tip - when you edit long posts, it's handy to add an 'edit' note at the bottom to let us know what changed. interweb is amazing for misunderstandings.
Android Bishop wrote:a) probably misinterpreting what I mean by "unlimited". If there are uncontainable environmental concerns then it should absolutely be limited.
I got that.
I'm arguing that placing arbitrary limits on when we can use animals for research based upon animal rights or some such crap is that, just crap.
which is probably where the thread should head. PETA is just one voice, IMO both their extreme and your extreme should exist so that all aspects of the issue can be examined. that's good science.
However, even if you ignore the moral aspect of the argument, its just better science to give the animals good facilities and treatment. If you dont, you're potentially screwing up the research by allowing outside factors to affect the animal's health.
true, but the d0uchebags in management sign the checks, business prevails over science, surely you've seen that. if finance doesn't approve the funding for good facilities, who will?
Nobody sticks cats in microwaves to test the microwave, scientists are pretty professional people and dont do experiments that are unnecessary. making them jump through even more hoops than they already have to is just gonna hold up the game and make research unnecessarily more difficult than it already is.
can I get an amen to a Hitler reference?
your reliance on human compassion far outweighs my own. wow.
b) Like I said, from that paragraph my only concern is the aim to "limit use of animals in research in the future". How exactly do they plan on doing that? Pretty much all research with animal systems is going to need animals to test it on, otherwise you're just playing guessing games. It has the potential to unnecessarily restrict research into a field that needs it badly, as animal biotech is only just beginning to come on the scene whereas microbial and plant biotech are much further developed. I doubt they would actually pass anything that would place anything more than token restrictions on animal research, however. EU is a world leader in biomedical research and its economy is completely dependent on it, they're not going to hold back because of uneducated concerns and PETA types. What is important, again, is environmental restrictions. There must be safeguards to prevent new transgenic organisms from being introduced into the wild, and good testing measures to ensure that the ones intended to be introduced into the wild won't negatively impact its environment.
the two bold parts are your two points. got it.
the third point is how they do they apply ANY restrictions? dunno, what is the proposition doing? I addressed this earlier in this post.
c) yeah its pretty nice that we can develop stem cell therapies for humans now, but I think there's a lot of media hype around it too. Human stem cell research is an extremely promising avenue for new cures and therapies, but its a niche avenue of research. The tools and methods being developed are whats important, for those has wider applicability. For instance, most people dont realize this but ES cells are primarily used as an important tool in animal biotechnology. Creating transgenic animals is very tough, but using ES cells is much easier. You can have an culture of ES cells and do all kinds of genetic experiments on them, and then just fuse them with an egg and boom...transgenic animal. The most important thing to develop in this field is totipotent (able to become 100% of every type cell in an organism) stem cells for a bunch of animals, not just humans. Most stem cell lines we have arent totipotent so its really hard to do biotech research with a lot of animals.
totipent, nice word. this is the kind of geekshit I heard from the PhD peeps I worked with, hence my math comment, it was funny. I'm not being cheeky, it brings back memories. ES cell? you gotta dumb this way down if we're gonna follow it.
In reality though, the biggest new avenues for biotech research are plant/animal pharming and marine biotechnology. Human stem cell research will be good but its overall use is limited and it doesnt teach us much of anything new. Finding out better ways to re-engineer animal genes on a wide scale, however, is far more exciting. Plant biotech is very promising too, for a very wide range of applications. We eliminated toxins from cottonseed to make it edible for its high protein composition (help feed starving countries that grow more cotton than food), but did it in a way so that the toxins were still mae int he rest of the plant to keep bugs from eating it. We've turn tobacco plants into factories that ooze out antibodies custom made from individual lymphoma patients to target each one's specific cancer cells. Made a tomato chock full of an anti-cancer compound that turned the tomato purple, and when fed to mice engineering to be susceptible to cancer they live 40% longer than their counterparts who were eating normal mice food.
Marine biotechnology is REALLY exciting and its just in its infancy. Its the one area we dont know JACK about and most of our tried and true methods simply do not work. We're also really primitive in our use of aquaculture, something we mastered on land thousands of years ago but are only now beginning to understand and utilize in water. Plus we're finding all kinds of really unique compounds and proteins and stuff in marine organisms that were unheard of until now, with future uses in medicines and new antibiotic treatments and stuff. We're developing ways to isolate these compounds/proteins/genes from cultures of dozens of organisms, without ever knowing what organism its actually coming from. This is where bioinformatics comes into play. We dont know which organism is making this particular thing we want, and we cant culture them individually because they are all symbiotic organisms, so instead we just take out ALL the DNA from every single organism in the pool and sequence the whole damn lot. From there we can find and isolate the gene we want without ever actually knowing where it came from. That's just one side to it, there are gonna be HUGE things coming out of marine biotech in the future.
bioinformatics... that's cool. brute force harvesting, throw a computer at it.
so what's with all this WE shit? genetic engineering started in the early 80s. you did all that? I'm an EE, can I claim that WE'RE keeping your lights on?
and the geeks shall inherit the earth.
edit - so your stance is that animals have no rights.
Forget I wrote anything