Scientific Research

Question 1

Scientific procedures

Answer 1

Using animals to develop drugs and medicines to treat human conditions and diseases; using animals as test subjects for new therapies.

Question 2

Examples of animals being used in scientific procedures

Answer 2

Scientific procedures refers, for example, to using animals to develop drugs and medicines to treat human conditions and diseases; using animals as test subjects for new therapies.

Vaccines and drugs to treat HIV/AIDS came from research on similar viruses in chickens, cats and monkeys.

Penicillin was developed through research on mice and other rodents.

Question 3

Animals and oncology

Answer 3

Animals are widely used in oncology (study of the prevention, diagnosis and life-saving treatment of cancer/tumours).

For example: for understanding the growth of cancer cells, the role of viruses in causing cancer, the use of hormone treatment to limit tumor growth, and the effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Question 4

Cloning

Answer 4

Cloning refers to the process of producing genetically identical copies of a plant or an animal. The copied individual is a clone.

Question 5

Why do we clone?

Answer 5

-The technology has a number of applications, for example:

-Preserving endangered species; ‘improving’ animals to make them disease resistant

-To increase the meat yield

-Therapeutic cloning of cells in order to understand diseases and test medicines

-Mass production of animals for scientific research.

Question 6

Benefits of cloning

Answer 6

1. Animal cloning creates desirable traits in each species.
2. Organ harvesting
3. Animal cloning has created several medical breakthroughs for humans.

Question 7

Animal cloning creates desirable traits in each species.

Answer 7

-When we clone animals, what we’re doing is an advancement of the natural evolutionary cycle.

-We are doing what others have done through selective breeding for more than 1,000 years. It is an opportunity to create specific traits in an animal that are desired for some reason.

-We might use animal cloning to create dairy cows that offer more milk.

-We might clone chickens to improve egg production. Pigs could be cloned to produce more meat for butchering.

Question 8

Organ Harvesting

Answer 8

-The biggest argument that supporters of animal cloning point out is the potential to create life saving organs for humans.

-Cloning means an entire new body and a brand spanking new set of organs.

-If this was applied to humans, the problem with the organ donor waiting list could be resolved.

Question 9

Animal cloning has created several medical breakthroughs for humans.

Answer 9

-When we start learning how to clone animals successfully without multiple failures per attempt, then the processes can transfer to other areas of science.

-We could begin to replicate organs, tendons, and other needed body parts by cloning them.

-Scientists could research the human genome to clone genetic information that could reduce cancer, diabetes, and other problematic diseases

Question 10

Risks of animal cloning

Answer 10

-Human-Animal Hybrids: cells have both human and non-human genetic material.

-Cloning animals could eventually lead to cloning humans.

-Animal suffering.

-Cloning animals leads to higher levels of embryo destruction. Fewer than 5% of cloned embryos usually survive to birth.

-The notion that humans have souls, but animals do not, was (and still is for some) a popular belief. It gives us a sense of being superior, above or outside the biological order. Harvesting human hearts from goats can shatter this protective belief, leaving us feeling disgusted and dismayed.

Question 11

Animal experimentation

Answer 11

-Animal experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to test the safety of other products.

-Many of these experiments cause pain to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other ways. If it is morally wrong to cause animals to suffer then experimenting on animals produces serious moral problems.

-Animal experimenters are very aware of this ethical problem and acknowledge that experiments should be made as humane as possible. They also agree that it’s wrong to use animals if alternative testing methods would produce equally valid results.

Question 12

In favour of animal experiements

Answer 12

Experimenting on animals is acceptable if (and only if):
• suffering is minimised in all experiments
• human benefits are gained which could not be obtained by using other methods

Question 13

Against animal experimentation

Answer 13

Experimenting on animals is always unacceptable because:
• it causes suffering to animals
• the benefits to human beings are not proven
• any benefits to human beings that animal testing does provide could be produced in other ways.

Question 14

Harm vs benefit

Answer 14

The case for animal experiments is that they will produce such great benefits for humanity that it is morally acceptable to harm a few animals. The equivalent case against is that the level of suffering and the number of animals involved are both so high that the benefits to humanity don’t provide moral justification.

Question 15

Reduction

Answer 15

Reducing the number of animals used in experiments by:
• Improving experimental techniques
• Improving techniques of data analysis
• Sharing information with other researchers

Question 16

Refinement

Answer 16

Refining the experiment or the way the animals are cared for to reduce their suffering by:
• Using less invasive techniques
• Better medical care
• Better living conditions

Question 17

Replacement

Answer 17

Replacing experiments on animals with alternative techniques such as:
• Experimenting on cell cultures instead of whole animals
• Using computer models
• Studying human volunteers
• Using epidemiological studies (the study of how often diseases occur in different groups of people and why.)

