Does anyone else support animal research?

[JerryBlunted]

JerryBlunted - I find what you say about the plants possibley "communicating" pain and danger to each other very interesting. What I find even more interesting is that, if it is your contention that these plants are sending out signals of pain and suffering, that it took a scientist to mangle and cause this pain and suffering to "discover" that these plants do in fact suffer and feel pain.

Well, how else would you observe pain in a controlled way without applying it? This finding is at this point hardly strong enough to take as fact, but it does suggest that plants do have some active interpretation of physical trauma and a way of communicating a warning about danger to other members of their species.

Any biologists in here? I've heard about trees communicating about which direction to send roots or grow toward sunlight by means of chemical signals as well, any truth to that?

And I wouldn't put discover in quotation marks as it IS in fact a discovery if we prove plants feel distress in some way comparable to animals. At this present juncture I'd be willing to bet maybe 1 out of 10 people would believe this is true. I myself suspect plants do have more feelings than we can currently prove (they respond well to music and talk, etc.) but its really just speculation with a little data to corroborate at this point.

If it was proven to be true it would be something to ponder though, huh?

As for the rest of your message, I will endeavor to reply with an appropriate response when time presents itself. For now though let me conclude with a very heartfelt "Go Yankees!!!!"

 

[justsomeguy]

Well, how else would you observe pain in a controlled way without applying it? This finding is at this point hardly strong enough to take as fact, but it does suggest that plants do have some active interpretation of physical trauma and a way of communicating a warning about danger to other members of their species.

Yes, I wasn't taking it as a strong fact.

And my point is not that the correct and only way to observe pain in a controlled environment is to apply pain, that is rather obvious, but rather that we ought not apply pain to observe it in the first place. To do so is to play exactly into the knowledge-through-subjugation strategy I wish to avoid.

 

[JerryBlunted]

then what do you propose we do as an alternative? mankind (womankind included of course) cannot and will not halt the quest for knowledge it is one of our fundamental characteristics.

 

[nads]

*rolls up sleeves*

<<do you think your consciousness is felt by each cell?>>

No. I have already stated that it is better to look at cells from a cellular level, not an anthropomorphic level which includes phenomena such as consciousness, pain etc.

<<if your finger is cut but the tissue is kept alive in a lab.
does you finger have a consciousness of its own?>>

See above.

<<in order to salvage arguments you're denying ideas that would have used as arguments in another thread.>>

I have denied nothing, merely advanced an idea I believe is better. I've attempted to answer all your questions but I still have some questions for you left unanswered.

<<are you now denying the importance of a nervous system?>>

Wherever did you get that idea from?

<<does your cut finger suffer, or can you only feel the pain through your central nervous system?>>

Excuse me, am I only allowed to choose one of the answers? I want both. The finger suffers in that it has had some of its tissue destroyed but feels no pain because a finger is not a vertebrate. The person suffers slightly due to tissue loss (refer to scale of injuries) and moreso due to pain. The two aren't comparable as they suffer differently.

<<look at me in the eyes and pretend that the physical trauma of a rock being broken or of a plant being cut is comparable to an obviously conscious animal to be tortured.>>

No pretending needed. On a physical level, all cell death is equal in it's deathness. A rock is different, it is a part of the non-living Earth which regenerates itself regardless of what we do thanks to tectonic plate movement.

<<i really don't appreciate people who don't give a fuck about animals trying to use my reasoning about them, relying on facts, to a similar reasoning about plants, only relying on suppositions. and then ignoring my reasoning about animals and only pointing out their hypothetic conclusions about plants, that they obviously don't apply in their lives.>>

a.) You have no idea how I live my life, there is no 'obviousness'.
b.) My arguments are based on facts about how cells are all identical in that they strive to survive and that physical trauma affects them all equally.
c.) I haven't ignored your reasoning, only argued with you.
d.) Calm down, and open your mind to the possibility that I'm not trying to rub you the wrong way but just explaining some ideas.

<<if you pretend to care about plants, that should be a reason to care even more about animals whose consciousness and senses are so obviously related to ours.>>

WHY?!?!?!?!? Don't just assume I have the same thought patterns as yourself, explain to me why there exists a reason to care more about an animal than a plant if one cares about plants.

