Robots Could Replace Adorable Animals in Toxicity Tests  E-mail
Written by Hank Green   
Friday, 15 February 2008

Well, sometimes we talk about the environmental benefits of digitizing physical media...but today we're going to talk about the environmental benefits of digitizing physical bunnies.

According to the BBC, scientists are working on ways to replace live animal testing of everything from cosmetics to pesticides with "high speed, automated robots" and "live cells grown in a laboratory."

Samples of chemicals will be dropped onto dishes containing human or animal cells grown in the laboratory.

These will then be studied for signs of toxicity using a variety of biochemical and genetic tests.

The ultimate goal is to develop non-animal based testing methods that are rigorous enough to be submitted for regulatory approval.

Sounds preferable to the traditional systems. Of course, it wouldn't be a full approximation of the marvelous beauty and intricate systems of a real-live cute little bunny rabbit. So for pharmaceutical and broader carcinogen and system-wide effects, I'm afraid they'd still go under the knife.

Nevertheless, this would certainly be a step in the right direction.

Via Engadget from The BBC

Comments (4)add
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good
written by Luke , February 16, 2008
it's about time they did something like this
It's A Start
written by Brian Green , February 16, 2008
While I'm obviously simplifying matters, it does seem logical that we'll be able to move away from animal studies to those conducted by machines or through grown human tissues in petri dishes.
Nice blog
written by Onebucks , February 17, 2008
Nice blog you have here. Keep up the good work!
...
written by Virgil , February 18, 2008
So for pharmaceutical and broader carcinogen and system-wide effects, I'm afraid they'd still go under the knife.

And therein lies the crunch. This is nothing new really. All it means is that high-throughput drug screening can be done by robots, to see the effects of a drug on a dish of cells. However, as soon as the system delivers a "hit" and it's time to see if the drug actually does anything in a more realistic setting (i.e. inside a live organism), then the bunny massacre will begin. It might save a few animal lives, but please don't even begin to pretend that this will ever replace good old fashioned animal tests. All it will actually replace is human jobs in the laboratory! Give it a few years of lots of people dying because drugs were rushed to market on the basis of inadequate testing, and we'll be right back at square one.
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Hank Green
About the author:

Hank Green is the founder and chief geek at EcoGeek.org. Aside from being obsessed with saving the planet with technology, he loves to write and make videos. If you want to find out more about him, visit hankgreen.com
 
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