As slow as it may be to adopt, it's a welcome change to how people should do research. Why induce suffering on an animal when the potential for failure and or miscalculation is so high? It seems from the article a model/chip can be more insightful on how something will affect humans.
2) When testing in animals, first ensure that there is reasonable confidence the risk and severity of harm from the testing will be minimal. Only begin initial in vivo testing after this has first been achieved.
3) For test animals that are or aren't harmed, allow them to live happy, (relatively) normal, natural lives. Don't end their life early unnecessarily, with exceptions for humane euthanasia if the testing has unexpectedly caused significant, persistent suffering. Treat them as a pet owner would treat their beloved pet rat.
Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans. The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.
Most of what you said is already how it's done today, at least in the pharmaceutical industry.
> Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans.
I don't consider it an extreme view, as lots of people share that view. But within the scope of pharmaceuticals, as opposed to cosmetics, I disagree with it because I think that's an impractical guideline to follow. Animal testing happens because there aren't good alternative ways to get safety data (on a per-treatment basis) without putting human lives at risk, and it's already a tiered system designed to balance scientific need against animal welfare. This is also why in standard medical trials proving safety comes before proving efficacy.
> The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.
The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject? You need safety data. How do you get the safety data? Right now, the main way is a tiered system that starts on a petri dish and eventually passes through mice, monkeys, etc. before humans.
> The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject?
I don't think you and GP are actually saying anything different. I interpreted their statement 'The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?"' not to mean don't test on animals if you wouldn't on a human, but to use your reaction and feelings to that to guide your judgement, and help judge what type of animal testing you're at, not to be a binary switch of whether any animal testing at all should be done.
It is a tiered system, at least if you look at big pharma. There are many stages in the pharmaceutical drug development process.
Also human testing (clinical trials) have different stages/tiers to maximize learning and minimize risk at every stage. A lot of companies trying to innovate here.
I do feel bad for medical mice, especially things like SCID Mice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_combined_immunodeficien..., which are basically only born to be infected with something, and then die. Even more so in a recent case of academic fraud I've seen involving cancer testing, where the data was obviously faked, but mice still died for the data.
But yes, it's hard to test immune responses without hurting a living animal, since you'd have to somehow have a non-alive immune system to test on otherwise
These examples don't work. Hunter gatherers didn't suffer, and the other two are in outlier bad situations. Set them free in a stable situation and they'll live happy lives.
If that description of wild mice is accurate, there is no happy free life. The baseline is very different. I'm not going to try to say how that should affect the rest of the ethics, but it's an important point to consider, and not as easily dismissed as your examples would imply.
All patients recovered, the final patient left hospital after 3 months. Not ideal. The company went bankrupt and the outcome was better regulation in the UK and Germany; great wiki article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theralizumab including the relevant:
Critics of animal testing have cited the case to argue that experiments on nonhuman animals, even in species closely related to humans, are not necessarily predictive of human responses, and cannot justify the harm inflicted on animals or the resultant risks to humans
Meeting standards is nothing but a formality, a form to fill. The PhDs and lab staff doing the killing, if they have any qualms about the act itself or just the purpose of the killing, generally justify it away as being what they have to do to keep the job. The "humane" killing methods are learned on the job through trial and error, and such errors keep happening regularly to experienced staff.
Prior to lockdowns, many/most lab animals just got killed: interesting quality of life standard.
What's written in lab policies is not at all how it happens in reality.
FWIW, just watching a few pigs in an existing herd without interacting with them in any active way requires an extensive ethical approval process. Nobody would go through even that if they could gather the same data from a computer model.
I feel like "just a question of cost" is a heavy lifter here though.
Cost core to our resource allocation system, for better or worse, and if something costs a lot it usually means we can't do it as much. In this framing, cutting out animal testing would (often) mean medical research is slower. In this framing it's a question of where people are willing to put the dial on ethics vs results, and of course pumping the breaks in one place without universal buy-in just means the cruelty moves elsewhere.
I don't think the above 1-dimensional framing is the whole story though. You could imagine more standardized data sharing, so that the data that cost the lives of a few thousand rats could be used by others. And of course you could require (as drug trials do) that the study be registered before any experiment happened, and that the results be published regardless of the outcome. Some of these changes could actually make the science better, in addition to more ethical.
hopefully animal testing alternatives keep innovating enough that they, like some renewable energy sources today, become cheaper to make use of than their incumbents
I hope so too! Unfortunately animal studies are still one of the main pillars of physiology and drug development. They were even a requirement until very recently in the US, see the rule just approved by the FDA [1].
It’s not just a question of cost. Our biological mechanisms are so complex, there is no single system that can tell us whether a drug is 100% safe or not. That’s why drugs are eventually also “tested” in humans during clinical trials. How amazing would it be if we could throw any drug/compound into a computer, then also spit in it, and get a personalized efficacy score as a response…?
Animals are NOT cheaper. Pharma companies do everything to avoid animal testing.
For most drugs the only reasonable test animals are mice and rats. And they LOVE to naturally get cancer and other diseases, so you need to use large groups to get even a semblance of statistical significance.