 

[justsomeguy]

then what do you propose we do as an alternative? mankind (womankind included of course) cannot and will not halt the quest for knowledge it is one of our fundamental characteristics.

i really doubt that people have any charecteristics that are fundamental...i mean come on, all men and women, forever into the past and future have this thirst for knowledge that must be satiated?

i don't buy that sort of essentializing.

i'm not saying we get away with knowledge all-together, i'm simply saying we change our methods of appropriating knowledge to be more compassionate, respectful, and caring. i would imagine you would agree with me on this point?

 

[zorn]

"Although the sciences hav eincreased human power over natural processes, they have, according to [my above] analysis, done so in a lop-sided way, systematically perpetuating women's [and in the context of this thread, animal's] cognitive and political disempowerment...ne obvious questoni, the, is whethr this appropriation of power is an intrinsic feature of science or whther it is an incidental feature of the sciences as practiced in the modern period, a feature deriving from the social structures within which teh sciences have developed. A second question is whether it is possible to seek and possess empowering knowledge without expropriating the power of others. Is seeking knowledge inevitabley an attempt at domination? And are there criteria of knowledge other than the ability to control the phenomena about which one seeks knowledge?"

justsomeguy --
Where on God's green earth do you dig this stuff up? Is this actually supposed to have any relevance or connection at all to, yknow, reality? Or do "feminist philosophers of science" just get really stoned and write this kind of stuff as part of some esoteric game?

No offense, but I read through that post three times and failed to discern any actual substance in it. You seem to be a pretty bright guy, so it sort of baffles me. I mean, do you actually believe stuff like

If the means through which we save human lives and increase human happiness are supported through an assymetrical, hegemonic power-knowledge scheme, I believe that we, as humans, are at great risk of placing ourselves within that scheme, and of becoming victims to self-subjugation as dangerous as the cancer and AIDS we are trying to cure.

!?!?

Can you try explaining this without all the big words? Allowing scientists to do animal experiments will cause them to go power-crazy and subjugate other people? That's gonna cause us to become part of an "asymmetrical hegemonic power-knowledge scheme" (whatever the fuck that is) which is "as bad as cancer and AIDS?" Now I'm sorta slow, so maybe I'm not understanding properly, but that just sounds completely ridiculous.

---


PS -- What's up with the excessive use of scare/sneer quotes in this branch (PoMo/literary theory/etc?) of the humanities? I mean, do "knowledge," "ethics," and "communication" really need the quotes? 'Discovery'? Isn't that just silly faux sophistication?

PPS -- And have you ever heard of a guy named Alan Sokal?

 

[justsomeguy]

sorry, i'll cut out the bullshit....sometimes i overwrite bullshit when i don't need to, and please, call me on that.

okay, here's what i meant with that block quoted sentence.

an assymetrical hegemonic power-knowledge scheme is, roughly speaking, the way in which scientists experiement on animals, whereby the animals have no power, where all the power to probe, feed, test, kill, cage, and basically subjugate is on the side of the scientists. the animals can't run away, they can't fight back, they can't forage for food, they can't do anything but be on the receiving end of the scientists' power.

through this lop-sided scheme the scientists are said to be either discovering or creating or appropriating knowledge. by probing this rat, and feeding these fish this chemical, and strapping these electrodes to this mouse, and observing this other rat's feeding habits, etc, the scientists come to know things about drug interactions, behavior, etc.

thus, through the unfair, lop-sided power, the scientists come about some bits of knowledge. this is what i mean by "assymetrical power-knowledge scheme." i call this scheme "hegemonic" to emphasize the dominance of the scientists on the animals, and also to imply the dominance of scientific knowledge over the rest of culture.

yes i was bit vague.

i find this method of discovering knowledge, or constructing knowledge (not much difference between the two) problematic for a few reasons. first, the means that the knowledge is appropriated is come about unjustly if we believe animals can be considered in justice relationships. second, even if animals cannot be treated justly or unjustly, the poking, proding, injecting and killing becomes legitimated by the products of the scientist's activities. the medicines produced and the knowledge appropriated by these means tell society at large that it is OK to prod, poke, inject, kill and dissect our world as long as it serves our interests.

the assymetrical power-knowledge scheme becomes the norm; when the unjust use of power is the norm for animals, its much easier to stomach unjust power used on humans.

this is why the same society that produces animal research also produces prisons. to think that science exists in a vacuum from the rest of culture is a poor thought; science's power of legitimation and ability to produce knowledge is dangerous when science is carried out in ways that encourage the ritualized incarceration and killing of animals.

whether science's influence for bad is worse than cancer and AIDS is probably something i shouldn't have said; it was a bad comparison.

