Animal testing is barbaric!

[lestatdark]

forest-spirit said:

lestatdark said:

forest-spirit said:
I understand why animals are used in medical research as it's in our nature to think of ourselves before others. There is no reason to let the animals suffer more than necessary though.
However, modern science is now letting us grow entire body parts and when that technology let's us grow e.nough "human" to test on then using animals is no longer acceptable in my book.

Using animals in cosmetic research on the other hand is fully despicable and unacceptable.

Growing entire body parts is still a work in progress. The best you can grow in full detail are individual organs and tissue samples, there still some complications in recreating entire working systems from stem cells or cloning processes. 

However that will lead to a whole new ethical debate and whole new arguments. Would it be ethically and morally right to do tests on cloned bodies or "grown" from stem cells? How can you justify that the "grown" humans don't have the same rights as a normal human has? If they do, then why not just test on regular humans? 

That would be the equivalent of an ethical shitstorm.

Yeah, we won't be there anytime soon.

I think there will be ways to use that technology efficiently without having to grow complete humans. It gets really problematic when you need a brain and unfortunately a brain is quite important in many cases. As long as you can just hook up a piece of meat that more or less resembles a human body to a computer and do some testing then I don't see a problem, but when you involve the brain you add things like conscience and advances stuff like that to your equation and it all becomes a big mess. Of course, just the idea of recreating a human brain lies probably atleast a hundred years into the future so we won't face that epic dilemma just yet...

You're right, and a hundred years in the future is probably a very hopeful estimation. 

Science will probably find a way to circumvent the problem, like creating tissue that functions with the systematic structure of the brain and has the same basic chemistry, without the implications of actually creating a working brain that can correlate conscience and higher thought. As long as the tissue is usable for performing the same tests as in a normal brain, that would be the ideal scenario.