Oh, and don't forget that it takes a lot of time to run the tests. And time IS money for pharma.
Even within animal testing, the cost and convenience of animal testing could vary tremendously. Working in animal testing intrinsically means running a death-camp for mice. The mice aren't are barely even raw materials, they're basically stationery, more treated more like a mobile pH test-strip then a living creature.
There are ways that animal testing could be made far more humane (like birth control to prevent the kind of overbreeding that demands mass culling), but those, themselves, would be costly.
And in order to test cures, you must first inflict the animals with the disease. How many do you need? Are you sure? Because waiting to produce more later would also create costs. Cheaper just to breed a huge batch now and then cull the surplus.
Potential for failure is high, of course, an experiment might not have the desired outcome and a death of a few hundred mice would not lead to a cure of some disease, sure.
But without trying for millions of times, scientists won’t find the one drug that works. If it saves at least person, isn’t the risk and cost of not trying to find the cure by all mean possible even higher?
Sacrificial animals are used to answer nearly all questions in medicine. I would be surprised if you could find a single therapeutic out of the last 3,000 that entered Phase I that didn't cite mouse experiments in its preclinical studies for efficacy.
The dirty little secret of human organoid models is that they are grown in a matrix (e.g. Matrigel) that is derived from a tumor that secretes this matrix, which is grown in a mouse host. The mouse of course is "sacrificed" to harvest this matrix.
Well, when people say "organ on a chip" it sounds completely synthetic, but some organ-on-a-chip designs (and many organoid platforms) actually require the killing of untold numbers of mice to generate the matrix compounds. So that would just be an industrial obfuscation of who is doing the killing: now it is not the scientist doing all the killing but the Matrigel manufacturer. But to be fair, this will likely change over time as more synthetic approaches are developed. And the lung-on-a-chip described in this article does not use Matrigel. So I think it is actually a pretty good example of moving away from animal use in biomedical research.
Ah lest we forget about Jevons Paradox. With the ability to discover a nearly infinite number of potential breakthroughs, we are going to need more animal testing than ever!
Thanks! I was thinking of this concept just yesterday, specifically comparing AI to the internet. I didn't realize it had a name, although I knew it was a known phenomenon.
IMO the most interesting research in this field is being done by DeepMind, which is to build an actual virtual cell [1]. Would be curious to know if the team / Demis is still finding adequate time to advance this field amidst the LLM boom.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEOOMYxMvY4 (Note: I have heard Demis Hassabis speak about this topic in a few sources, this was the quickest one I could find where he talks in depth about it)
The suffering of test animals is a tiny decimal point compared to the suffering of factory farmed animals, which produce 99% of the animal products humans eat. Literally 50 billion chickens a year in the most inhumane conditions imaginable for their entire lives. Over one billion pigs per year. They die in horrible 9/11-like conditions.
Edit: I used to dismiss all that since I figured animals don't have enough neurons or intelligence or whatever for their pain to matter. A quote from Ozy Brennan[1] (five paragraphs down from this hyperlink, though BB's commentary here is important too) changed my mind. TL;DR: intelligence is almost certainly not relevant to feeling pain, and the same pain pathways that exist in the human brain exist in other animals too.
+1. Highly recommend people read “Animal Liberation Now” (“Now”) being the 2023 version of “Animal Liberation” from the 70s.
I became vegetarian after reading the original book, and more recently _mostly_ vegan after reading “Now”. (Still a work in progress as it’s only been a few weeks and takes time to adjust my diet).
Factory Farming is definitely horrendous and it’s not only for the animals killed for meat. Animals kept for egg or milk are essentially mistreated during their entire (short) lives.
Trying to go vegan because of this, but then I realize halfway through the yogurt I am eating that it is based on milk and is not vegan in the slightest, even though it is considered vegetarian. There is always tomorrow.
Trying to go plant-based too much at once is really difficult and almost always leads people to this all or nothing mentality (and speak for you directly obviously—just my observations).
I’d love to see people take a statistical model. I currently get 50% of calories or maybe protein from animals. If I reduce that to 40%, what would that look like? Maybe 1 fully-plant-based meal a week? That way I can test out a recipe or learn how to make tofu yummy.
Or maybe you’ve heard “I can’t live without steak” or “cheese.” Well, trend towards plant-based except for steak or cheese (while not increasing your consumption of that).
I quit animal products pretty abruptly and on a personal level I wouldn't say doing it all at once is necessarily the difficult part. I was unprepared for the sudden lop-sidedness in favour of needing to plan and prepare meals. The shift to not being able to eat unprocessed on-the-go and restaurant meals because the plant-based options were mediocre to non-existent is quite drastic. I've gotten used to accompanying people who are eating without partaking myself.
I am still allowing myself to make an occasional mistake, because if you do not read the ingredients carefully it can be hard to say what is (for example, finding out a brand name chicken ramen bowl is artificial chicken and is actually vegan friendly) and what is not vegan (for example, a brand name candy I previously enjoyed, sadly), but rather than giving up I hit the reset button and start again the next day until I get it right. Everyone gets a mistake!