 

[justsomeguy]

no i hadn't heard of sokal before, but from a quick google search i think you've just insulted me!!!

 

[justsomeguy]

is this really necessary?

 

[Cimora]

I beleive animal testing is the lazy way out. If companies or goverments got together we could have a working virtual simultation of a human body quicker than we resolved the Genome project.

Simulations are far more accurate, and provide better safety than animals. The technology is here, now the world needs to stop going for the cheap, easy and comparitively inaccurate option and put the work in so we can end the needless killing of animals (especially animals with the capacity to experience rich psychological pain like us, such as primates)

Now i agree, the animal testing has made simulation possible, via the medcial understandings its delivered us. So to some degree (and this is actually a small amount of the research done - most animal research is pointless in terms of medicine, safety and science benefits), some animal testing in my mind, has up to this point been justifiable (For me, cancer and aids research on primitive mammals like rats seems pretty okay - as the animal becomes more evolved and has psychological pain, abstraction, understanding etc it becomes ethically undoable for me - cancer or aids no matter - because to my rather well informed understanding of human versus animal experience/brain etc - theres no difference in how much suffering such an animal would experience and a human being - thus humans make more ethical volunteers for such research)

So short answer: generally no. The costs (suffering), really have to be balanced against the benefit with real thought (which in practice doesnt happen ever). In those circumstances where real medical or scientific benefit can be delivered (a big drop in suffering), with a low amount of cost in suffering - thats okay.

However now 100% accurate simulation of the human body is possible (save the brain of course, but animal testing on neurological drugs is very low accuracy anyway) - at a high but one off cost - animal testing can no longer be justified for me. (Unless paralled inititiatives are also being taken to advance simulation)

 

[nads]

Cimora - We're a looong way off simulating the human body in entirety. It took this long sequencing the genome, which in comparison to a completed proteome, is a blink of the eye. First off you have 6 reading frames to deal with (3 fwd, 3 rev), modifications to consider, and multiple-function proteins - some which aren't so obvious.

And it doesn't stop there, we need to figure out the brain too, and it does matter wrt how the body reacts to a certain drug, most of the homeostatic function is located in the brain and isn't very well understood. The amount of processing power needed to handle the massive amounts of variables in a human body is probably a long way off too.

All these branches of science seem to be heading towards this complete simulation which will finally make animal testing a thing of the past. But like others have already said, we couldn't get there without testing.

Now to the ethical issue. justsomeguy said:

the medicines produced and the knowledge appropriated by these means tell society at large that it is OK to prod, poke, inject, kill and dissect our world as long as it serves our interests.

Yep. There's nothing sadder than lying to oneself when plain, obvious evidence is right in front of you telling you otherwise.

You can take the man out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the man.

 

[justsomeguy]

i seriously doubt the jungle man kept animals in cages...unless i'm missing your point here.

 

[nads]

The point is most life exploits something else in order to grow, multiply and survive (exceptions being photosynthesisers & scavengers). So if we are to say it is morally wrong to do this, then we must feel as though we've risen above the life of a consuming animal and become one or both of the aforementioned classes of life. I highly doubt any person has achieved this.

 

[justsomeguy]

i'm not saying that we ought to think we have risen above exploitation of nature, but rather, that one particular type of exploitation ought to be avoided.

certainley we must eat to survive, but we need not cage, inject, and dissect to survive.

 

[Cimora]

We're a looong way off simulating the human body in entirety. It took this long sequencing the genome, which in comparison to a completed proteome, is a blink of the eye. First off you have 6 reading frames to deal with (3 fwd, 3 rev), modifications to consider, and multiple-function proteins - some which aren't so obvious.

Well okay, emulating the whole genome is obviously a ways off. But emulating a functional emulation of an organ doesnt require that. Theres no micro-level nessesary for most things. Theres a simulation of a human heart, that can give a functional analysis of a heart medication, or for experimental surgery using VR. (Its been used for both). Its a complete heart and it behaves in all circumstances like a real heart - medicines, diseases, anything bigger than the microlevel - you just build the molecular structure and plonk it in. It cost a bundle but it will save more and give greater certainty, as people like the FDA learn to trust it. If enough large pharmacetical companies, universities, medical research companies, maybe govts, invested in a large scale project (to the scale of a budget likely in my estimation smaller than the Genome project) they could have a working model of all organs but the brain within a smaller timeframe than the Genome project. (The heart took 1 year and a bout .5 mil i think - you see it costs money, thats why people arent using it - you need an investment group to want an advantage over their competitors, ie safety - but for that you need the FDA et al along for the ride, so the public needs to accept simulation as a stane-alone standard for safety before any1 wants to buy in.

