Alternatives to animal testing are finally taking off
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
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.
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.
[1]: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-19350.pdf
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?
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.
wasting time and money on a drug that only works in a test tube/organoid/co-culture model is also very expensive.
we should keep funding both, and if the non-animal are good enough, it won't be difficult to convince scientists to save money by using them.
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
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?
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.
Of course they did and still do. They have far higher rates of infant and child mortality, death from curable disease, starvation, and violent death.
It’s inconsistent to call the natural condition of wild animals, surviving and dying in nature, "no happy free life," then exempt humans living under that same fundamental condition.
How do we draw the line, from which principle that isn’t ex post facto? Do no wild animals have a happy free life? Do all humans? Most? A minority? Across all of human history?
Even in the most cherry-picked minority of cases, someone born into a wealthy developed country, people are frequently born with or develop agonizing diseases. They die of cancer and dementia despite their wealth. They live in grinding poverty, or barely cling to existence through depression, anxiety and alienation. Many suffer so greatly in fact that they commit suicide.
Suffering isn't a state of existence reserved for animals that humans are exempt from except in rare cases.
So if it is not, then is the fact that people suffer tremendously just as a normal fact of life justification for nonconsensual fatal human testing?
Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.
The claim above is about mice. I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim.
I don't know how you can say this, frankly, unless you do not see or experience any of this suffering yourself. If not, you should be extremely grateful for your luck.
You don't have to try hard, at all, to find it.
> Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.
How are you defining this, and again by which principle do you draw this line which isn't some ex post facto version of "well humans are here, so I'm going to say everything to the left of here"?
> I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim
We should be extremely skeptical of this claim because it's so convenient.
It absolves us of the guilt for the tremendous harms we're causing them by proposing something which we would see as obviously absurd if it were applied to us:
"A short, miserable life of having all sorts of horrifying experiments performed on you in a lab is better than being free to live your life and die in the world at large." - Person who benefits from performing experiments on you in a lab
But your attempts to equate it to the human experience are a waste of time. Nobody actually thinks humans (or cats, or bison) face the experience that SoftTalker was trying to describe. When we go by the actual intent of the statement, either it's true and mice but not humans face that, or it's false and neither mice nor humans face that. Any experience that you can say is the human default in full honesty, is not the experience SoftTalker was trying to convey.
Ah yes, how silly of me to criticize this as a 2 dimensional statement utterly lacking in self-awareness.
Humans have always enjoyed objectively long lives, and mouse lives are objectively short. Relative to what? Let’s not think about that and while we're at it take the implication for granted that length of a life grants it weight.
This is why we have always honored the fact that tortoise lives are more valuable than those of humans after all.
Borderline starvation is definitely not something millions of humans face every day, or something most of humanity faced for most of history.
Being eaten is so horrible that you’re better off being tortured to death in a lab. Thankfully that has never happened to humans in the wild. Meanwhile, dying of war, famine, cancer or diarrhea is comparatively great, which is why using you in a lab would of course be unthinkable.
Mice struggling for food and survival in the wild are totally different from humans struggling for food and survival in the wild, because, see, uh...
That sentiment is a dismissive, incurious oversimplification of the entire existence of other species. It has so many blind spots, and is seemingly oblivious to the fact the same reasoning could be turned on us. If a hard, short, dangerous life justifies putting a creature in a lab, then a large share of humanity, past and present, would qualify for the same.
You can criticize it but you can't strawman it to oblivion and back.
> objectively
You know what they meant though.
Lines can be set.
And the higher you set the quality of life line, the nicer your lab needs to be to meet the "better than life outside" standard! It's not an excuse for unlimited torture.
> millions of humans
Again, this is about the default. "millions" is 0.1% of humans. And the real number is higher than that but not that much higher.
> Being eaten is so horrible that you’re better off being tortured to death in a lab.
No, that wasn't the argument. And lots of animals we eat do live perfectly good lives.
> Mice struggling for food and survival in the wild are totally different from humans struggling for food and survival in the wild, because, see, uh...
