4 ms·
> Imagine a life dedicated to saying "No." Your mind is disoriented, deteriorating. The world is spinning, and your insides are churning, throbbing, and burning
by mlyle 4y ago
> 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.
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.
- goldenkey 4y agoI've experienced an allergic reaction to medication before. It was the worst hour of my entire life until I had an injection of Benadryl. Every moment, I felt like I'd rather be dead than experience another moment of the agony. 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.
- mlyle 4y ago> 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.
- goldenkey 4y agoThat sounds fair to me. If we want to get the benefit of something, we ought to pay the price. Not offload it to some poor soul, literally.