Hence my continual speal about it

The brain is a seperate project, although a working model of the CNS apart from the brain should be possible. The brain itself is a bigger project than the Genome by quite a magnitude.

The cell structure and molecule level interactions should be modelled in a separate micro project - to model viruses, antibodies, free radicals and all that. The immune system still holds some mysteries so a complete model may require more medical knowledge, but not derived from animals. The micro project could be intergrated with the Genome project and the body project to eventually create a complete person (aside from brain) from the microscale. (When we eventually merge with the brain project to emulate a whole person however, ethically we may find ourselves back in square one to some degree - for example do we really want to emulate a suffering human being using a bad medicine?)

Our knowledge of the body is such, we dont even need any more animals or humans to finish the job on the functional body level.

And it doesn't stop there, we need to figure out the brain too, and it does matter wrt how the body reacts to a certain drug, most of the homeostatic function is located in the brain and isn't very well understood. The amount of processing power needed to handle the massive amounts of variables in a human body is probably a long way off too.

The homestatic function/regulation, is one of the few things we can actually learn reliably from animal brain studies. Some animals can teach us some things, but often not very much and at a fairly high price in suffering. Theres a great degree of incompatibility between species that in actuality probably shouldnt be acceptable as a safety standard. Hell animal studies in general can be pretty dicey. God knows the number of toxins, carcinogens, neurotoxins and other nasties weve approved on the back of animal testing only to fuck a whole bunch of folks up because oops were wrong. Neurological drugs are at the high end of this tip of incompatibility, especially for many of the modern purposes such as anti-epileptic, anti-depression, anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety and pain/sleep meds which involve some high level function specific to humans. And yet monkeys, which are fairly evolved animals are being used, having their brains munched as a safety standard for drugs for which their is no true correlation of safety.

Either simulation or animal studies, the uncomfortable fact is their is no reliable or even semi-reliable means of studying some of the things we want to with the brain without real human people. People need to be aware of this - your pharms etc are tested on you, not on mice. Take prozac. Long term users now have brain damage, like mdma axon damage. And thats the way its gonna be for a long time yet.

All these branches of science seem to be heading towards this complete simulation which will finally make animal testing a thing of the past. But like others have already said, we couldn't get there without testing.

Some testing yes, i agree with you. The level we see today? No way is in all nessasary for sciencitific progress or medicine. Even that which is, most of the science and medicine is pretty useless in terms of improving life, knowledge or saving people suffering - Its only a kernel of science which can really even begin to justify itself it terms of "the greater good" - and even their you need an analysis of the suffering and death causes which is generally not practiced, in order to make it truely "justified", paid and bought. At least IMO.

Emulation is really only the investment away, which is really only public perception away. If they can make a complete heart in one year, with a relatively small budget and a small team, the rest, apart from the brain should footwork - (some basic brain and CNS signals should be doable, to provide some basic emulations of things like involantary muscles, maybe some aspects of arousal/alertness - in terms of nerve signals in the body)

 

[JerryBlunted]

i really doubt that people have any charecteristics that are fundamental...i mean come on, all men and women, forever into the past and future have this thirst for knowledge that must be satiated?

i don't buy that sort of essentializing.

i'm not saying we get away with knowledge all-together, i'm simply saying we change our methods of appropriating knowledge to be more compassionate, respectful, and caring. i would imagine you would agree with me on this point?

Well homo sapiens = "thinking man." There is a reason we are named thusly, and a reason the extreme trauma and pain of the birth process is worth it for the added benefit of the higher brain (neocortex) that allows us to do this thinking.

From the time you come into the world you are a sponge soaking up new information. If your schooling doesn't manage to completely eradicate your sense of curiousity it will remain the default state.

If we didn't have this innate need to know and desire to advance our understanding the course of history would probably look radically different.

I would be happy to change our methods to something more compassionate, respectful, and caring if I could find those methods you speak of and if they actually work. Nobody WANTS to hurt animals in these experiments, it is a necessity to advance research that is important for men, women, children and animals (domesticated animals definitely benefit from medical research).