Question 18

The three R’s

Answer 18

The three Rs are a set of principles that scientists are encouraged to follow in order to reduce the impact of research on animals. The three Rs are: Reduction, Refinement, Replacement.

Question 19

Would do scientists say stopping experimentation would lead to

Answer 19

Scientists say that banning animal experiments would mean either:
• an end to testing new drugs or
• using human beings for all safety tests

Question 20

Drug safety

Answer 20

-Animal experiments are not used to show that drugs are safe and effective in human beings - they cannot do that.

-Instead, they are used to help decide whether a particular drug should be tested on people.

-Animal experiments eliminate some potential drugs as either ineffective or too dangerous to use on human beings.

-If a drug passes the animal test it’s then tested on a small human group before large scale clinical trials.

Question 21

Justifying animal experiments

Answer 21

-Those in favour of animal experiments say that the good done to human beings outweighs the harm done to animals.

-This is a consequentialist argument because it looks at the consequences of the actions under consideration.

-It can’t be used to defend all forms of experimentation since there are some forms of suffering that are probably impossible to justify even if the benefits are exceptionally valuable to humanity.

Question 22

Animal experiments and ethical arithmetic

Answer 22

-The consequentialist justification of animal experimentation can be demonstrated by comparing the moral consequences of doing or not doing an experiment.

-This process can’t be used in a mathematical way to help people decide ethical questions in practice, but it does demonstrate the issues very clearly.

Question 23

Basic arithmetic

Answer 23

If performing an experiment would cause more harm than not performing it, then it is ethically wrong to perform that experiment.
The harm that will result from not doing the experiment is the result of multiplying three things together:
• the moral value of a human being
• the number of human beings who would have benefited
• the value of the benefit that each human being won’t get

Question 24

The harm that the experiment will cause is the result of multiplying together

Answer 24

• the moral value of an experimental animal
• the number of animals suffering in the experiment
• the negative value of the harm done to each animal

Question 25

Weaknesses with this…

Answer 25

• it’s virtually impossible to assign a moral value to a being
• it’s virtually impossible to assign a value to the harm done to each individual
• the harm that will be done by the experiment is known beforehand, but the benefit is unknown
• the harm done by the experiment is caused by an action, while the harm resulting from not doing it is caused by an omission

Question 26

Cloning Rare and Endangered Breeds:

Answer 26

-Another use of cloning could be to maintain the genetic material from endangered species.

-Cells from rare breeds might be stored in a biobank to be available to use cloning techniques to ‘recreate’ animals in case of sudden disease outbreaks or natural disasters that would otherwise decimate irreplaceable stocks.

Question 27

Cloning for Faster Livestock Breeding

Answer 27

-But the application that has caught so much attention recently is to use cloning to speed up of convential animal breeding.

-This is on a much larger scale than medical applications or rare breeds.

-Imagine you are a commercial breeder of cows or pigs, and over many generations you have bred some fine and valuable beasts with highly desirable characteristics.

-It was immediately reaslised that the Dolly method could be used to clone such animals from the cells of one of them, and sell the cloned animals to “finishers” - those farmers who simply feed up the animals for slaughter, rather than breed them to produce more stock.

-Again, the breeder might want to clone a series of promising animals in a breeding programme, in order to test how the same “genotype” responded to different environmental changes.

Question 28

Is cloning unnatural?

Answer 28

-Many people say that cloning farm animals would be unnatural.

-Whereas in the plant kingdom cloning is a fairly common phenomenon, there are few animal examples and none in mammals or humans.

-Should we then respect this biological distinction, or should we celebrate our human capacity to override such limitations?

-It is hard to argue in an absolute sense that anything is unnatural, when so little remains around us that we might justifiably call natural, and nature itself is in constant motion.

-Yet many believe some technological inventions are now going too far to remain in tune with what we perceive “natural” to mean, despite how much we have intervened in nature to date. Is cloning animals a point to draw a line?

Question 29

Would cloning narrow genetic identity too far?

Answer 29

-This brings us to the question of diversity.

-One of the fundamental rules of selective breeding is that you must maintain a high enough level of genetic variation.

-The more you narrow down the genetic “pool” to a limited number of lines of, say, animals for meat or milk production, the more you run risks of problems from in-breeding.

-If that is the case with breeding, how much more is it true of cloning, where genetic replicas are involved.

-This means there are pragmatic limits to how useful cloning would be, but beneath the pragmatics there lies a deeper ethical concern. Does this reflect something fundamental about the nature of things?