Do mice test better than petri dishes?

September 5, 2006 8:57 AM

Reliability of animal testing vs. non-animal testing?

What are the alternatives to animal testing and how well do they work? I imagine stuff like cloned skin tests are great for something simple like makeup irritation, but it seems like the biological systems needed to test pharmaceuticals are a little more complicated than can be replicated in a test tube. Computer modelling (built on results of prior animal testing?) sounds nice, but how well can we use old tests to determine the results of new substances?

And since rats & dogs & humans aren't all so alike - how well does animal testing work in the first place? Rumor has it the LD50 between different kinds of rats or mice is so different it casts doubt on the ability to extrapolate to humans. And a reaction more specific than death seems harder yet!

How much are these studies depended upon? Are clinical trials where it's at, with animal testing just to figure out that if I use chemical X in mascara it'll burn my face off?

It's hard to tell what's biased and what's not when googling, so any links to reliable studies and all are all super-appreciated.

posted by soma lkzx to science & nature (9 comments total)

Something similar was just asked.
posted by agregoli at 9:04 AM on September 5, 2006

so much of it is subjective and can be skewed one way or the other (sometimes subconsciously) based upon ones moral opinion of the subject, that its really difficult to get "unbiased" info about it.

personally, i feel like there really isn't much more we can learn from animal testing that would outweigh the moral repugnance of torturing animals to see what happens if X is done to Y. the point you make about extrapolation of data from animal testing to human relevance is huge to me, and there have been some examples of things being fine for mice but not humans (and vice versa). Plus, with most everything that does make it to human use, there is a whole series of human testing that is done anyway.

but really, more than anything, its going to come down to the moral question, which will lead you to embrace the studies that show it as worthless or the studies that show it as useful. both are out there, and both are "unbiased and reputable".
posted by teishu at 9:17 AM on September 5, 2006

agregoli: that question was "how much of animal research is medical?" and got a lot of "PETA is good!" "PETA is bad!" answers. I'm specifically looking for information regarding viability of non-animal alternatives.

teishu: This isn't about me trying to judge whether it's moral or not to test on animals - I'm just factfinding!

An example of what I'm looking for is this report which is where i got my information concerning LD50 dosage differences from. Sure, it's from the European Coalition to End Animal Experiments, but at least it gives me some numbers. Also, This page lists a bunch of really interesting-sounding alternatives to animal testing, but gives little data about most of them.
posted by soma lkzx at 10:49 AM on September 5, 2006

Sorrrrieee, just trying to help.
posted by agregoli at 1:51 PM on September 5, 2006

Sometimes it is hard to seperate the ethical questions from the science. In the vast majority (all?) of academic settings there are review boards which ask the question "does the benefit to science justify the use of animals in the experiment?" The point being that (for medical testing) if the experiment is not applicable to humans, then the experiment is not worth doing. If there was a way to do it (safely) without animal testing, then of course, that would be the prefered way to do it.

So, for example, I just heard a talk about on the developmental deficits of the ear due to mercury and pcb poisoning. The researchers were trying to determine if mercury or pcbs alone were causing hearing problems, or if it was the combination of the two. They combined animal trials with a survey of a population that consumes a lot of fish with elevated mercury/pcb levels. They used rats because it turns out that the inner ear of the rat is extremely similar to the human inner ear. So for that part of the research using animals made sense.

You may find examples where the use of animals in the experiment does not make sense. But, to actually find data may be hard. Those experiments should be weeded out by review boards. The only way you might find data is to search for projects where animal testing is used, but the funding was cut due to misconduct. Personally, I think those numbers will be hard to come by.

