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Watch it! - its very useful

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The Way of All Flesh by Adam Curtis In 1998, Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh, a one-hour BBC documentary on Henrietta Lacks and HeLa directed by Adam Curtis, won the Best Science and Nature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

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one of the parts of the female reproductive system that lies between the uterus and vagina.

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matt smells

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A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as foreign, destroy it, and keep a record of it, so that the immune system can more easily recognize and destroy any of these microorganisms that it later encounters

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- The shuffling of existing genetic material into new combinations during meiosis is important in creating genetic variation.

-Independent assortment : Random assortment of chromosome pairs as they line up during meiosis

-Crossing over: during the first meiotic division, homologous chromosomes come together as pairs and all 4 chromatids come into contact. At these contact points the chromatids break and rejoin, exchanging sections of DNA

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Abnormal mass of tissue as a result of abnormal growth or division of cells.

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Any event that changes genetic structure.

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the treatment of cancer with one or more cytotoxic anti-neoplastic drugs (chemotherapeutic agents) as part of a standardized regimen.

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Cell formed by the division or budding of the parent cell

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The number of times a normal human cell can divide

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a process by which an egg is fertilised by sperm outside the body

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The creation of a genetic map assigning DNA fragments to chromosomes.

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Cell division maintaining the diploid number of chromosomes

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An attenuated or dead form the virus or an antigen bearing fragment

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A change in the base sequence of DNA or change in the number of nucleotides in DNA.

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There was no concern for animal welfare. The main concern was for  money as the cost millions of  dollars.  (para 20-21)

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Cells will continue to produce clones

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A substance, usually a protein, which can be synthsised in the laboratory in pure form by a single clone (population) of cells.

These antibodies can be made in large quantities and have a specific affinity for certain target molecules called antigens which can be found on the surface of cells and those that are malignant.

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The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) - a charity created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who'd himself been paralyzed by polio - began organizing the largest field trial ever conducted to test the polio vaccine.

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Characterized by or involving indiscriminate mingling or association, especially having sexual relations with a number of partners on a casual basis.

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The final stage of mitosis, following Telophase  in which mother cell splits to form two separate daughter cell

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A disease caused by incontrollable growth  and mutation in the cell cycle

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When cells clump together and fuse, their genetic information combines

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Disease which is extremely severe or harmful in its effects

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Any of mixed origin or composition, or the combination of two or more different things.

An offspring resulting from the cross between parents of different species or sub-species.

(molecular biology) A complex formed by joining two complementary strands of nucleic acids.

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Organisms ability to resist a particular infection

by the action of specific antibodies

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Make something impure

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Mixing blood serum from newly vaccinated children with live poliovirus and cells in culture. If the vaccination worked the cells would be protected from the poliovirus, if it didn't work the cells would be infected by the virus.

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Biobest, VNT (Virus Neutralisation Test) to determine antibody titres

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The VNT (Virus Neutralisation Test) is used to determine antibody titres for viruses, including Feline Herpesvirus (FHV), Feline Calicivirus (FCV), Canine Distemper (CDV), Canine Adenovirus (CAV) and Equine Viral Arteritis (EVA).

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"A virus"

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Poliovirus, the causative agent of poliomyelitis, is a human enterovirus and member of the family of Picornaviridae. Poliovirus is composed of an RNA genome and a protein capsid
.

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Poliovirus is composed of an RNA genome and a protein capsid. The genome is a single-stranded positive- sense RNA genome that is about 7500 nucleotides long. The viral particle is about 30 nm in diameter with icosahedral symmetry.

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Biological catalyst which speeds up reactions lowering activation energy

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Moral principles which govern behaviour

e.g. animal rights

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Are animal experiments useful?

Are animal experiments useful?

Animal experiments only benefit human beings if their results are valid and can be applied to human beings.

Not all scientists are convinced that these tests are valid and useful.

The moral status of the experimenters

Animal rights extremists often portray those who experiment on animals as being so cruel as to have forfeited any own moral standing.

