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by qplex
2189 days ago
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In my humble opinion it's not that bright to think of animals as an utilitarian resource for the human race to plunder, or to consider their monetary value as any sort of a yardstick. Certainly if we hold these kind of ethics we've got no excuses if an advanced alien race wants to use us in their medical experiments. |
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I do agree that lab animals aren't a resource in themselves – they're just the currently "next best" model to test in before trying a drug out in humans. In fact, mice are actually quite expensive in terms of time and money – custom-genotype mice can cost hundreds of dollars each, and that's just the up-front purchase price. The overhead of maintaining a mouse line is also quite high, with a huge loss incurred for accidental death or euthanization before they've been used as a model. When many research facilities were first shut down due to COVID lockdown this year, I heard that many labs at my university had to euthanize all their mice as they wouldn't be able to care for them. This represents a loss of months of research time and possibly thousands to tens of thousands of research dollars.
Another thing to consider is that many drug candidates that make it to the animal testing stage don't succeed with safety and/or efficacy testing. According to the FDA, 92% of pre-clinical animal tests actually fail to predict drug effectiveness in humans. This highlights a pressing need for other fail-fast/fail-cheap methods that should precede animal testing, like cell culture methods that could be used as a pre-animal screen.