A note about Animal Testing

I've demonstrated excitement on this blog for certain experimental findings that involved treatment of animals that was slightly dubious. The monkey who is strong with the force, after all, had to have electrodes implanted in her brain. Now, the brain doesn't have any pain sensors, so my guess is that she did not experience any pain once the electrodes were in place, and my impression from reports of the experiment was that she was treated very well. Many of the people to whom I've described that project have expressed puzzlement about its usefulness--in other words, they act as though this is science for geek's sake--but the technology being developed by that particular project could help millions of people disabled by debilitating diseases, amputations, and the like. On the other hand, it seems to me grossly unnecessary to test beauty products or designer drugs on animals, who, after all, indisputably have personalities and feel pain.

Thus, I feel ambivalent about animal testing, and I'm not sure it can be categorically dismissed as cruel. I have friends and family members who have participated in research using lab animals, and in many cases they expressed nothing if not love for the animals with whom they worked in the lab. An article in this week's issue of Newsweek reports on the sentencing of groups that have committed violence against animal researchers at UCLA, and the practices of these groups--bombing and vandalizing homes of professors, publishing their home addresses in order to aid in harassment--seem frankly deplorable to me. Some of the comments in the discussion thread for the article are quite wise (and I'm not talking about the bizarre tangent to abortion and anti-abortion-rights-terror): if the government is so serious about regulating stem cell research, then why can't it regulate animal research more vigorously?