Doing less than 100% is not a "mistake." Self-castigation only undermines your efforts. The change you do make still matters. I have started aiming at 80% because it is attainable. Doing so sets an example for others that it doesn't need to be a radical lifestyle change, which in net terms may be more effective than doing 100% but scaring people off by making it look unattainable and uncomfortable.
+1. I phased out meat over almost like 6 months before being completely vegetarian. It made the transition much easier when I did this about 12 years ago.
I eliminated types of meat (e.g no more chicken, then no more beef, etc). Slowly adapting my diet over time.
You're still doing more than most, and if everyone in the world made choices like yours it would still cash out in massive changes to animal welfare even if it was short of 100% perfect.
I think an unfortunate thing that has poisoned too much of the talk of animal welfare has been what I consider a small minded and frankly frivolous accusation of hypocrisy. The "hypocrisy" is the price of agreeing to be accountable to a much higher standard. The "consistency" of not even bothering to try is not morally preferable.
Sadly that is not entirely true. Many farms will make such claims.. until secret “inspections” happen and you realize they are skirting around the rules.
In theory yes it’s better, in practice, not always.
Yeah that is good when shopping at a local grocery store, but more difficult when you want to make good choices at the local coffee shop, which has more limited options even though they do have some available that are vegan or/and organic.
Go at your own pace. It's more important to succeed a little than to risk failing. Cheese and yogurt still lack really great vegan alternatives. But I switched to oat milk, which lasts longer, is cheaper, and (IMO) tastes better, and I haven't looked back.
Wait until you're comfortable with the changes you've made, and only then introduce more.
Flax eggs are a good substitute for eggs in many recipes.
Vegan food is like Star Trek replicators. It is the future. Can’t wait for vertical farms and world being overwhelmed with beans and fruits all picked by AI floating robots.
It is funny how future is here yet it takes centuries to come. Human’s still sticking to their slaughter instead of using replicators. Klingon much.
Lab-grown meat is starting to become feasible and it's already being turned into a cultural issue just like electric cars were. It's pretty embarrassing.
Not just their living conditions, but their cruel slaughter in the name of religion ought to get banned, too. Countries claiming to have animal welfare laws, roll out special exemptions for religion for killing them in a fashion than can only be described as deliberately cruel.
To the larger point, all exemptions in the name of religion must stop. You don't get special treatment just because you read Harry Potter.
Ok factory farming has some appalling quality of life issues for the animals but I'm really struggling to figure out what the comparison is to 9/11 unless you're just a troll.
I can't find it (looked for 10 minutes), but there was an article at some point talking about a video that activists took after sneaking into a certain slaughterhouse. It showed cows (or was it pigs?) being put in a cage and slowly lowered down into a pit full of hot smoky gas. They were freaking out all along the way down, and as they were being pushed into the cages. Call me pathetic but it made me think of the people having to choose between burning to death and jumping to death, except in this case there was no choice at all for the animal. And no more than a few thousand people died this way on 9/11, but at just that one slaughterhouse probably orders of magnitude more animals have died in that way.
What makes it more complicated is that regulatory authorities across different countries have varying views on what is considered 'acceptable'. As mentioned in the Harvard example from the article. This could mean that both animal and non animal testing will be required for the forceable future to satisfy both sets of views until there is sufficient alignment from the 'big' regulators imo.
Very odd.... two months ago now I just bought a lazer cutter and some random acrylic off amazon to make little microfluidic devices because I thought they were neat and have some ideas to make them more generalized that i wanted to tinker with. Nice to see one pop up at me unexpectedly on an HN link.
In the next 18 months it will come out that Anthropic and/or OpenAI have killed ~1,000,000,000 mice to RL train models for drug discovery. May these model/chips be widely available and cheap enough soon!
Funny animal research story: University had an animal research committee to which anyone wanting to "use" an animal on university property had to submit proposals. Theatre department wants to "borrow" a lamb from the school's agricultural department research herd. Female character was to hold a live lamb during several stage scenes. Three shows a week for about a month. Everyone laughed. Then came the objection:
As the lamb would be exposed to uncontrolled people/pathogens it could not be used for further scientific studies nor returned to the herd. There was doubt it could even be sold for food. So, absent anyone taking it home as a pet, its appearance on stage was more of a death sentence than any scientific study!
the FDA wanted data from organs-on-a-chip or some comparable alternative.
This is the main takeaway from the article imho and great news! ~15 years ago those systems were were not very interesting for pharma companies (bayer used to have a campus a few s-bahn stops away) due to regulators requiring animal tests over those systems.
I believe that the issue is not that we are not capable of, it's just that we don't want to do it or give priority to it.
All the while people with massive power and resources are just wasting them on gimmicks and plots to keep increasing their net worth, power, all of that.
The one who don't care have all the power, the ones who care have none.
The massive increases of medical research spending to useful outcomes directly track the decrease in testing in humans and then animals. False positives from doing research in systems that are not the systems the medicine will be used in results in the observed waste and lack of progress compared to, say, the 1950s.
