Scientists Build Microscope Onto The Head Of A Rat 32
mindpixel writes: "Unisci is reporting: 'The ability to see individual neurons in detail in the brains of conscious, behaving animals seems like the stuff of science fiction. But in the current issue of Neuron, Professor Winfried Denk and colleagues report that they have done just that. In a stunning technical achievement, they have built a tiny, powerful microscope onto the head of a rat.'" This might be technically stunning, but I wonder how much the rat likes it.
Re:Sick, sad science. (Score:4, Interesting)
1) All the examples deal with attempts to learn about and cure diseases in people. It neglects the fact that a good amount of research, such as the rat discussed, hopes to learn about a system given any environment because we've never studied it in any context. And, other times scientists really do want to learn about rats or rabbits or monkeys in question.
2) It presumes that animals are in all ways radically different than people and no results are comparable. This is patently false. Not every animal can be used for everything, but over time we learn what animals are good models for some processes. For instance the recent artificial hearts probably never would have been implanted without numerous practice surgerys on pigs, who have similar heart needs. Rabbit eyes while not perfect are a good predictor of irritation in human eyes. Failure of a drug in one animal model doesn't mean you can't try it in a different animal if you think it will give more accurate resuls.
I have actually protested (seriously!) animal research in the past, but that doesn't mean all animal research is bad. Complaining about a single rat with a microscope on its head isn't worth one's time. For instance one experiment I recently found offensive involved dozens of parakeets that were intentionally maimed, allowed to live for several more weeks and then vivisected. After reading the research reports and other documentation (it dealt with studying language acquisition), I concluded that this treatment was substantially unjustified and went after it. (The experiment is now over, though largely because it reached its natural conclusion before there was enough momentum to close it down preemptively.)
If you really want to stop ALL animal research you basically need to prove one of three points:
1) No animal research produces useful information.
2) The amount of misinformation greatly outweighs the value of any useful infomration.
3) The ethical implications of harming animals are never justifiable.
IMHO, the first two are largely false when dealing with human medicine and entirely false when the point of the research is to learn about the animal in question. The ethical point is hard to justify unless you are opposed to all medicine, or deny that the suffering/death of animals can ever be justified by improvements in the lives of people. (Not all animal experiments lead to improvements in the human condition, but at least some does.)
I am concerned for animals and have taken active stances to defend their rights, but I think blatantly opposing all forms of animal research is unrealistic and counterproductive.