My new experimental animal?
A couple of Republicans have introduced a bill in congress to ban all research on animals. All animals, although I’m not sure they understand the breadth of that term. They do helpfully declare that The term ‘‘animal’’ does not include a human
. So, according to the ‘Safeguard Pets, Animals, and Research Ethics Act’
, we’re going to have to shut down all research involving any kind of animal, except humans. They don’t have the first clue what an “animal” is, or how devastating this would be to biomedical research.
Specifically, this legislation would ban animal testing in federal labs, establish a three-year phase-out, rehabilitate and re-home former lab animals, saving taxpayer dollars while enhancing research outcomes, and ensuring accountability and transparency. American taxpayers spend an estimated $20 billion funding experiments here in the US and overseas including in countries with subpar safety conditions in China, Russia, and Iran.
“I am proud to work alongside Congressman Aaron Bean to end the cruel and unnecessary spending on animal experiments that have wasted billions of tax dollars and inhumanely kept hundreds of thousands of innocent animals in captivity to be tortured and sentenced to painful death,” said Congresswoman Malliotakis. “From administering transgender hormone therapy to monkeys to infesting beagles with fleas and drilling into cats’ skulls for so-called ‘research purposes,’ the American taxpayer would be outraged to learn how their money has been spent. As Co-Chair of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus and the Cosmetics Caucus, I am committed to advancing our legislation, promoting humane research alternatives, and ensuring taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly.”
“What Fauci did to beagles and other animals is disgusting. The federal government needs to get out of the business of torturing Snoopy. I am proud to join Congresswoman Malliotakis in introducing the SPARE Act.” said Congressman Bean.
Of course she brought up transgender hormones, Fauci, and saving money, the current Republican shibboleths. I can’t believe this would ever pass into real legislation, but I don’t know…congress and the president have been pushing some insane stuff lately. If it did become the law of the land, you can kiss most biological research goodbye.
Welp, I guess I better go release my spiders and all those fruit flies. Then I’ll go raid the local orphanages for small children I can still legally use in my experiments, before my colleagues get the same clever idea.
Hm. They seemed to have not have mentioned Neuralink despite all of the animals they’ve killed. I wonder why…
Too bad ‘humans’ doesn’t include Republicans. That would create an interesting opportunity.
They’re probably looking for a legal means to use prisoners, detainees, and other “undesirables” as test subjects and playing up to “animal rights” as a means to justify it.
Paging Dr. Mengele…
The US was conducting human experimentation (e.g. Tuskegee among other examples) and forced medical procedures, such as sterilization, long before Nazi Germany even existed. It would be a return to form.
This type of crap is just another example of how completely imbecilic those that run this country are! (I will not call them leaders, because, they are ignorant hateful thugs, not leaders). It is part of their war on science and intelligence. They value drool over intellect!
Here we go, further down the death spiral.
Who knew they could get to Fauci this way?
PZ, you’ve just got to create your army of huge mutant spiders and unleash them on every one of these imbecilic (my new fav. word) rtwingnut xtian terrorists! Please start with Felon muskrat and the Magat in chief, followed by the vancehole and then the rest as you see fit.
“ raid the local orphanages for small children I can still legally use in my experiments…”
How to make a reference to someone without explicitly mentioning the word MUSK.
@ 4
Fair point. Thank you.
Animal husbandry is experimental research.
Going off on a tangent, I want to remind you you are not isolated, even if your (temporary) rulers think USA is the whole world. The brain rot is confined to MAGAstan.
“Zelenskyy has taken to X, formerly Twitter, to thank leaders who have posted their support on the social media platform.
They include the leaders of Germany, Spain, France, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Moldova, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Czech Republic, Finland, Portugal, Croatia, the European Parliament, the European Commission and European Council.”
Also, the FDA unexpectedly cancelled a meeting that would discuss which flu variant to target with the next vaccine.
Q: Is this about “vaccines are evil” or is this to protect virus particles? They are some kind of organisms, I suppose.
I very much hope that you “re-home” your black-widow spiders in the offices of MAGA congress-critters.
…might be too cruel to the spiders, tho.
Betteridge’s law of headlines applies. (“Animals” is distinct from “spawn of Satan”).
@3, 4 Nicole Malliotakis seems to have a really short memory. This literally happened in her district.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School
https://abc7ny.com/willowbrook-geraldo-rivera-staten-island-bill-ritter/11575075/
Yes, talk show dude was once a real reporter and a good one too. But he got dollar signs in his eyes.
I don’t blame people for wanting to further their careers but Riveria was already highly compensated as a reporter. What are you going to buy with $4 million/year contract that you couldn’t buy with a 2 million/year contract as a real journalist?
Malliotakis has consistently voted against abortion rights. Where exactly did she think all those kids and adults came from at Willowbrook?
She hasn’t exactly spoken out about women bleeding out in their cars or on the way to hospitals, dying because they can’t get a lifesaving abortion. What about their pain and unnecessary sacrifice?
But I bet their deaths are generating a lot of data.
Then again, so did Pinochet’s torture sessions on people, particularly women. (Not that Pinochet discriminated.)