But the argument is about whether the experiments are morally right or wrong. The general moral character of the experimenter is irrelevant.

What is relevant is the ethical approach of the experimenter to each experiment. John P Gluck has suggested that this is often lacking:

Gluck offers this advice for people who may need to experiment on animals:

Animal experiments and animal rights

The issue of animal experiments is straightforward if we accept that animals have rights: if an experiment violates the rights of an animal, then it is morally wrong, because it is wrong to violate rights.

The possible benefits to humanity of performing the experiment are completely irrelevant to the morality of the case, because rights should never be violated (except in obvious cases like self-defence).

And as one philosopher has written, if this means that there are some things that humanity will never be able to learn, so be it.

This bleak result of deciding the morality of experimenting on animals on the basis of rights is probably why people always justify animal experiments on consequentialist grounds; by showing that the benefits to humanity justify the suffering of the animals involved.

Justifying animal experiments

Those in favour of animal experiments say that the good done to human beings outweighs the harm done to animals.

This is a consequentialist argument, because it looks at the consequences of the actions under consideration.

It can't be used to defend all forms of experimentation since there are some forms of suffering that are probably impossible to justify even if the benefits are exceptionally valuable to humanity.

Ethical arithmetic

Animal experiments and ethical arithmetic

The consequentialist justification of animal experimentation can be demonstrated by comparing the moral consequences of doing or not doing an experiment.

This process can't be used in a mathematical way to help people decide ethical questions in practice, but it does demonstrate the issues very clearly.

The basic arithmetic

If performing an experiment would cause more harm than not performing it, then it is ethically wrong to perform that experiment.

The harm that will result from not doing the experiment is the result of multiplying three things together:

the moral value of a human being

the number of human beings who would have benefited

the value of the benefit that each human being won't get

The harm that the experiment will cause is the result of multiplying together:

the moral value of an experimental animal

the number of animals suffering in the experiment

the negative value of the harm done to each animal

But it isn't that simple because:

it's virtually impossible to assign a moral value to a being

it's virtually impossible to assign a value to the harm done to each individual

the harm that will be done by the experiment is known beforehand, but the benefit is unknown

the harm done by the experiment is caused by an action, while the harm resulting from not doing it is caused by an omission

Certain versus potential harm

In the theoretical sum above, the harm the experiment will do to animals is weighed against the harm done to humans by not doing the experiment.

But these are two conceptually different things.

The harm that will be done to the animals is certain to happen if the experiment is carried out

The harm done to human beings by not doing the experiment is unknown because no-one knows how likely the experiment is to succeed or what benefits it might produce if it did succeed

So the equation is completely useless as a way of deciding whether it is ethically acceptable to perform an experiment, because until the experiment is carried out, no-one can know the value of the benefit that it produces.

And there's another factor missing from the equation, which is discussed in the next section.

Acts and omissions

The equation doesn't deal with the moral difference between acts and omissions.

Most ethicists think that we have a greater moral responsibility for the things we do than for the things we fail to do; i.e. that it is morally worse to do harm by doing something than to do harm by not doing something.

For example: we think that the person who deliberately drowns a child has done something much more wrong than the person who refuses to wade into a shallow pool to rescue a drowning child.

In the animal experiment context, if the experiment takes place, the experimenter will carry out actions that harm the animals involved.

If the experiment does not take place the experimenter will not do anything. This may cause harm to human beings because they won't benefit from a cure for their disease because the cure won't be developed.

So the acts and omissions argument could lead us to say that

it is morally worse for the experimenter to harm the animals by experimenting on them

than it is to (potentially) harm some human beings by not doing an experiment that might find a cure for their disease.

And so if we want to continue with the arithmetic that we started in the section above, we need to put an additional, and different, factor on each side of the equation to deal with the different moral values of acts and omissions.

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Animal experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to test the safety of other products. Many of these experiments cause pain to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other ways.