I am not saying we should not have stopped directly testing in humans or animals. But I am saying that the result has been worse outcomes. And any further shifts away from the biological systems that need the medicine (like using computational crap like LLMs) will further increase this disconnect.
Honestly I don’t get it. Why use a model of organs when you can use real organs in mice?
If society had to choose: cure one extra disease variant and sacrifice a million mice in the process, or don’t. Shouldn’t the answer be obviously to use mice to save people lives?
Honestly I don’t get it. How many lab rats is one person worth? Judging by some comments here, the answer would be they won’t trade mice lives for people lives?
That whole argument is predicated on the false assumption that mice are accurate enough human analogs that you even can cure human disease with their help. There's a good reason why it's such a common comment to point out how "in mice" was omitted from a headline that otherwise sounds like a medical breakthrough.
This is true, but perhaps not for the reason you have in mind. The “failures” are exaggerated by shoddy experimental design—mainly trying to generalize from a single fully inbred strain of mouse. Most murine research is based on this one strain: C57BL/6. This is like conducting a clinical study with one seriously inbred human subject multiple times. Very poor generality even to other types of mice, let alone to humans.
I think it's terribly unfortunate that the the "in mice" meme ever took off. If overhyping science based on preliminary tests is bad, so too is the blanket dismissal of that research that overcorrects in the wrong direction.
We share enough mechanisms across genetics, proteins and even our immune systems and that research is capable of asking meaningful questions that matter to us, and frequently has paid off. That's not to justify the ethics of it but I think it's beyond question that research iN mIcE has been an important research platform for things like immunology and lead to nobel prizes. Research writ large is a vast cumulative program of small iterations that are, individually, of provisional significance, and the categorical dismissal of it as not producing instant one-shot cures is at least as bad a misunderstanding of science as overhyped articles are.
Where do you draw the line and say that the arithmetic regarding suffering lab animals versus suffering humans does or doesn't add up?
The answer is far from obvious for many people and so obvious as to not need discussion for others. But the proportions of the population that fall into each group varies over time, from place to place, etc., as does the fraction of each group deciding for or against animal experimentation.
Odd that in all the comments I have read so far no on has yet mentioned the many apparently faceless octopods, chickens, turkey, lambs, pigs, goats, and cows many of us consume each week and how they ended up in our mouths; the same mouths now discussing mouse welfare. Yes, odd.
If the simulated organs perform better for research and avoid needless animal suffering, then it's a win/win. Right now it's a win/lose at best, possibly a lose/lose if you factor in reproducibility issues using animal organs for research.
First off, we should only be making this kind of trade-off (non-human lives for human lives) because it's absolutely necessary.
But even ignoring the ethics concerns, an accurate non-animal model is going to be vastly preferable to a real animal for a lot of stages of research. It's going to be easier to isolate variables, and a lot of research time and resources are taken up by animal models just being real animals.
It could and likely is the case that we can make better alternatives to animal testing but we're held back by the kinds of arguments you just made and the inertia in the system so we don't move past a flawed but functional paradigm based around animal testing.
I think it’s important to realize, the mice are still dying as we speak for this purpose.
This is simply a step toward not needing to literally kill animals needlessly, if it succeeds. In the meantime, while stuff like this is really early on, we’re not going to stop animal testing.
I think for most people who are against animal testing it is not the death of the animals that is the principal problem, it is the suffering they undergo while alive.
*for drug trials. I imagine animal testing will remain required for implants, surgical instruments, and imaging for quite a long time.
As slow as it may be to adopt, it's a welcome change to how people should do research. Why induce suffering on an animal when the potential for failure and or miscalculation is so high? It seems from the article a model/chip can be more insightful on how something will affect humans.
It should be a tiered system, IMO.
1) Where possible, don't test in animals.
2) When testing in animals, first ensure that there is reasonable confidence the risk and severity of harm from the testing will be minimal. Only begin initial in vivo testing after this has first been achieved.
3) For test animals that are or aren't harmed, allow them to live happy, (relatively) normal, natural lives. Don't end their life early unnecessarily, with exceptions for humane euthanasia if the testing has unexpectedly caused significant, persistent suffering. Treat them as a pet owner would treat their beloved pet rat.
Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans. The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.
Most of what you said is already how it's done today, at least in the pharmaceutical industry.
> Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans.
I don't consider it an extreme view, as lots of people share that view. But within the scope of pharmaceuticals, as opposed to cosmetics, I disagree with it because I think that's an impractical guideline to follow. Animal testing happens because there aren't good alternative ways to get safety data (on a per-treatment basis) without putting human lives at risk, and it's already a tiered system designed to balance scientific need against animal welfare. This is also why in standard medical trials proving safety comes before proving efficacy.
> The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.
The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject? You need safety data. How do you get the safety data? Right now, the main way is a tiered system that starts on a petri dish and eventually passes through mice, monkeys, etc. before humans.
> The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject?
I don't think you and GP are actually saying anything different. I interpreted their statement 'The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?"' not to mean don't test on animals if you wouldn't on a human, but to use your reaction and feelings to that to guide your judgement, and help judge what type of animal testing you're at, not to be a binary switch of whether any animal testing at all should be done.
