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Animal Testing Dilemmas

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Animal Testing Dilemmas
Animal testing is an ethical dilemma as it is using animals, which are other living creatures to profit humankind, when they are incapable of giving assent. Over 115 million animals are burned, crippled, poisoned, and abused in labs every year for any scientific experiment or test. This topic was chosen as it is one of the most controversial issues throughout the world. They raise ethical issues, as George Bernard Shaw, a political activist has said “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that is the essence of inhumanity.”, inflict both physical pain as well as psychological distress, are time and resource intensive and does not correctly predict reactions on human. Thus if this issue …show more content…
Meanwhile, innumerable animal lives are lost, and the process often fails to predict human responses because traditional animal models do not accurately copy human biology. For these reasons, there is a need for alternative ways to model human diseases in order to speed up the development of new drugs and medicines. Through the explosive growth of computer power and computational biology, and the high speed robot automation of cell based screening systems, non animal methods are introduced, and are already reducing the number of experiments on animals. Harvard Wyss Institute researchers who are one of the top advanced technology team and a multidisciplinary team of collaborators have engineered and invented “organs-on-chips”, which contain human cells grown to copy the functions of living human organs, including the lung, intestine, kidney, skin, bone marrow and blood-brain barrier. One of the researcher Donald Ingber has said that this new “technology is now poised to have a major impact on society” for reducing animal testing. Not only that, it also improves the research quality as the microdevices are translucent, they provide a window into the inner workings of human organs. Another example of alternative is technology developed by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) such as “quantitative structure-activity relationships”, which uses computer models that simulate human structure and the development of diseases which can predict the ways that drugs will react in the human body. These inventions have produced new tools and ways of thinking that can help uncover exactly how chemicals and drugs disrupt normal processes in the human body at the cellular level while reducing time, monetary cost and animal testing

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