For the record, I am a scientist, although none of my experiments (currently) involve human or animal testing.
posted by achmorrison at 2:26 PM on September 5, 2006

layperson (non-helpful) response. Discard at will:
I think another way to look at it is this: Animal testing might not need to work very well at all to be very useful, eg in establishing a range of things that might happen in humans - things to keep an eye out for Just In Case. Drugs require human trials for FDA approval. To perform a trial on human subjects, all sorts of ethics committees and stuff must first be satisfied that every effort has been made to ensure that the drug will be non-harmful. Could that case be made for a drug that has never been tried in a living animal? The natural premise (that animal tests have little benefit unless they are accurate and reliable predictors of drug effects in humans) might not be true (I don't know), but the assumption that it must be true heavily shapes our thinking.
posted by -harlequin- at 2:30 PM on September 5, 2006

my point was that you will find "facts" that are on different sides of the argument represented quite well, and that the defining factor between them, is from what moral position they tend to be coming from.

you can find studies of the exact same data set where one points to the utter worthlessness of animal testing while another points to the opposite.

this is an issue that you cannot seperate the morality from. just like you'll find "unbiased" scientists giving data that can be used for or against abortion.
posted by teishu at 4:00 PM on September 5, 2006

Scientific American had an article on a similar topic in their January 2006 issue called "Protecting More Animals." It's premium content now through their website, but I remember it covered a run-down of various alternatives to animal testing and their pros and cons.
posted by Helix80 at 4:18 PM on September 5, 2006

Shelleycat once told me that LD50 isn't actually used/common anymore because too many animals need to be killed to measure it, and there are new, more animal friendly ways to calculate toxicity now. She knows a lot about this kind of stuff in general, so you can ask her, or wait until she finds this thread.

Myself, I'm doing lab stuff but not on animals, just on cell lines. For studying things at the molecular level (protein functions) it's very useful because all cells are somewhat the same. However, I can't really make any organism-wide conclusions from my work, for several reasons:
1) Things that happen in 1 cell type might not happen that way in different cell types
2) Cultured cell lines are slightly different from their physiological counterpart. They're usually cancer cells, because regular cells don't just grow outside of the body. For example, melanoma cells in petri dishes can be used to study pigmentation, but these are mutated melanocytes (skin cells) and slightly different from the actual cells in your skin.
3) Isolated cells also don't tell you what actually happens when the cells are in a tissue or organ or body, next to other types of cells that inevitably interact with it.

With these kind of experiments you can figure out whether or not a drug might work, or what type of proteins a gene encodes, but it doesn't tell you what really happes in an organism. For that you would need to study (inbred, to reduce background) animals.

I'm actually in a moral debate with myself at the moment about animal experimentation. I'm trying to justify the fact that I'm vegetarian (for moral reasons) and do lab work. Even though I don't use animals myself, I do need to use antibodies in my experiments that were produced using animals, and that even growing a cell line in petri dishes requires the addition of serum (from cow blood). I'm not entirely done setting my thoughts straight, but clearly there is a range of different studies that use animals, and not all of them depend on it or need to use as many animals as they might need. Cosmetics testing can easily be done without animals, that's simple. But then it gets more complicated. Clinical research really needs animals because it's too dangerous, even with increasingly better understanding of toxicology, to administer a new substance to humans straight away. Functional studies (just figuring out how everything works) can go a very long way with cell lines, bacteria & yeast, and computers, but at some point animal work may be inevitable.

Do mice test better than petri dishes? In these last two case (clinical and functional), mice do, in a way, test better than petri dishes because dishes don't give full organism information. But at a very basic molecular level petri dishes test better. There is a lot of work still to be done (and currently being done by people like me) at the computer and molecular/cellular stage, and this does rule out a lot of things that are not even worth using animals for. But when a drug is at a certain stage of testing and seems a potential succesful drug candidate with no known predictable side effects, or when a gene/protein has been found to have a certain function that might imply an important phenotype (characteristic) or be related to a disease, then there is at this moment no reliable alternative to animal testing, as far as I know.

It's not a black and white answer, but I don't think anyone can give you that (at least not a well-informed answer).
posted by easternblot at 4:23 PM on September 5, 2006