> It should be a tiered system, IMO.
It is a tiered system, at least if you look at big pharma. There are many stages in the pharmaceutical drug development process.
Also human testing (clinical trials) have different stages/tiers to maximize learning and minimize risk at every stage. A lot of companies trying to innovate here.
I’m exited what more AI can bring to this space.
I do feel bad for medical mice, especially things like SCID Mice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_combined_immunodeficien..., which are basically only born to be infected with something, and then die. Even more so in a recent case of academic fraud I've seen involving cancer testing, where the data was obviously faked, but mice still died for the data.
But yes, it's hard to test immune responses without hurting a living animal, since you'd have to somehow have a non-alive immune system to test on otherwise
How do you feel for wild mice, who typically have short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten by a snake, bird, or other predator?
Should hunter gatherers be thankful if we kidnapped them and tortured them to death in our labs?
What about people from Gaza?
Is it acceptable to do human testing as long as you pull the humans out of say east Africa during a famine?
These examples don't work. Hunter gatherers didn't suffer, and the other two are in outlier bad situations. Set them free in a stable situation and they'll live happy lives.
If that description of wild mice is accurate, there is no happy free life. The baseline is very different. I'm not going to try to say how that should affect the rest of the ethics, but it's an important point to consider, and not as easily dismissed as your examples would imply.
No matter how many checks, there's a human trial, and that may not go to plan either: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4811626.stm
--
Two men who fell seriously ill following a clinical drugs trial remain in a critical condition but four others are showing signs of improvement.
All six are still in intensive care in Northwick Park Hospital, north-west London, after falling ill on Monday.
TeGenero, which manufactures the anti-inflammatory drug, says it has apologised to the men's families.
All patients recovered, the final patient left hospital after 3 months. Not ideal. The company went bankrupt and the outcome was better regulation in the UK and Germany; great wiki article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theralizumab including the relevant:
this is already what they do, you have to justify usage of animals and meet standards for quality of life to do any research at a real institution
also animal research is a huge pain in the ass, nobody is doing it unless they have to
That's a naive understanding of academia.
Meeting standards is nothing but a formality, a form to fill. The PhDs and lab staff doing the killing, if they have any qualms about the act itself or just the purpose of the killing, generally justify it away as being what they have to do to keep the job. The "humane" killing methods are learned on the job through trial and error, and such errors keep happening regularly to experienced staff.
Prior to lockdowns, many/most lab animals just got killed: interesting quality of life standard.
What's written in lab policies is not at all how it happens in reality.
that does not sound at all like my lab experience, nobody was doing ad hoc trial and error on basic animal management
> Treat them as a pet owner would treat their beloved pet rat.
They do that already? Then how come an estimated 192 million mice are killed each year?
That's already how it works.
FWIW, just watching a few pigs in an existing herd without interacting with them in any active way requires an extensive ethical approval process. Nobody would go through even that if they could gather the same data from a computer model.
I agree. If it’s a question of just cost - (animals being cheaper to just test on quickly and faster) animal testing shouldn’t be allowed.
I feel like "just a question of cost" is a heavy lifter here though.
Cost core to our resource allocation system, for better or worse, and if something costs a lot it usually means we can't do it as much. In this framing, cutting out animal testing would (often) mean medical research is slower. In this framing it's a question of where people are willing to put the dial on ethics vs results, and of course pumping the breaks in one place without universal buy-in just means the cruelty moves elsewhere.
I don't think the above 1-dimensional framing is the whole story though. You could imagine more standardized data sharing, so that the data that cost the lives of a few thousand rats could be used by others. And of course you could require (as drug trials do) that the study be registered before any experiment happened, and that the results be published regardless of the outcome. Some of these changes could actually make the science better, in addition to more ethical.
hopefully animal testing alternatives keep innovating enough that they, like some renewable energy sources today, become cheaper to make use of than their incumbents
I hope so too! Unfortunately animal studies are still one of the main pillars of physiology and drug development. They were even a requirement until very recently in the US, see the rule just approved by the FDA [1].
[1]: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-19350.pdf
It’s not just a question of cost. Our biological mechanisms are so complex, there is no single system that can tell us whether a drug is 100% safe or not. That’s why drugs are eventually also “tested” in humans during clinical trials. How amazing would it be if we could throw any drug/compound into a computer, then also spit in it, and get a personalized efficacy score as a response…?
Animals are NOT cheaper. Pharma companies do everything to avoid animal testing.
For most drugs the only reasonable test animals are mice and rats. And they LOVE to naturally get cancer and other diseases, so you need to use large groups to get even a semblance of statistical significance.
Oh, and don't forget that it takes a lot of time to run the tests. And time IS money for pharma.
Even within animal testing, the cost and convenience of animal testing could vary tremendously. Working in animal testing intrinsically means running a death-camp for mice. The mice aren't are barely even raw materials, they're basically stationery, more treated more like a mobile pH test-strip then a living creature.
