Animals In Scientific Experiments Research Articles

ASSESSMENT OF LABORATORY ANIMAL FUNCTIONAL STATUS: MODERN METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES FOR CONDUCTING BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH

Aim: to outline modern scientific approaches for evaluating the functional condition of small laboratory animals in experimental research. Materials and Methods: Scientific publications on the rules of using laboratory animals in scientific experiments, testing, educational process have been studied. The bioethical norms and principles of animal care and use of material for medical, veterinary and biological profiles were also studied, for example modern methodological approaches for conducting biomedical research, since it is the responsibility of the scientist to achieve reproducible research results using the minimum number of laboratory animals. Conclusions: The main conditions for their implementation and effectiveness include: adherence to the “Ethical Code” published by the International Council for Medical Scientific Organizations in the early 1980s, the principles of the European Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals Used for Experimental and Other Scientific Purposes (Strasbourg, 18 March 1986), and Directive 2010/63/EU adopted on 22 September 2010; the use of advanced and modern diagnostic equipment that enables low-invasive yet highly informative research on small laboratory animals; conducting comprehensive, multi-level studies on an optimal number of animals in laboratories that meet international standards.

Навчальні експерименти з використанням живих організмів: біоетичні обґрунтування корекції методик

The relevance of the topic of the article is due to two trends in the world and in Ukraine: the spread of research practices that need to be understood in the discourse of bioethics, and attempts to introduce bioethics (or its basic ideas and principles) in the educational process of technical universities. These two trends are combined in the practice of using animals in scientific experiments. Taking into account the fact that a component of such research in not only scientific, but also educational experiments, this topic becomes an urgent problem in the discourse of the philosophy of education. The purpose of the article is to present and analyze the experience of correcting the methods of educational and demonstration experiments using living organisms, which are carried out at the Odessa Polytechnic State University. As examples, the course of laboratory work on the study of the influence of wastewater from foundry dumps on living organisms (specialty 136-Metallurgy) and an experiment to study the effect of photon irradiation on biological objects in the aquatic environment (specialty 163-Biomedical engineering) are described. Guppy fish (Poecilia reticulata Peters) are used in both experiments. The results of the analysis of the correction of the methods of these experiments form the scientific novelty in three aspects: 1) the substantiation of the need for the formation of bioethical competencies is given not only for physicians and veterinarians, but also for engineers of various specialties; 2) an additional principle of bioethics of experiments on animals is proposed and tested - the principle of early stopping of an experiment (educational and demonstration) at a certain stage; 3) it is shown that giving students the opportunity to make decisions about changing the experiment procedure allows them to better understand the boundaries of what is necessary and sufficient, forms their willingness to take responsibility for the result of the experiment and for the lives of people and animals.

Criminal liability for cruelty to animals under the legislation of Ukraine: features of theory and practice

The study aimed to determine the characteristics of criminal liability for cruelty to animals. The object of the study is social relations arising in the field of morality protection. We used the following general scientific methods: dialectical, historical, descriptive, methods of scientific analysis and generalization. In addition to general scientific methods, we also used special methods: comparative legal and statistical. Having performed a retrospective analysis of criminal liability for cruelty to animals, we identified four historical stages in the formation and development of criminal legal standards for cruelty to animals. Having investigated the reasons for the social conditioning of criminalization for cruelty to animals, the authors identified a range of problems in the field of humane treatment of animals that require immediate solutions: the use of animals in scientific experiments, the manufacture of clothing from leather and animal fur, the activities of dog hunters and the use of animals in circuses. Factors affecting the cruelty of a person have been also identified. The delimitation of corpus delicti from an administrative offense is carried out according to several main criteria: the degree of public danger and consequences. International experience in the context of criminal liability for cruelty to animals is diverse.

Loomad Rootsi-aegse Tartu ülikooli meditsiinitöödes

At the Swedish-period University of Tartu there were four medical works which described or mentioned animals in some connection. Animals were often used as metaphors in these works in order to draw parallels with humans. In this connection animals were rather considered to be inferior to humans as it was typical to the early modern period. In the medical works of the 17th century University of Tartu veterinary medicine is mentioned and also the use of animals as a source of remedies or even animals as their own doctors, teaching the humans how to heal certain diseases. There are hints to animals in scientific experiments. In the medical work Dissertatio prima de oeconomia corporis animalis, originating from 1698, the development of early modern physiology can be observed. There is a clear difference between the works which were compiled in the first half of the 17th century and the dissertation written at the end of the same century. The works that were written earlier were mostly based on ancient authors, whereas the dissertation from the end of the 17th century delivers empirical knowledge. Thus animals had their impact on the medicine of the 17th century University of Tartu as well as on the way of talking and writing about medicine.

Density Functional Theory in the Prediction of Mutagenicity: A Perspective.

