Wounded King

Despite the heavy emphasis now being placed on refinement, reduction and replacement in terms of animal testing, much of the most fundamental medical research still relies heavily on animal models. How likely do people feel it is that this situation will change in the near future? How far off are we from a viable model system which is entirely in vitro /in silic(o/e) simulation based? Will we ever get there? Is there too much regulation on animal test now, holding back advances?

Thought, feelings and personal abuse all gratefully recieved.

dublczek

Since I know nothing about those subjects, I will simply abuse you. But I notice you are wounded! Drat. I'll be back when you're not. I will now work on refining, reducing and replacing my plan with something more in keeping with the second part of your name.

theyeti

Tissue cultures are likely to replace the need for many animals. But there will always be a need for them. I don't forsee any point in the future in which we will not need to use them, at least for the later stages of researching a useful drug or procedure.

My feeling on using animals in research is that it makes up an insignificant proportion of all animals used by human beings. Orders of magnitude more are used in agriculture. And unlike with research, agriculture usually has few if any of the stringent requirements that research animals have (at least here in the USA). If you take rodents out of the euqation, we euthanize far more animals that we use for research. Heck, even pet shops are filthy concentration camps compared to research labs.

The 3R approach is a good if not perfect way to minimize harm, but even if it has some problems, there are bigger fish to fry. (My apologies to the fish lovers.)

theyeti

scigirl

No joke. I am always appaled at the careless treatment of the animals in many pet shops. If we researchers did the same, we'd lose our grants probably!

A human medicine example - we still have a long way to go before we can just do in silico research. One example is this physiology simulator we use here at medical school. For a lot of conditions, it is adequate, but for more complex and compounded problems, it is not. I do think more emphasis should be placed on computer models however - I am learning a lot from this one program, and I can experiment with so many more variables than I could on a real patient, or on an animal.

scigirl

Unbeliever

Sorry, this is "Argument"; "Abuse" is down the hall.