There are ways that animal testing could be made far more humane (like birth control to prevent the kind of overbreeding that demands mass culling), but those, themselves, would be costly.
And in order to test cures, you must first inflict the animals with the disease. How many do you need? Are you sure? Because waiting to produce more later would also create costs. Cheaper just to breed a huge batch now and then cull the surplus.
... so how many extra do you want?
Time to feed my beloved pet snake.
Potential for failure is high, of course, an experiment might not have the desired outcome and a death of a few hundred mice would not lead to a cure of some disease, sure. But without trying for millions of times, scientists won’t find the one drug that works. If it saves at least person, isn’t the risk and cost of not trying to find the cure by all mean possible even higher?
> But without trying for millions of times, scientists won’t find the one drug that works.
well isn't it mostly other way around? millions of times to LOOK FOR hidden SIDE-EFFECTS?
animal testing is mostly for answering 'is it safe?'
Sacrificial animals are used to answer nearly all questions in medicine. I would be surprised if you could find a single therapeutic out of the last 3,000 that entered Phase I that didn't cite mouse experiments in its preclinical studies for efficacy.
>Why induce suffering on an animal when the potential for failure and or miscalculation is so high?
Because that's drug testing in general, even with human subjects.
The dirty little secret of human organoid models is that they are grown in a matrix (e.g. Matrigel) that is derived from a tumor that secretes this matrix, which is grown in a mouse host. The mouse of course is "sacrificed" to harvest this matrix.
Is it a dirty secret? It's like saying the people running the ESG funds drive gas powered cars.
Well, when people say "organ on a chip" it sounds completely synthetic, but some organ-on-a-chip designs (and many organoid platforms) actually require the killing of untold numbers of mice to generate the matrix compounds. So that would just be an industrial obfuscation of who is doing the killing: now it is not the scientist doing all the killing but the Matrigel manufacturer. But to be fair, this will likely change over time as more synthetic approaches are developed. And the lung-on-a-chip described in this article does not use Matrigel. So I think it is actually a pretty good example of moving away from animal use in biomedical research.
it's impossible to win with concern trolls. unfortunately, they are a big voting constituency.
Ah lest we forget about Jevons Paradox. With the ability to discover a nearly infinite number of potential breakthroughs, we are going to need more animal testing than ever!
(Sarcasm but also some potential truth)
Thanks! I was thinking of this concept just yesterday, specifically comparing AI to the internet. I didn't realize it had a name, although I knew it was a known phenomenon.
IMO the most interesting research in this field is being done by DeepMind, which is to build an actual virtual cell [1]. Would be curious to know if the team / Demis is still finding adequate time to advance this field amidst the LLM boom.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEOOMYxMvY4 (Note: I have heard Demis Hassabis speak about this topic in a few sources, this was the quickest one I could find where he talks in depth about it)
The suffering of test animals is a tiny decimal point compared to the suffering of factory farmed animals, which produce 99% of the animal products humans eat. Literally 50 billion chickens a year in the most inhumane conditions imaginable for their entire lives. Over one billion pigs per year. They die in horrible 9/11-like conditions.
Edit: I used to dismiss all that since I figured animals don't have enough neurons or intelligence or whatever for their pain to matter. A quote from Ozy Brennan[1] (five paragraphs down from this hyperlink, though BB's commentary here is important too) changed my mind. TL;DR: intelligence is almost certainly not relevant to feeling pain, and the same pain pathways that exist in the human brain exist in other animals too.
[1] https://benthams.substack.com/i/151605056/2-intensely-what-a...
+1. Highly recommend people read “Animal Liberation Now” (“Now”) being the 2023 version of “Animal Liberation” from the 70s.
I became vegetarian after reading the original book, and more recently _mostly_ vegan after reading “Now”. (Still a work in progress as it’s only been a few weeks and takes time to adjust my diet).
Factory Farming is definitely horrendous and it’s not only for the animals killed for meat. Animals kept for egg or milk are essentially mistreated during their entire (short) lives.
Trying to go vegan because of this, but then I realize halfway through the yogurt I am eating that it is based on milk and is not vegan in the slightest, even though it is considered vegetarian. There is always tomorrow.
Trying to go plant-based too much at once is really difficult and almost always leads people to this all or nothing mentality (and speak for you directly obviously—just my observations).
I’d love to see people take a statistical model. I currently get 50% of calories or maybe protein from animals. If I reduce that to 40%, what would that look like? Maybe 1 fully-plant-based meal a week? That way I can test out a recipe or learn how to make tofu yummy.
Or maybe you’ve heard “I can’t live without steak” or “cheese.” Well, trend towards plant-based except for steak or cheese (while not increasing your consumption of that).
I quit animal products pretty abruptly and on a personal level I wouldn't say doing it all at once is necessarily the difficult part. I was unprepared for the sudden lop-sidedness in favour of needing to plan and prepare meals. The shift to not being able to eat unprocessed on-the-go and restaurant meals because the plant-based options were mediocre to non-existent is quite drastic. I've gotten used to accompanying people who are eating without partaking myself.