As a field, computational toxicology is concerned with using in silico models to predict and understand the origins of toxicity. It is fast, relatively inexpensive, and avoids the ethical conundrum of using animals in scientific experimentation. In this perspective, we discuss the importance of computational models in toxicology, with a specific focus on the different model types that can be used in predictive toxicological approaches toward mutagenicity (SARs and QSARs). We then focus on how quantum chemical methods, such as density functional theory (DFT), have previously been used in the prediction of mutagenicity. It is then discussed how DFT allows for the development of new chemical descriptors that focus on capturing the steric and energetic effects that influence toxicological reactions. We hope to demonstrate the role that DFT plays in understanding the fundamental, intrinsic chemistry of toxicological reactions in predictive toxicology.

Investigating TBI Using Animal Models

In the USA, there are 2.8 million emergency room visits for traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year and about 1.2 million people are living with brain function problems due to TBI. Although much information has been gained from experimental and clinical studies showing how injuries happen, no effective treatments are currently available for TBI. To understand the effects of TBI on the brain and spinal cord, scientists use animal models as a cost-effective research method. Larger animal models, such as pigs or sheep, are closer in bodily functions to humans. However, the use of rodent models is preferred because they are easy to work with in the lab. Importantly, this also fits with the national recommendations to use the lowest mammalian species that can provide the answer to the scientific question. Using rodents, scientists can control specific details, such as the type of brain injury and the severity of the injury. There are ethical concerns about injuring in animals in scientific experiments, but scientists make substantial efforts to ensure the most humane treatment of these animals. Recently, animal models have been used to discover certain proteins, called biomarkers that are present in the brains of people with TBI and could lead to the development of new therapies to prevent or reduce disability that can result from TBI.

Patents, animal experiments and animal sentience—where do we currently stand?

At present, the European Union (EU), and therefore the UK, recognizes non-human animals (hereafter ‘animals’) as ‘sentient beings’.1 In the wake of the Brexit referendum, there has been much political talk over what will happen to this sentience provision once the UK leaves the EU.2 In December 2017, the UK Government announced that the sentience of animals would continue to be recognized once the UK leaves the EU; however, it is unclear what form any such protection would take. On 7 August 2018, the UK Government stated that it would continue to work on the issue of animal sentience ‘with the intention of introducing any necessary legislation before the UK leaves the EU’.3 This article looks at the current UK legal framework regulating the use of animals in the life sciences sector, focussing on the patenting of animals and the use of animals in scientific experiments relating to medicinal products for humans. Where does our legal landscape currently stand and how far, if at all, does the sentience provision limit the use of animals in the life sciences? And, will the regulatory landscape change post-Brexit?

Embryonated chicken eggs: An experimental model for Pythium insidiosum infection.

Pythiosis is a severe disease caused by Pythium insidiosum. Currently, the research on the treatment of pythiosis uses rabbits as an experimental infection model. To reduce the use of animals in scientific experimentation, alternative models are increasingly necessary options. The objective of this study was to establish a new experimental infection model for pythiosis using embryonated chicken eggs. First, we tested the inoculation of 4 zoospore concentrations into the egg allantoic cavity at 3 embryonic days. We observed that increased zoospore concentration causes a decrease in survival time, and at a later embryonic day (the 14th) of infection, embryos showed delayed mortality. To confirm the reproducibility of the model, we chose the 14th embryonic day for the inoculation of 50 zoospores/egg, and the experiment was repeated twice. Mortality began with 30% embryos 48hours after inoculation, and 95% embryos died within 72hours. There was no mortality in the uninfected control group. The infection was confirmed by culture, PCR and histopathology. Immunohistochemistry confirmed the presence of hyphae in blood vessels in the umbilical cords in 95% of embryos and only 1 liver (5%). Our results suggest that embryonated eggs can be a very useful alternative infection model to study pythiosis.

A Review on Drug Testing in Animals

An estimated 26 million animals are used every year in the United States for scientific and commercial testing. Animals are used to develop medical treatments, determine the toxicity of medications, check the safety of products destined for human use, and other biomedical, commercial, and health care uses. Research on living animals has been practiced since Ancient times. Researchers will use animal testing to obtain clues to how the disease develops in the body. The purpose of this article is to raise some points for an understanding the ethics of using animals in scientific experiments. I present the various positions from scientific and moral perspectives establishing different ways of viewing animals; the paper aims to analyze the controversial topic i.e. Animal Testing. This paper represents the process of animal testing as Is carisoprodol still prescribed? well as Alternative Studies to animal Experiments.

