Animal testing should be banned

Over 90 per cent of drug trials in humans fail, even though they’ve been successful in tests on animals. The main causes of failure are safety problems and a lack of effectiveness that weren’t predicted by the tests on animals. In just one appalling example, 11 human babies died after their mothers were given Viagra-like pills during a 2018 clinical trial aimed at promoting foetus growth in the womb. The drug had proved to decrease foetal mortality for rats. How can we rely on a system which can’t reliably predict and prevent these tragedies?

1)Self-awareness is often thought of as a uniquely human trait, but new research suggests that it may be more common than previously thought across the animal kingdom. Conscious creatures may include our primate cousins, cetaceans and corvids – and potentially many invertebrates, including bees, spiders and cephalopods such as octopuses, cuttlefish and squid. The challenge, of course, is to understand how the inner lives of these creatures differ from our own. “Animals have interesting thoughts, but the only way they can convey them is by grunts, shrieks, and other vocalizations, and by gestures,” Hauser points out. “When humans evolved speech, they liberated the kinds of thoughts nonhumans have.

• I've already conceded that animals with self-awareness should not be experimented on. This doesn't debunk the claim of animal experimentation itself being banned, which goes way beyond self aware animals. "animals have interesting thoughts" i consider this to be a very odd thing to say, as to have thoughts implies ideas, ideas or at least complex ideas must be expressed through some form of language. At least complex ideas beyond instinctual reasoning. Self aware beings (like octopus) could have a form of limited conscious thinking.
  
• Most animals do not consciously suffer when we do these experiments on them (such as rabbits). You keep on humanising and projecting yourself into these animals, despite the fact they almost certainly don't consciously feel pain. I wouldn't give my rabbit up to animal testing as it gives me comfort. I do have a personal emotional attachment to it and do humanise it, but I am aware that objectively this is incorrect and shouldn't get in the way of my argument that I am making here.
  

We have moved away from studying human disease in humans. … We all drank the Kool-Aid on that one, me included. … The problem is that [animal testing] hasn’t worked, and it’s time we stopped dancing around the problem. … We need to refocus and adapt new methodologies for use in humans to understand disease biology in humans.” —Dr. Elias Zerhouni

• Researchers have created “organs-on-chips” that contain human cells grown in a state-of-the-art system to mimic the structure and function of human organs and organ systems. The chips can be used instead of animals in disease research, drug testing, and toxicity testing and have been shown to replicate human physiology, diseases, and drug responses more accurately than crude animal experiments do. Some companies, such as AlveoliX, MIMETAS, and Emulate, Inc., have already turned these chips into products that other researchers can use in place of animals.
  
• A variety of cell-based tests and tissue models can be used to assess the safety of drugs, chemicals, cosmetics, and consumer products. For example, MatTek Life Sciences’ EpiDerm™ Tissue Model is a 3-dimensional, human cell–derived model that can be used to replace rabbits in painful, prolonged experiments that have traditionally been used to evaluate chemicals for their ability to corrode or irritate the skin.
  

• The difficulty with organoids is their limited lifespan. They keep growing and once they become more than about three times the diameter of a human hair [300 microns] the inside becomes necrotic and dies from lack of food and lack of oxygen and no place to pee. The only countermeasure is to break them up into small pieces after a few days and let them reform. That makes organoids impractical for studying long-term effects over weeks or months.
  
• another limitation of organoids is that many of them would be required to provide enough tissue to do sophisticated, untargeted, multi-omic screening, . Also, since the interior of each organoid is difficult to access, it’s hard to use organoids to study biological barriers—for example, the blood-brain barrier, the blood-testis barrier and the epithelial cells that protect the lungs and the gut from pathogens. The interesting substances might be inside, but you can’t yet get readily connected to it.
  
• These chips also don't factor in the human bodies circadian rhythm currently. There's many things animals can do which these chips nor computers currently can.   Drugs have different pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties, depending on the time of day, which can differ by a factor of two to 10 over 24 hours.
  
• The pump and valve technologies that Wikswo developed may simplify the move to coupled organs, or so-called “homunculi,” he points out. That might better recreate the complex physiological signals that regulate the endocrine, metabolic, and digestive systems.
  
  The liver, for example, has three zones with different oxygen levels that can affect drug metabolism, Wikswo says. No worries. D. Lansing Taylor, director of the University of Pittsburgh Drug Discovery Institute, has successfully built a microphysiological device with three liver chips in a row showing how
  
• drugs are metabolized in the different compartments.
  
  Over the near term, drug toxicity testing is probably not where organ-on-a-chip technology will flourish, Wikswo adds. “Pharmaceutical companies have done a pretty good job of checking for toxicity, and you don’t want to come up with an assay you say is safe until you’ve proven that you haven’t missed something.”
  
• The bar is “justifiably quite high,” says Wikswo. “What you don’t want is a false negative.” Companies need to know if a drug they’re making has the “desired efficacy and pharmacokinetics.”
  
  Wikswo admits that his pumps and valves may appear complicated to biologists. His advice? “If you can use gravity and a rocking plate, or a pressurized reservoir, that’s a good way to go today.” But Wikswo’s focus is on overcoming the shortcomings of these technologies in recreating important biological processes that involve recirculation, pharmacokinetics, circadian rhythms and coupled organs.
  
  “Our ultimate goal is to make our pumps and valves so simple, reliable and inexpensive that people love to use them,” Wikswo says. “We’re not there yet, but we are moving closer every day.”