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Asked by unity1 to Mariana on 15 Mar 2010 in Categories: Test methods.
Question: Why do use animal tissue?
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Mariana Vargas answered on 15 Mar 2010:
Using brain tissue from animals (mice) allows me to study how the connections between their cells work. At the moment, there is no other way of obtaining this information, and it is very important to understand how brain cells communicate in a healthy brain, and what happens in diseases such as Alzheimer’s when the connections between brain cells get weaker and weaker and brain cells die. Although our brains are much bigger than those of mice, their brain cells are extremely similar to ours and the findings we obtain by studying them can benefit us all in the long term.
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Comments
Joe commented on :
Personally, I don’t — unless you count humans in this category and the tissue is still in place inside their heads. But there are strong reasons for using animals in science that often boil to: there is no other way to acquire the information. If the information is considered important enough, then animals are used.
For instance, one of the most important things we need to know in order to understand how brains function is how the different parts of the brain are wired up because that explains how information is moving through the system. Without this information, it becomes incredibly difficult to discover how the pieces work together. But, at the moment, the only way to get this information involves injecting specific chemicals into a living brain, then sacrificing the animal, extracting the brain and doing chemical analyses and using microscopes to see these wiring patterns. Obviously, this isn’t something one would do with people so animals are used instead.
This example, however, raises other issues because there is the very real possibility that a monkey’s brain isn’t wired up exactly like a human brain — we can do things like X-factor and snowboarding that monkeys can’t. As a result, one of the main lines of research in my lab is trying to develop alternate methods for getting this same information directly in humans without using invasive procedures. There are new tools that help with this using MRI scans and other methods, but they are still in the early phases. Our group is trying to push their boundaries to find a set of tools that provides as good information as animal models only using non-invasive methods in humans.
I hope others in the group will provide their $0.02 as this is a great question with many (many!) different perspectives.
Nick commented on :
I think we try to use animal tissue as little as possible, but sometimes there is no alternative.
I spend most of my work looking at the “schizophrenia” proteins I’m interested in nerve “cell lines”. These are cells which were taken from an animal animal many years ago and have been growning in labs ever since. By doing this, we can perform experiments without having to kill any more animals. However, their DNA is no longer identical to the original animal that they came from.
Because of this, having done about 10 experiments in these cells, I will then have to do one experiment in nerve cells which have been only just taken from a mouse (which sadly involves sacrificing the mouse) in order to check that I get the same results. We try to make sure we get as many experiments done as possible on these mouse though.
No one likes haing to use animals, and we try to use them as little as possible, but it is sometimes unavoidable.
Carolyn commented on :
I think it’s easy to say we shouldn’t test perfumes and cosmetics on animals because these are things we don’t really need, and developing new fragrances won’t teach us anything new about how the world works. In other cases, testing a drug on animals that could have tremendous benefits for human medicine could be very worthwhile. Then there are the ‘grey areas’, like sticking electrodes in the brains of monkeys to measure their responses to sound, or deliberating damaging parts of a rat’s brain to see how this affects their spatial memory. The problem is that, without these data, neuroscientists like me who do non-invasive research on humans would know so much less about how the brain works at a very basic level. We’d have to rely much more on findings from the behaviour of stroke patients, for example, which is much less precise. This would have implications for how quickly we can develop therapies and treatments when brains are injured. So, while I don’t do research on animals, it is very useful to me that other people have done it.
junefreel1 commented on :
I agree with Nick, try to avoid it where possible, but sometimes there is no alternative. Isnt it true that the UK has some of the (if not THE) most strictly regulated rules for test animals in the world? Also for the husbandry and humane disposal.
Joe commented on :
I think you’re right — the UK has some very tight regulations on animal use, although some places in Europe (like Germany) are talking about creating an Animal Bill of Rights to stop _all_ animal research of any sort. To my mind, that’s going way too far and will be massively counterproductive but it is a popular idea in some places. It’s up to scientists to make the case to the public about why animal testing is important. A huge number of medical advances that we take for granted (like blood transfusions) would never have happened without animal experiments and I don’t think this message comes across very clearly.
mspeirs96 commented on :
not sure ?? y u askin me
lilmissjoy commented on :
im not 2 shure
really
lilmissjoy commented on :
hi how are you
lilmissjoy commented on :
hi kerry how are you i willl miss you a lot you no that lol you no that i will always be there lol lov ya joy xx