Animal Testing Essays - Animal Welfare, Medical Research

Animal Testing Essays - Animal Welfare, Medical Research Animal Testing Please Read This Warning Before You Use This Essay for Anything (It Might Save Your Life) Animal Testing Using animals for testing is wrong and should be banned. They have rights just as we do. Twenty-four hours a day humans are using defenseless animals for cruel and most often useless tests. The animals have no way of fighting back. This is why there should be new laws to protect them. These legislations also need to be enforced more regularly. Too many criminals get away with murder. Although most labs are run by private companies, often experiments are conducted by public organizations. The US government, Army and Air force in particular, has designed and carried out many animal experiments. The purposed experiments were engineered so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single life, or benefit humans in anyway at all; but the same can be said for tens of thousands of other experiments performed in the US each year. Limiting it to just experiments done on beagles, the following might sock most people: For instance, at the Lovelace Foundation, Albuquerque, New Mexico, experimenters forced sixty-four beagles to inhale radioactive Strontium 90 as part of a larger ^Fission Product Inhalation Program^ which began in 1961 and has been paid for by the US Atomic Energy Commission. In this experiment Twenty-five of the dogs eventually died. One of the deaths occurred during an epileptic seizure; another from a brain hemorrhage. Other dogs, before death, became feverish and anemic, lost their appetites, and had hemorrhages. The experimenters in their published report, compared their results with that of other experiments conducted at the University of Utah and the Argonne National Laboratory in which beagles were injected with Strontium 90. They concluded that the dose needed to produce ^early death^ in fifty percent of the sample group differed from test to test because the dogs injected with Strontium 90 retain more of the radioactive substance than dogs forced to inhale it. Also, at the University of Rochester School Of Medicine a group of experimenters put fifty beagles in wooden boxes and irradiated them with different levels of radiation by x-rays. Twenty-one of the dogs died within the first two weeks. The experimenters determined the dose at which fifty percent of the animals will die with ninety-five percent confidence. The irritated dogs vomited, had diarrhea, and lost their appetites. Later, they hemorrhaged from the mouth, nose, and eyes. In their report, the experimenters compared their experiment to others of the same nature that each used around seven hundred dogs. The experimenters said that the injuries produced in their own experiment were ^Typical of those described for the dog^ (Singer 30). Similarly, experimenters for the US Food and Drug Administration gave thirty beagles and thirty pigs large amounts of Methoxychlor (a pesticide) in their food, seven days a week for six months, ^In order to insure tissue damage^ (30). Within eight weeks, eleven dogs exhibited signs of ^abnormal behavior^ including nervousness, salivation, muscle spasms, and convolutions. Dogs in convultions breathed as rapidly as two hundred times a minute before they passed out from lack of oxygen. Upon recovery from an episode of convulsions and collapse, the dogs were uncoordinated, apparently blind, and any stimulus such as dropping a feeding pan, squirting water, or touching the animals initiated another convulsion. After further experimentation on an additional twenty beagles, the experimenters concluded that massive daily doses of Methoxychlor produce different effects in dogs from those produced in pigs. These three examples should be enough to show that the Air force beagle experiments were in no way exceptional. Note that all of these experiments, according to the experimenters^ own reports, obviously caused the animals to suffer considerably before dying. No steps were taken to prevent this suffering, even when it was clear that the radiation or poison had made the animals extremely sick. Also, these experiments are parts of series of similar experiments, repeated with only minor variations, that are being carried out all over the country. These experiments Do Not save human lives or improve them in any way. It was already known that Strontium 90 is unhealthy before the beagles died; and the experimenters who poisoned dogs and pigs with Methoxychlor knew beforehand that the large amounts they were feeding the animals (amounts no human could ever consume) would cause damage. In any case, as the differing results they obtained on pigs and dogs make it clear, it is not possible to reach any firm conclusion about the effects of a substance on humans from tests on

J.B.S. Haldane An Evolution Biography

J.B.S. Haldane An Evolution Biography J.B.S. Haldane was an evolutionary biologist who made many contributions to the field of evolution. Dates: Born November 5, 1892 - Died December 1, 1964 Early Life and Education John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (Jack, for short) was born on November 5, 1892, in Oxford, England to Louisa Kathleen Trotter and John Scott Haldane. The Haldane family was well off and valued education beginning at an early age. Jacks father was a well-known psychologist in Oxford and as an eight-year-old child, Jack started studying the discipline with his father and assisted him in his work. He also learned genetics by breeding guinea pigs as a child. Jacks formal schooling was done at Eton College and New College at Oxford. He obtained his M.A. in 1914. Soon after, Haldane enlisted in the British Army and served during World War I. Personal Life After returning from the war, Haldane began teaching at the University of Cambridge in 1922. In 1924 he met Charlotte Franken Burghes. She was a reporter for a local publication and was married at the time that they met. She ended up divorcing her husband so she could marry Jack, almost costing him his teaching position at Cambridge for the controversy. The couple married in 1925 after her divorce was final. Haldane took a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley in 1932, but returned to London in 1934 to spend the majority of the rest of his teaching career at the University of London. In 1946, Jack and Charlotte separated in 1942 and finally divorced in 1945 so he could marry Dr. Helen Spurway. In 1956, the Haldanes moved to India to teach and study there. Jack was openly atheist as he said that was how he conducted his experiments. He felt it wasnt fair to assume no God would interfere with the experiments he conducted, so he could not reconcile having a personal belief in any god. He often used himself as a test subject. Jack allegedly would perform dangerous experiments, such as drinking hydrochloric acid to test the effects on muscle control. Career and Accomplishments Jack Haldane excelled in the field of mathematics. He spent most of his teaching and research career interested in the mathematical side of genetics and particularly how enzymes worked. In 1925, Jack published his work with G.E. Briggs about enzymes that included the Briggs-Haldane equation. This equation took a previously published equation by Victor Henri and helped reinterpret how enzyme kinetics worked. Haldane also published many works on population genetics, again utilizing mathematics to support his ideas. He used his mathematical equations to support Charles Darwins idea of Natural Selection. This led to Jack helping to contribute to the Modern Synthesis of the Theory of Evolution. He was able to link Natural Selection to Gregor Mendels genetics using mathematics. This proved to be an invaluable addition to the many pieces of evidence that helped support the Theory of Evolution. Darwin himself did not have the privilege of knowing about genetics, so a quantitative way to measure how a population evolved was a major breakthrough at the time. Haldanes work brought a new understanding and renewed support of the Theory of Evolution by quantifying the theory. By using quantifiable data, he made the observations by Darwin and others verifiable. This allowed other scientists across the world to use their own data in support of the new Modern Synthesis of the Theory of Evolution linking genetics and evolution. Jack Haldane died December 1, 1964, after a bout with cancer.