See, in this argument the thing that a lot of people seem to be missing is that most of the pro-animal research people AGREE with the contention that hurting animals is wrong... it is our view that it is necessary at this point. If developments continue to the point where it is no longer necessary, I would be extremely happy to abandon my support.

 

[justsomeguy]

homo sapiens might equal thinking man, but is this the name all humans give themselve cross-culturally, and throughout the history of man? probably not. just because one label a particular group, even a very large group, of people gives themselves imply an innate thirst for knowledge does not mean that this label trumps all other labels simply as a label.

your argument that the pains of birth are justified because of our larger heads and brains, the neocortex, adds thinking benefits is entrenched within the logocentric, Western discourse that actively seeks to legitimate itself from a thinking-head perspective.

What I am saying is that your analsysis of "we have big heads and brains that cause pain in birth, but that pain is justified because of the thinking benefits given by those large brains" is biased by its position in a logic oriented culture.

To me the idea that the quest for knowledge is an essential, maybe even the essential and innate characteristic of our humanhood doesn't make sense.

You say that "if we didn't have this innate need to know and desire to advance our understanding the course of histour would probably look radically different," I could equally say, "If we didn't have this innate need to dominate and desire to advance our power and means of production, the course of history would probably look radically different."

I could also say, "If we didn't have this innate need to play baseball and desire to advance our homerun percentage, the course of history would probably look radically different," because our history would be absent of the totality of the history of baseball. To essentialize one apsect of our personhood, be it the quest for knowledge, the desire to inflict pain, our having an opposable thumb, or our featherless bipedness is to marginalize and possibly trivialize all the other rich and manifold charecteristics that make us who we "are."

I'm on my way out the door for work, so i'll proofread and add some more comments later.

 

[JerryBlunted]

homo sapiens might equal thinking man, but is this the name all humans give themselve cross-culturally, and throughout the history of man? probably not. just because one label a particular group, even a very large group, of people gives themselves imply an innate thirst for knowledge does not mean that this label trumps all other labels simply as a label.

...

What I am saying is that your analsysis of "we have big heads and brains that cause pain in birth, but that pain is justified because of the thinking benefits given by those large brains" is biased by its position in a logic oriented culture.

...

I could also say, "If we didn't have this innate need to play baseball and desire to advance our homerun percentage, the course of history would probably look radically different," because our history would be absent of the totality of the history of baseball.

Homo sapiens is the scientific name that is accepted by all other cultures within the scientific context. If you take it out of the scientific context then you are not going to have a commonality of language, which is why the context is so necessary in the first place. A biologist in China, Australia, France, South Africa, and America will all know what you are talking about when you talk about homo sapiens.

Our brain is not the feature that serves as a boundary between the start of humanity and our departure from our primate ancestors. Most anthropologists would likely say bipedalism is what the first major departure was. However, the brain, when it did expand, was what led to the vast majority of the changes that result in living the way we do today.

Are you contending that other people besides Westerners DON'T have an innate thirst for knowledge and don't try to understand the external world through whatever methods are available to them? Not every culture has a material/scientific outlook, but all try to address the same fundamental questions by some means or another. We have botanists who study plants, an indiginous culture has a shaman who does more or less the same thing through a different method. Besides, there have been MANY non-Western scientific cultures (Arabs in antiquity developed much of modern mathematics, the Chinese developed gunpowder and a complex medical system, etc.). Science is a method of observing external reality by trial and error systematic controlled observation. It is an attempt to minimize the subjectivity of perception.

As for the pain of childbirth, it is a fact that needs no justification. There isn't any way out of it. You can argue about it till the cows come home, but ultimately it remains as is. It is sort of a digression, anyways.

The baseball analogy is false. We have no inborn desire to play baseball, there are plenty of places in the world where they don't play it yet get along fine. We DO seem to have an innate desire to socialize and often that takes the form of an athletic competition. Games and sports are found in all cultures in varying ways. You get caught up on the specific expression, when that is not important, it is what is being expressed and satisfied in that form, not the form itself.

 

[zorn]

Cim.... we're nowhere near being able to entirely simulate the human body. Nowhere close at all! I can't emphasize enough how much of a pipe dream that is right now. It's a nice thought, but still far, far, faaar away.

