More About ResearchSaves.org
- February 1st, 2010
- Posted in Politics
- By sycobuny
- Write comment
I’ve gotten an uptick in comments on my blog in the past few days. Like, I’ve gotten three. From three different people. That’s an increase of hundreds of percent over the norm. What I found most odd, though, was that 66 percent (i.e., two) of those comments were on my ResearchSaves.org blog post. I find this very curious.
My curiosity led me to Google, whereupon I realized that my humble blog post with its stupid subtitle (which I still need to change, so, please give me ideas) is the second hit for ResearchSaves.org. What I haven’t been able to find, is whether there’s been a recent upswing in marketing from them. It seems that’s the only reason people would be taking a sudden interest.
Of course, despite repeated comments from rakaur (Eric), I haven’t changed my stance. In fact, I don’t think he really said much that I didn’t already think about the whole thing, although he had a much more defend-the-science approach to it all. I’m not going to advocate animal testing. I know it saves human lives. It ends animal lives in the meantime. Predators in the wild also end animal lives, though usually less slowly and painfully (usually). The sooner we get a viable alternative working to animal testing, the better. I’d give ideas for the alternative, advanced simulations, etc., but that’s what we pay the scientists for.
Incidentally, according to Twitter, at least, ResearchSaves.org is related to the Foundation for Biomedical Research. This is hilarious to me, as I’ve received a few E-mails from them titled “HORSE VIDEO.” I’ve never watched it, but it has something to do with using equine biological research to cure some minor ailment. It takes a good few paragraphs to get to that description though, which led me to believe for quite some time that, not only had I gotten bestiality porn, but that whoever made it was really excited about it.
Finally, in closing: no, the place I work doesn’t have any sort of established official opinion as far as I know about this whole thing. I say this because plenty of jerkoffs, jackasses, and shitheads like to politicize science and use any excuse to choke off funding to work that can actually save lives. They get understandably very antsy about it at work so, suffice it to say, I don’t speak for them.
Right now it’s one of the only thing saving human lives. You’d trade human lives for animal lives? Animals like rats which your very own city has a crusade against? Baltimore City is killing rats the size of compact cars left and right and that’s just fine but implant a tumor into one and give it some drug and cut it up to see if the tumor shrank and you’re satan?
If you’re so concerned about animal lives then you need to be out on the corner handing out condoms or throwing javelins in peoples crotches. Something like half a billion people suffer from needless diseases that could be vanquished with animal-tested technologies, but god yes please, let’s save the rats.
I don’t think the way humans treat animals in almost any given situation is particularly great, and I don’t set policy for the city any more than I do for the scientific community doing the testing. Also, there is hardly parity in killing an animal that potentially has a disease because it might transmit it to you, and giving the animal that disease and then killing it.
How many carcinogens do we dump into the world? I realize sometimes people just get cancer and all manner of other maladies, but sometimes the conditions we seek to solve through animal testing were of our own creation. Humans are inherently destructive to their environment and to each other.
Mainly, it comes down to the fact I don’t see anything particularly precious about humanity. Our brains process more information than a rat’s brain, or a monkey’s. That gives us the ability to kill them to save ourselves, but it doesn’t give the right to do so. Emotions, like conscious thought in general, are tricks of chemical interactions, and our desire to say we need to save ourselves at any cost is just a hallmark of our cultural vanity. If saving humans at the cost of other living creatures was an absolute moral necessity, then pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be able to hold people’s lives and well-being for ransom after developing amazing life-saving drugs. Surely, if other life is nothing compared to human life, then money can’t even hold a candle?
All that being said, I don’t think you’ll see me anywhere in my posts advocating blowing up animal testing facilities, or running wild through a lab, killing the evil scientists and freeing the poor suffering creatures. I don’t think it’s the prettiest thing in the world, but telling people they should suffer or die in place of an animal is pretty stupid; mere self-preservation instincts will prevent anyone from agreeing with that idea. Absent the humans-must-be-saved factor, torturing and killing animals is a shitty thing, though, and I’m not going to give it my two thumbs up with accompanying shit-eating grin. However, the closest I come to advocating the abolishment of animal testing is suggesting that we should focus more efforts than we currently do on finding alternative means to achieve the same end result. Unfortunately, many people think that the leftover biological waste of a failed human IVF procedure is still more valuable than any other living creature.
Sycobuny,
I googled researchsaves.org after seeing an ad on TV, and came across your blog. I appreciate the eloquence in your responses, and I couldn’t agree with you more.
-Axen