As someone who has been a bit of a birdwatcher since I was a wee lad, and a lover of wildlife/nature, people have asked me my opinion of animal testing in the biomedical industry a few times. Derek Lowe sums it up best in a post about animal rights activists (emphasis mine
yes, we do indeed use animal testing. Mice take the brunt of it, followed by rats. It’s very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, and we’d drop it in a minute if we could, just for those reasons. But no one knows enough about living organisms yet to do that. Not even close. For the foreseeable future, there’s no other way to do medical research, academic or industrial, basic or applied. Anyone who tells you differently is either misinformed or lying, and anyone who knows better but still tries to shut down the research is ethically deranged.
Yes there are isolated cases of experiments that just shouldn’t be done, but in general the pharma industry does the best job it can. It also shows how complex biological systems are. We can simulate space travel, but the physics of space travel are well defined and relatively simple (I still get a kick out of “this isn’t rocket science”. They should change it to “this isn’t protein folding” or something). That said, I have high hopes for a decent chunk of drug testing and trials going in silico sometime in the next 15 years.
Further reading
Computing where art thou
Structure prediction has a long way to go
2015 or 2025
Technorati Tags: Animal Testing, Drug Development
Animals and drug development
As someone who has been a bit of a birdwatcher since I was a wee lad, and a lover of wildlife/nature, people have asked me my opinion of animal testing in the biomedical industry a few times. Derek Lowe sums it up best in a post about animal rights activists (emphasis mine
Yes there are isolated cases of experiments that just shouldn’t be done, but in general the pharma industry does the best job it can. It also shows how complex biological systems are. We can simulate space travel, but the physics of space travel are well defined and relatively simple (I still get a kick out of “this isn’t rocket science”. They should change it to “this isn’t protein folding” or something). That said, I have high hopes for a decent chunk of drug testing and trials going in silico sometime in the next 15 years.
Further reading
Computing where art thou
Structure prediction has a long way to go
2015 or 2025
Technorati Tags: Animal Testing, Drug Development