It's not that we just need motivation or funding for this; there's tons of work being done on computer modelling and simulation in biology & medicine. (I'm not sure why so many people seem to think that scientists are so shortsighted that there wouldn't be.) It's just that the body is so fucking complicated, and there's so incredibly much we don't understand -- really we have barely scratched the surface in terms of what's going on. Simulations and computer models are just getting to the point where they're any good at all for anything.... to suggest that they could replace lab/animal research in the foreseeable future just boggles my mind.

I don't know how to convey just how incredibly much knowledge and how complex of a system we're talking about here. A couple years ago I worked down in San Diego; I drove back and forth with a guy I knew who was doing neurobio research at the Scripps Insitute there. He was working on a simulating just the electrical properties of a single neuron. Just one; it took a while to simulate only a few seconds of activity, and God knows how accurate it was. In the human brain there are 100 billion neurons -- you would need hundreds of gigabytes of memory merely to list them all....

Most drugs are still discovered totally accidentally. We're still trying to figure out the basic mechanisms of disorders like Alzheimer's that have had billions of dollars sunk into them... and for each such mechanism we figure out, there are thousands, tens of thousands, more we're still totally clueless about....

On the heart model -- not sure what you're talking about, but there are many heart models out there, some better than others, all very limited and incredible simplifications.

Here's some links I pulled up on this... some various computational biology groups I know about... check them out to get a feel for the scale of the field....

http://www.cns.caltech.edu/
http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~hsauro/links.htm
http://www.molsci.org/Dispatch?action-NavbarWidget:-project=1&NavbarWidget:-project=alpha
http://www.bioeng.auckland.ac.nz/physiome/physiome_project.php
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/science.html

The homestatic function/regulation, is one of the few things we can actually learn reliably from animal brain studies. Some animals can teach us some things, but often not very much and at a fairly high price in suffering.

On the contrary, they're pretty much the only way we can learn about biology. Look, pick any recent advance in large-scale (eg more than just pure biochem/molecular bio) biology, and try and tell me how it could have been achieved without the use of animals models. Can you?

Theres a great degree of incompatibility between species that in actuality probably shouldnt be acceptable as a safety standard. Hell animal studies in general can be pretty dicey. God knows the number of toxins, carcinogens, neurotoxins and other nasties weve approved on the back of animal testing only to fuck a whole bunch of folks up because oops were wrong.

They aren't acceptable as a safety standard. Nothing is approved merely on the back of animal testing. For FDA approval, there are three phases of human trials (typically ~50,~200,and ~2000 people) that must be done.

But animal trials invaluable not only for finding these drugs in the first place, but for filtering out many of the really toxic ones, determining which adverse reactions/side fx to keep an eye out for, learning the drug's mechanism to inform about probably interactions, develop more effective variants of the drug, and so on. Consider that every toxic drug that's caught in animal trials -- the vast majority -- would otherwise have to be tested on humans, and you'd have a bunch of people disabled or dead instead of rats or rabbits.

Neurological drugs are at the high end of this tip of incompatibility, especially for many of the modern purposes such as anti-epileptic, anti-depression, anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety and pain/sleep meds which involve some high level function specific to humans.

True. But in many cases even these drugs aren't on functions specific to humans; usually they target older systems and mechanisms in the brain that are fairly conserved across all mammals. I don't know of a single drug that affects the kind of high-level cortex function unique to humans (probably with good reason -- no animals to do research on!) Most mammals have an anxiety system built in the amygdala; they can all have seizures, they all sleep, etc.

And yet monkeys, which are fairly evolved animals are being used, having their brains munched as a safety standard for drugs for which their is no true correlation of safety.

Research is very rarely done with monkeys, partially because of cost, partially because of ethical concerns. In safety trials, typically rats & rabbits would be used, or mice & pigs.

You and vegan both seem to think that because there's not a perfect correlation between toxic effects in animals and people, there must be no correlation at all. But there'a big range between 0% and 100%! Some quick googling reveals that 70%+ of toxic reactions are caught in animal trials.

Take prozac. Long term users now have brain damage, like mdma axon damage.

Can you point me to your reference for this? I saw a few papers suggesting something along those lines a couple years ago, but they were all extremely sketchy, borderline effects. I thought they'd all failed to find any support for the idea -- has there been some new research I missed?

 

[zorn]

Some links with info on animal research

http://www.rds-online.org.uk/

http://www.fbresearch.org