I am still allowing myself to make an occasional mistake, because if you do not read the ingredients carefully it can be hard to say what is (for example, finding out a brand name chicken ramen bowl is artificial chicken and is actually vegan friendly) and what is not vegan (for example, a brand name candy I previously enjoyed, sadly), but rather than giving up I hit the reset button and start again the next day until I get it right. Everyone gets a mistake!
Doing less than 100% is not a "mistake." Self-castigation only undermines your efforts. The change you do make still matters. I have started aiming at 80% because it is attainable. Doing so sets an example for others that it doesn't need to be a radical lifestyle change, which in net terms may be more effective than doing 100% but scaring people off by making it look unattainable and uncomfortable.
+1. I phased out meat over almost like 6 months before being completely vegetarian. It made the transition much easier when I did this about 12 years ago.
I eliminated types of meat (e.g no more chicken, then no more beef, etc). Slowly adapting my diet over time.
I think that made it easier to stick with it.
You're still doing more than most, and if everyone in the world made choices like yours it would still cash out in massive changes to animal welfare even if it was short of 100% perfect.
I think an unfortunate thing that has poisoned too much of the talk of animal welfare has been what I consider a small minded and frankly frivolous accusation of hypocrisy. The "hypocrisy" is the price of agreeing to be accountable to a much higher standard. The "consistency" of not even bothering to try is not morally preferable.
Another option is to go organic. There is organic yoghurt, milk, eggs and of course meat. At least you know that the animals have had a better life.
Sadly that is not entirely true. Many farms will make such claims.. until secret “inspections” happen and you realize they are skirting around the rules.
In theory yes it’s better, in practice, not always.
Yeah that is good when shopping at a local grocery store, but more difficult when you want to make good choices at the local coffee shop, which has more limited options even though they do have some available that are vegan or/and organic.
There really is. And it's worth making the effort! Wishing you luck.
Go at your own pace. It's more important to succeed a little than to risk failing. Cheese and yogurt still lack really great vegan alternatives. But I switched to oat milk, which lasts longer, is cheaper, and (IMO) tastes better, and I haven't looked back.
Wait until you're comfortable with the changes you've made, and only then introduce more.
Flax eggs are a good substitute for eggs in many recipes.
Vegan food is like Star Trek replicators. It is the future. Can’t wait for vertical farms and world being overwhelmed with beans and fruits all picked by AI floating robots.
It is funny how future is here yet it takes centuries to come. Human’s still sticking to their slaughter instead of using replicators. Klingon much.
Lab-grown meat is starting to become feasible and it's already being turned into a cultural issue just like electric cars were. It's pretty embarrassing.
Not just their living conditions, but their cruel slaughter in the name of religion ought to get banned, too. Countries claiming to have animal welfare laws, roll out special exemptions for religion for killing them in a fashion than can only be described as deliberately cruel.
To the larger point, all exemptions in the name of religion must stop. You don't get special treatment just because you read Harry Potter.
Of course their conditions are inhumane: they are not human.
I love that you posted this. Going to listen to Propagandhi now.
Ok factory farming has some appalling quality of life issues for the animals but I'm really struggling to figure out what the comparison is to 9/11 unless you're just a troll.
"The Horror of Unfathomable Pain" [1]
[1] https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-horror-of-unfathomable-p...
I can't find it (looked for 10 minutes), but there was an article at some point talking about a video that activists took after sneaking into a certain slaughterhouse. It showed cows (or was it pigs?) being put in a cage and slowly lowered down into a pit full of hot smoky gas. They were freaking out all along the way down, and as they were being pushed into the cages. Call me pathetic but it made me think of the people having to choose between burning to death and jumping to death, except in this case there was no choice at all for the animal. And no more than a few thousand people died this way on 9/11, but at just that one slaughterhouse probably orders of magnitude more animals have died in that way.
Here's a recent one about the CO2 stunner at UW-Madison, where a student snuck in and recorded it being used on pigs.
https://www.dailycardinal.com/article/2026/09/uw-madison-gra...
Frankly, with how pigs are killed, they could have said the holocaust and it would have made more sense (at least to me)
What makes it more complicated is that regulatory authorities across different countries have varying views on what is considered 'acceptable'. As mentioned in the Harvard example from the article. This could mean that both animal and non animal testing will be required for the forceable future to satisfy both sets of views until there is sufficient alignment from the 'big' regulators imo.
Very odd.... two months ago now I just bought a lazer cutter and some random acrylic off amazon to make little microfluidic devices because I thought they were neat and have some ideas to make them more generalized that i wanted to tinker with. Nice to see one pop up at me unexpectedly on an HN link.
In the next 18 months it will come out that Anthropic and/or OpenAI have killed ~1,000,000,000 mice to RL train models for drug discovery. May these model/chips be widely available and cheap enough soon!
Exactly 49 humans.
?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Funny animal research story: University had an animal research committee to which anyone wanting to "use" an animal on university property had to submit proposals. Theatre department wants to "borrow" a lamb from the school's agricultural department research herd. Female character was to hold a live lamb during several stage scenes. Three shows a week for about a month. Everyone laughed. Then came the objection:
As the lamb would be exposed to uncontrolled people/pathogens it could not be used for further scientific studies nor returned to the herd. There was doubt it could even be sold for food. So, absent anyone taking it home as a pet, its appearance on stage was more of a death sentence than any scientific study!
