Is Animal Research Justified By Human Supremacy? | Syd Johnson | TEDxSUNYUpstate

[ashleyvillena]

Good Day, Dr. Johnson! First, I would just like to express my gratitude to you for sharing your honest opinions about animal research. I should say that we stand for the same thing. From your talk, you have said that if humans really value their lives and well-being, they should demand better and more effective research. I totally agree with this since, for years now, it has been proven that there are more failures in animal research compared to what we actually benefit from it. As you have also said in your talk, there are several other alternatives (use of advanced algorithms, "organs on a chip", and many others) that are proven to yield more promising results than animal testing. Moreover, I agree with your sentiment that we should focus more on what we can do to improve these alternatives rather than focusing on the methods that we know are not working and are not reliable enough. That is all. Thank you for your insightful talk, Ma’am!

[ArcticCircle]

Fantastic talk! Very intelligent arguments and well presented.

[maureenbeatty]

Excellent talk Syd Johnson, very reasoned, thank you.

[MM-qppd]

There is a way to eliminate animal testing. Dr. Shiva Ayadurai created computer technology that helps eliminate animal testing. Dr. Shiva is the ONLY Presidential candidate who competent enough to explain this kind of science and invent it.

[dbmbusinessentertainment]

I think this video is purposely hidden; how does a 38.9 million subscriber channel get 6 thousand views only.

[invinciblewellbeing]

I'd love to see where the million estimate came from. Do you have a paper you can share? Thanks for your talk, Dr. Johnson!

[petrtelensky]

This is so filled with logical fallacies I don't even know where to begin. To reason that because some animal models have low predicitive validity in experiments aimed at testing novel drugs, therefore all animal research is not justified, is like reasoning that because race cars are bad at driving off road, we must ban all cars. Firstly, not all race cars are bad at driving off road, secondly, not all cars are race cars, and thirdly, lack of capacity to drive off road doesn't invalidate the usefulness of a car.

Much the same way, some animal models have rather decent predicive validity; secondly, only a tiny fraction of animal research concerns drug research; and thirdly, just because the predictive validity of a model might be rather poor, doesn't mean that there is nothing to be learned from said model.

Banning animal research is the surest way how to halt progress in Alzheimer's, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and the list could go on. Not to mention the vast basic research that depends on animals.

[Chobblesome]

Two arguments are being made
1. Because we don't do experiment on human, we shouldn't do it on animals
2. animal testing have a high failure rate
I think neither holds. for the the first argument, human to human relations are significantly different to human to animal relationships that drawing this parallel is almost certainly overextrapolation.
The second argument is even more nonsensical, sure animal testing can have high failure rate, but saying it is worse than "chance" is astonishingly misleading, the chance of what? if researchers replace animal testing with coin flip it might statistically provide better correlation with historical data, does that mean we should do it? Most importantly, And how do alternatives they compare to animal testing? If animal testing the best technique we got in comparison, we should continue to use animal for testing.

[wingglerwiggelspecht]

Thats such an overstatement. I can understand the moral need for every scientist to try to get more non-animal subjects or models. But that they are already equially avaible and that animals fail that often especially in basic science questions (where most of the animals are used) is just wrong. Understanding the brain is just possible with macaques or did someone model the brain in a dish with all the complexity ? Or maybe some humans would like to volunteer ? I am totally open to that ! We need woman and men between 18 and 80 who are willing to be killed for progression of humanity. Who is in ?! Of course in the end animals are not "the best", but what are the other options ? Wait until we can rebuild the brain in a dish to do scientific research ? Okay..sorry for the people who benefiting already from that research. Although, you are wrong at one point. Every Scientist who works with animals has a deepesed wish, that he wouldn´t have to use and kill the animals. I don´t know anyone who is doing this for fun, likes to do that. Give us an really alternative.