Or she could, you know, actually take care of the military before they get permanently injured from shitty training and combat procedures.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/navy-seals-family-pushes-for-recognition-of-traumatic-brain-injuries-after-sons-death/2020/02/09/8ce8b622-46e3-11ea-bc78-8a18f7afcee7_story.html
I mean, your telling me that a country that loves its guns more than it loves its kids can’t build better guns & other artillery that doesn’t damage the GIs using them? All the money we spend on military weapons and there’s no money for that?
Then we wouldn’t need halfassed animal experiments that do precious little to advance science or alleviate veteran suffering but they do make certain researchers–the right researchers rich.
I mention this because one of the so-called researchers in the state I was living in at the time tortured cats for 10 years with horrific eye and brain experiments and never published a single paper. But he was living large off that sweet sweet grant money. Money that could have otherwise been spent on actual veteran care.
@1 Yeah I was wondering about that too. Suspect Malliotakis has ConvenientVision. It allows you to see everything you want to see and nothing that you don’t.
Edit: … you’re telling me
Why need this be necessarily a bad thing?
We do not need to develop a single new medication. For every disease going, we already know an existing treatment, vaccine or way to avoid getting infected in the first place; and at this point, every death from disease is simply a failure of political will.
If the USA were to exercise its right to decline patent protection within its borders for medicines developed zoicidally, you would still get all the benefits of other people’s animal-based research without killing a single animal yourselves (a bit like the way British Empire placed slavery on indefinite hiatus within its borders in order to sell steam engines, but continued to import slave-made goods; and the entire West continues to this day, happily importing goods manufactured under conditions that would be unacceptable at home). And you would get the first-move advantage in developing viable alternatives to animal testing.
Computer modelling will eventually provide superior results to in vivo testing in species with important differences from humans. And if you’ve got the computing power to generate an entire feature-length movie from a plot synopsis, you can’t pretend it’s not up to the job of modelling biochemical reactions. But as long as any nation in the world is permitting animal testing to be carried out, the political will is not there to ban it anywhere else.
With so much supercomputing hardware on the go, it’s only a matter of time before someone not only develops some software capable of predicting the effects of a drug at least as accurately as animal testing, but releases the Source Code. At that point, any first-move advantage anyone else might have had gets blown completely out of the water.
A world in which animals are not eaten, worn or experimented upon is coming one day, whether you like it or not; and this should be seen as an opportunity, not a threat.
#17:
There are lots of diseases which have no effective treatment or for which the treatments suck. Animal experimentation may or may not be helpful in developing treatments for those diseases – but those not-yet-existent treatments are needed.
@6: They’ve been doing that. Seriously, there have been a lot of “Fauci kills beagles” posts and memes on Xitter. Same braying jackasses were VERY silent when it came to Cricket.
I have very mixed feelings on this, as we do need some sort of standards when it comes to animal research, but this is just lip service to make Republicans look like decent humans, so it’s bullshit. This is just smoke and mirrors, nothing more, nothing less.
@17 Except, they don’t plan to use “computer modeling”, for which we still have vastly too little information on for everything from how the brain actual works, to a system anything close to extensive enough to run systemic tests on even a single drug, and the “knowable, at this time”, effects it might have on a complete organism. No, they plan to use LLMs, which literally just regurgitate “existing, already known, data”, to bridge a gap which is literally, “We don’t know this yet, so there is no way in hell we could teach a computer about it.” But, sure… in 100 years, 150, or some vast distant future, when we have collected the data from “existing methods”, maybe. Anyone that thinks otherwise is as big a freaking fool as the Hollywood execs that think they will fire all screen writers, because they can replace them with a subscription to chatGPT. It DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.
bluerizlagirl @17
This is simply untrue, we can not cure or even treat in any meaningful way, and certainly don’t know how to avoid progressive multiple sclerosis. We can treat Parkinson’s to an extent, but can’t prevent it, ditto rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, type I diabetes, adhesions, and many many more diseases. Furthermore there are infectious diseases for which there is no vaccine, no cure, for which we can only provide supportive care, which isn’t always enough. There are infectious diseases that we have no safe vaccine for, that are becoming resistant to all antibiotics. And of course there are new diseases popping up on a regular basis, it is after all one of the results of evolution.
@Kagehi, 20: Obviously I am not suggesting using LLMs. That way lies madness. But think of a machine with enough computing power and enough storage to run a general-purpose LLM — the sort of thing which is going to become cheaply available when, not if, that bubble bursts — running single-purpose software dedicated to one highly-specific task.
I’m talking hardware that could bubble-sort two huge lists in less time than the difference it would have taken to type in a longer program implementing a “faster” sorting algorithm and sort just the first list. You don’t need to spend time optimising things and reducing your search space if the hardware can complete an exhaustive, brute-force search quickly enough. Efficiency is great, and all that; but sometimes overkill is what you need. Look at the mammalian reproductive system, and how many sperm you have to throw at an egg to get one baby, and (at least in non-humans) how many babies you have to produce to be sure of getting one adult.
At the moment, the political will isn’t there, because it’s too easy just to chop up mice instead. Remove that option, and necessity will be the mother of invention.
@Jazzlet, #21: Fewer animals being killed for “research” that leads nowhere while the same number of humans die of diseases is still an improvement, and we can eliminate at least some of the human deaths with nothing more than lifestyle changes. Antibiotic resistance, for instance, is not inevitable, but caused by improper use of antibiotics. And there are measures we can all take to reduce the transmission of infectious diseases.