Deadly research in science

In this essay it is going to be discussed whether it is needed to use animals in the scientific fields in order to achieve important findings. The main purpose will be to prove that it is completely unnecessary and unethical.

The first topic is how animals are treated while conducting medical research. This might be the most controversial topic of all since many doctors believe that the only way to gather new information is by using animals in order to save human lives. To give an example scientists use animals trying to find a drug to cure Alzheimer’s disease. Experimenters gave drugs to mice which seemed to be working on them, but when tried on humans they failed. After that a research in connection with this showed that using human cells – instead of genetically modified mice – is more likely to help and give a solution. In other words these findings make the old method useless and inefficient. The results prove that the new method could help to understand the disease better and it would be easier to gather information, not just about Alzheimers.

The next step is psychological research. The example introduces the research carried on by the National Institutes of Health where baby chimpanzee monkeys are observed to learn about mental illness. What they do is that they separate the baby monkeys from their mothers in order to cause them mental trauma and then leave them alone. They suffer from fear, depression and their pain can lead to self-inflicted wounds.

However, this is not a help for people, because the experimenters themselves admitted that this treatment cannot be applied to humans at all. They said that it has nothing to do with human psychological trauma and brain disorders. It is not enough that the original purpose was to help humans, but this leads nowhere, since they do not help monkeys either.

Moving on now to another example of a psychological test: Scientists not only experiment on small animals, because in other tests they also torture cats and dogs by drilling a hole into their skull and then implanting metal coils in their eyes. They are almost blinded and get no food. They are forced to listen to the slightest sounds around them so that they can get food. All of this is only for examining their reaction. Many of them get infections from this abuse. The scientists who conducted this research have hidden the pictures from everyone. This is because they fear the response of the public in case they will learn about what they have been doing.

The next issue is cosmetic research. In this example guinea pigs are tested with chemicals injected under their skin in order to see if they have an allergic reaction to them. This is important because a new method can save their lives. This new skin-sensitivity test uses a 3D human-derived skin model that is a more perfect replica of the human skin, than that of any animal. A clever and also hopeful idea.

The next issue is the moral and ethical point of view of experimenting. The thoughts mentioned below are not proven facts, but important questions if one comes across this issue.

As it is shown in the essay, animals are treated in a very mean way. Taking animal lives like this is almost the same as killing humans which is as all of us know, morally not accepted – at least in most places. Many people tend to act like gods, thinking that they can do whatever they would like to without any consequences. However animals have rights as well: they have the right to live. Therefore it is unforgivabée to torture and then kill living creatures, just because they belong to another species. Especially if it is not needed at all, only out of curiosity and gathering - most of the time completely useless - information. To put it another way, killing animals for nothing is an unnecessary massacre without any sensible purpose, which is definitely inhuman. Both morally and ethically it is obviously unacceptable and not right. 

To summarize briefly what has been discussed so far, the point is clear. All the results show that these methods are only a huge waste of not just money and time, but animal lives. Sometimes the taxpayers pay for it without even knowing about it. Even if in some cases they have a useful result, the loss of animal lives makes it completely unethical and archaic.

It is not needed in our modern age, when everything can be substituted with something.

Also, as it has been mentioned before, none of these results have anything to do with our human bodies, making them unscientific. We definitely should not choose a product or treatment or anything that might be so harmful that they did not even want to try them on humans in the first place.

And as for the last words let me quote Stephen Suomi, who was the one who carried out the baby monkey experiment: “The only way to know definitively whether anti-depressant drugs work  in humans would be to study our species.”