Much much less struggling and starvation and fear fear fear.
You're mocking the statement without trying to understand it. That's rude and extremely unproductive.
Criticize what they meant, not the dumbest interpretation you can think of. Prove their actual intended meaning wrong.
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.
also animal research is a huge pain in the ass, nobody is doing it unless they have to
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.
They do that already? Then how come an estimated 192 million mice are killed each year?
> 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.
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.
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.
--
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.
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 humanshttps://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35766627
That was an antibody against human CD28, and I'd heard speculation at the time that the monkey trials failed to predict the human response due to differences between monkey and human CD28. That was apparently not correct, since "the sponsor had not only determined the relevant extracellular sequence (which is 100% identical to the human one) but also the binding affinities of the mAb, which were identical for human and monkey". That author goes on to propose a different explanation, though I don't know if any explanation is generally accepted.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2990150/
It's funny to recall this in the context of Terence Tao's question of whether you'd take an AI-designed drug with no mechanistic insight. The sponsors of this trial had reason to believe they had strong mechanistic insight, but they were wrong. A pharmacologist from the nineteenth century would have probably run the trial more safely (lower starting dose, one participant at a time) without that false confidence.
There is always human trial — the whole history/timeline of people taking a particular medicine is effectively a decades-long human trial. That's actually the only way we learn about long-term side effects, see paracetamol for instance. All you're proposing is we remove a smaller, controlled pre-trial before releasing the medicine into the wilder population. Sorry, but that won't solve anything except for your feeling of moral indignation.
Once you have an effect, use in vitro models/cell culture to figure out potential mechanisms, then test again in animals to confirm.
If you are doing a PhD (or whatever), do you want to spend 5 years not knowing if your discovery only works in test tubes?
> reasonable confidence the risk and severity of harm from the testing will be minimal
this sounds good, but how do you actually define that? how harmful do you consider giving an animal a UTI (which has the chance to infect kidneys, etc if untreated)?
> For test animals that are or aren't harmed, allow them to live happy, (relatively) normal, natural lives
I agree on principle but for infectious disease you can't really do this without potentially releasing lab strains into the wild.
Something you didn't mention would be to try to use as many parts of an animal that you sacrifice as possible, but then again you're just cluttering expensive -80C freezer space with random tissues if you don't use them. But sometimes when doing ex vivo experiments you can turn one mouse intro multiple samples if you cut the tissues up and expose each one to different conditions, rather than treating the whole mouse. That can save mice..
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?'
Because that's drug testing in general, even with human subjects.
I can see more biomed researchers being able to run bigger batteries of tests with this tech vs the alternative of animal testing.. which tarnishes companies needlessly like with Neuralink
And if the non-animal system isn't good, then you're just wasting money and plastic
The interconnected of organs previously thought to be independent is just starting to be uncovered for example
I'm all for in vitro and cell culture models, but they don't replace animal models, unless you want to go back to running experiments on humans
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab
And because of the unusual nature of their blood they can be used to test the bacteriological safety of injectable drugs. I remember an exhibit about them at the Boston Children's Museum because it was a big deal in Boston because of the pharma industry concentration in the area. A test that didn't require collecting blood was developed circa 1985 but for quite a few reasons the industry has been slow to adopt it and the anticipated transition is still an anticipated transition.
I guess it's better than when we literally injected a sample extract into a bunny to see if he gets a fever. (The old test before LAL)
(We also use the LAL test for bacterial endotoxins in med device for implantables
(Sarcasm but also some potential truth)
[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)
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...
In theory yes it’s better, in practice, not always.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
[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.
https://www.dailycardinal.com/article/2026/09/uw-madison-gra...
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.
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.
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.
the FDA wanted data from organs-on-a-chip or some comparable alternative.
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.
- Sealab 2021
Odd that we focus on the small amount of testing that will generate medicines and cures and not the wholesale death to make chicken poppers at Mickey Ds.
Zero, if there are alternatives.
If not, the alternatives will cost human lives and suffering.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.