Experimenting on animals
is a dark side of science and research.
Most of us try not to think
about the animals that experienced
the horrors of testing
when we buy medicine
or cleaning supplies.
I don't know about you,
but it would make me feel
a whole lot better if we could stop
testing products on animals.
More than 115 million animals
are used for experiments every year.
They are subjected to tests for medical,
pharmaceutical, cosmetic
and even cleaning products.
But animal testing doesn't always show us
the whole picture.
For exmaple, some toxicity tests
on rodents are only 43% accurate
at predicting problems in humans.
At least 85 HIV vaccines
and some stroke drugs
worked in animal test subjects
but failed in humans.
So what do you say?
How about we cancel these unreliable,
animal-torturing procedures altogether?
Animals make good test subjects
because they are biologically similar to us.
They suffer from many of the same health problems.
And they have short life cycles.
This allows scientists to study the effects
of chemicals over several generations.
The medical and pharmaceutical industries
use animal test subjects
to study diseases and disorders.
Animals are also used to make sure a drug,
vaccine or a procedure
is safe and effective for human testing.
But experimenting on animals
raises some ethical concerns.
So industries that are required
to test the safety of their products
are only supposed to use animal testing as a last resort.
The pharmaceutical sector has stopped
testing on animals as much.
But not out of any love for our furry friends.
Newer drugs target precise molecular mechanisms,
and the best way to study them
is in petri dishes.
This is also cheaper
than using live animals.
So what would happen if we completely stopped animal testing?
Well, first we’d need alternatives.
Luckily, we already have some.
Computers may seem like an unlikely replacement for live animals.
But they could be helpful.
There are thousands of chemical compound tests
in online chemical databases.
Scientists can use algorithms
to get this information and compare
the tested chemical compounds with new chemical compounds.
By looking at their structural similarities,
researchers can predict the toxicity
of untested chemicals.
That would be a great start.
But it wouldn’t be good enough to release a new product.
After using algorithms,
scientists and researchers would use other testing methods.
They could move on to testing chemicals
on cultured human cells that mimic
the functions of specific organs.
These are called organs-on-a-chip.
And they allow researchers
to test new drugs on human cells
without testing directly on humans.
But I didn't say we would
never do tests on humans.
Oh, we would.
Now, before you panic,
I’m not talking about
full-blown human experimentation.
That is definitely not ethical.
Instead, you would volunteer
to take microdoses of a new drug.
The tiny amounts wouldn’t have any huge impact on you.
But there’d be enough in your body
that researchers could study how the drug impacts your cells.
But none of these great alternatives
would replace animal testing.
Especially if we got ourselves into another pandemic.
All the successful COVID-19 vaccines
relied on animal testing
during the early research.
These tests helped scientists understand
the way the immune system
would respond to the vaccine.
And that is extremely important.
The animal tests made sure that the vaccines
wouldn’t make the infection worse.
So if we stopped animal testing,
we’d need to advance in vitro technology.
Scientists would take some skin cells
from people with a specific illness.
They would make the skin cells act more like stem cells.
Then the researchers could convert
those cells into any specialized cell in the human body.
So they’d have a patient-specific model
of a disease in a lab dish.
Eventually, we'd start growing
actual organs to study diseases and test experimental medicines.
This would be a much more humane way
for the cosmetic, pharmaceutical,
medical and household cleaning industries to test products.
And millions of animals would no longer
have to suffer experimentation
for human gain.
Of course, the other alternative
to testing on animals
would be to stop doing science at all.
But I don’t think that would turn out very well for us.
And besides,
that’s a story for another WHAT IF.