due to a reduction in lymphocytes and segmented cells. Bone marrow lymphocyte subsets were similar in BD and SH rats (CD3, P = 0.1; CD4, P = 0.4; CD3/CD4, P = 0.4; CD5, P = 0.4, CD3/CD5, P = 0.2; CD8, P = 0.8 . Expression of L-selectin and beta2 -integrins on granulocytes did not differ (CD11a, P = 0.9; CD11b/c, P = 0.7; CD62L, P = 0.1). There were no differences in the percentage of apoptosis and necrosis (Annexin V, P = 0.73; PI, P = 0.21; Annexin V/PI, P = 0.29). In conclusion, data presented suggest that the downregulation of the bone marrow is triggered by brain death itself, and it is not related to changes in lymphocyte subsets, granulocyte adhesion molecules expression or apoptosis and necrosis.
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polymath that's actually a pretty neat idea!! wish it could work. can't see how anything to prevent the animals becoming distressed wouldn't interfere with the underlying biology.

swilow thanks for your post! really appreciate a clearly thought out and well argued position.

i agree with basically everything you said. as far as i can tell, if traditional medicine were truly effective, then we wouldn't need modern medicine. but we do, there's examples in this thread of cases in which people died until recently, and all of the cures came from modern medicine.

its not even clear to me whether the concepts in traditional medicine are well defined, beyond obvious things like anatomy. without a clear definition, i don't know how you would measure them. if you can't measure them precisely, then even if you're an expert, how do you specify a dose? i'm not sure they are the type of thing that CAN be clearly defined. take the 'subtle energy field' example, we actually know that our body uses some insane number of orders of magnitude of the electromagnetic spectrum to facilitate communication between cells. we could describe this as subtle energy, but its not that of traditional medicine, as electromagnetism wasn't understood until a couple of hundred years ago, with the classical theory not being discovered until the 19th century. so were traditional medicine referring to electromagnetic energy in a well defined sense, then people in that area would have made predictions that revolutionised science many centuries before it happened.

i agree about animal testing ideally being a reasonably weighted exchange, and stuff like cosmetics is definitely disgusting. i do feel like we need to account for the level of suffering involved as well though, which includes an organisms capacity to suffer and perhaps the impact of illness beyond the person/animal suffering the disease. i think its reasonable to expect that species with much larger brains, or that are known to have higher intelligence (like dolphins), have more capacity to suffer, so testing on them would be worse than testing on species with smaller brains. this is borne out in the ethics of animal experimentation, far fewer experiments are performed on primates than rodents, and the bar to get a proposal involving testing on primates allowed by an ethics committee is much higher.

essentially i think if suffering is minimised as far as possible and the testing is to find cures for otherwise terminal or completely life ruining illnesses, then its OK, until we get an option that doesn't require any suffering, and that is being actively researched right now.
 
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