They opted for a doll.
Nice to see TissUse getting a shout out :)
This is the main takeaway from the article imho and great news! ~15 years ago those systems were were not very interesting for pharma companies (bayer used to have a campus a few s-bahn stops away) due to regulators requiring animal tests over those systems.I think one of the more egrigious cases that this could help avoid in the future is Neuralink using UC Davis's monkeys
Meanwhile, in China. https://faunalytics.org/animal-research-in-china/
“It’s people man! We’re the ones who are miserable, so why shouldn’t we get to try it all first?!”
- Sealab 2021
This was already figured out and built out years ago https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/microphysiological-s...
better link https://www.darpa.mil/news/features/microphysiological-syste...
I believe that the issue is not that we are not capable of, it's just that we don't want to do it or give priority to it.
All the while people with massive power and resources are just wasting them on gimmicks and plots to keep increasing their net worth, power, all of that.
The one who don't care have all the power, the ones who care have none.
The massive increases of medical research spending to useful outcomes directly track the decrease in testing in humans and then animals. False positives from doing research in systems that are not the systems the medicine will be used in results in the observed waste and lack of progress compared to, say, the 1950s.
I am not saying we should not have stopped directly testing in humans or animals. But I am saying that the result has been worse outcomes. And any further shifts away from the biological systems that need the medicine (like using computational crap like LLMs) will further increase this disconnect.
Honestly I don’t get it. Why use a model of organs when you can use real organs in mice? If society had to choose: cure one extra disease variant and sacrifice a million mice in the process, or don’t. Shouldn’t the answer be obviously to use mice to save people lives? Honestly I don’t get it. How many lab rats is one person worth? Judging by some comments here, the answer would be they won’t trade mice lives for people lives?
That whole argument is predicated on the false assumption that mice are accurate enough human analogs that you even can cure human disease with their help. There's a good reason why it's such a common comment to point out how "in mice" was omitted from a headline that otherwise sounds like a medical breakthrough.
This is true, but perhaps not for the reason you have in mind. The “failures” are exaggerated by shoddy experimental design—mainly trying to generalize from a single fully inbred strain of mouse. Most murine research is based on this one strain: C57BL/6. This is like conducting a clinical study with one seriously inbred human subject multiple times. Very poor generality even to other types of mice, let alone to humans.
I think it's terribly unfortunate that the the "in mice" meme ever took off. If overhyping science based on preliminary tests is bad, so too is the blanket dismissal of that research that overcorrects in the wrong direction.
We share enough mechanisms across genetics, proteins and even our immune systems and that research is capable of asking meaningful questions that matter to us, and frequently has paid off. That's not to justify the ethics of it but I think it's beyond question that research iN mIcE has been an important research platform for things like immunology and lead to nobel prizes. Research writ large is a vast cumulative program of small iterations that are, individually, of provisional significance, and the categorical dismissal of it as not producing instant one-shot cures is at least as bad a misunderstanding of science as overhyped articles are.
Where do you draw the line and say that the arithmetic regarding suffering lab animals versus suffering humans does or doesn't add up?
The answer is far from obvious for many people and so obvious as to not need discussion for others. But the proportions of the population that fall into each group varies over time, from place to place, etc., as does the fraction of each group deciding for or against animal experimentation.
Odd that in all the comments I have read so far no on has yet mentioned the many apparently faceless octopods, chickens, turkey, lambs, pigs, goats, and cows many of us consume each week and how they ended up in our mouths; the same mouths now discussing mouse welfare. Yes, odd.
If the simulated organs perform better for research and avoid needless animal suffering, then it's a win/win. Right now it's a win/lose at best, possibly a lose/lose if you factor in reproducibility issues using animal organs for research.
First off, we should only be making this kind of trade-off (non-human lives for human lives) because it's absolutely necessary.
But even ignoring the ethics concerns, an accurate non-animal model is going to be vastly preferable to a real animal for a lot of stages of research. It's going to be easier to isolate variables, and a lot of research time and resources are taken up by animal models just being real animals.
> How many lab rats is one person worth?
Zero, if there are alternatives.
If the alternatives are as fast and cheap as lab rat testing, sure.
If not, the alternatives will cost human lives and suffering.
But animal testing could be a local maxima.
It could and likely is the case that we can make better alternatives to animal testing but we're held back by the kinds of arguments you just made and the inertia in the system so we don't move past a flawed but functional paradigm based around animal testing.
You seem to suggest we should ban the best system we know in order to force the development of other systems?
Because not everyone in society is anthropocentric?
I think it’s important to realize, the mice are still dying as we speak for this purpose.
This is simply a step toward not needing to literally kill animals needlessly, if it succeeds. In the meantime, while stuff like this is really early on, we’re not going to stop animal testing.
I think for most people who are against animal testing it is not the death of the animals that is the principal problem, it is the suffering they undergo while alive.