Sentiency, bioethics and animal welfare: concepts that need to be discussed in higher education to change the teaching and researching paradigm

This study investigated the knowledge of students of Veterinary Medicine and Biological Sciences of the State University of Northern Paraná, Campus Luiz Meneghel, on the ethical and legal guidelines of animal experimentation, as well as the possibility of substitute methods for using sentient animals in classes and scientific practices. The research involved 162 freshman students and graduating students, aged 17 to 32 years. The students responded to the questionnaire containing objective and subjective questions, and the answers were analysed by descriptive statistics. It was observed that 87% of the students were unaware of the concept of the “3Rs” and 81.5% did not know the existence of alternative methods that can replace the use of live animals in studies. In addition, only 24.7% of respondents reported they had studied “bioethics” before graduation. However, 94.3% and 96.2% of the students from veterinary medicine and biological sciences, respectively, considered it important to insert animal welfare and bioethics in the curriculum of such courses. The results demonstrated that the ethical and statutory guidelines that rule the use of animals in scientific experiments and in classes are unknown even among senior students and there is still great resistance to the exclusion of animal models. Thus, it is important that animal welfare and bioethics remain in the curriculum in higher education through the insertion of such subjects, even as elective courses that aim to work with methodologies and innovative strategies in synergistic action with ethics committees for animal use, which are responsible for analysing, guiding and supervising the relevance of animal use in education and research. Therefore, the curriculum will be able to achieve rationalization in the use of animal models, the sustainable and “humanitarian” development of teaching and research, and the training of more conscious and ethical professionals, perceptions that must be achieved through a national education curriculum.

Opposing Scientific Cruelty: The Emotions and Sensitivities of Protestors against Experiments on Animals

AbstractAfter a marked decline, protests against cruelty to animals in scientific experiments acquired fresh momentum from the middle of the twentieth century onwards. This article sets out to show that the analysis of emotions and sensitivities is best able to account for the similarities and differences between historically distant mobilisations. While late twentieth-century activists have revived an emotional register invented by their precursors of the previous century, the meaning they attribute to their revolt has been profoundly transformed by sensitivities that derive from a very different social status and a different range of affective experiences.

Moral Standing of Animals in Scientific Experiments

When moral justification of the use of animals in the area of scientific experimentation is well thought-out, we rely on the principles of moral standing suggested by various philosophers. Philosophers try to find out whether animals count or whether animals can be brought under moral consideration. If they cannot be brought under the moral purview, then probably one cannot find any reason that it is morally wrong to use animals for human good, such as using them in painful scientific experiments. This paper brings out some of the principles suggested by philosophers in order for an agent to be considered morally. Further this paper suggests that most of these views do not provide a basis to include animals under the moral purview. Thereby, I put forward a perspective called the ‘common sense view’ to bring animals under the moral consideration which further implies that the use of animals in the area of scientific experimentation is morally unjustified.

Ethical Boundary-work in the Animal Research Laboratory

The use of animals in scientific experiments continues to attract significant controversy, particularly in the UK. This article draws on in-depth interviews with senior laboratory scientists who use animals in their research. A key claim is that animal research is necessary for medical advance. However, this promissory discourse relies on the construction of three boundaries. The first is between humans and non-human animals. The second is between the positive and less positive impacts of Home Office regulation. The third is between the use of animals in medicine versus other domains such as farming. The article analyses these discourses and evaluates the applicability of 'ethical boundary-work' (Wainwright et al., 2006a). I conclude that the concept is a potentially useful device for foregrounding ethics but argue that it carries several dangers for sociologists interested in claim-making in areas of controversy.

The tension between common sense and scientific perception of animals: recent developments in research on animal integrity

A distinction can be made between aesthetic or intuitive perception in holistic biology and in daily life, and reductionistic scientific perception based on the search for causal mechanisms. Going from our observations of animals in daily life to observations of animals in scientific experiments implies a transformation. Scientific experiments exclude all values that are important in daily life. For research on the concept of animal welfare it can be shown that excluding values is impossible as this issue lies too close to our daily experience. This means that the empirical and the moral domain of the concept cannot in fact be separated. And by means of the moral domain, background theories about man's relation to nature, about the role of natural science, and about what is morally relevant play a role in definitions of animal welfare. This is illustrated for two bioethical theories: zoocentrism and biocentrism. In the zoocentric theory, only sentient animals are morally relevant. Some consider the argument that genetic engineering violates the integrity of an organism not a moral issue, but an aesthetic one. In a biocentric ethical theory, all living beings have moral relevance; moral and aesthetic issues are then closely related. In such a theory the characteristic nature of an animal is respected and knowledge of this nature is intimately related to a more aesthetic and holistic perception of animals. This paper shows that the ethical attitude towards nature is directly linked to the way human beings perceive nature. In experimental reductionistic science, nature is seen as a material object, subject to mechanistic analysis: when animals are subjected to scientific experiments it is impossible to completely avoid ethical issues, but they are restricted to utilitarian ones. The genetic engineering of animals enhanced awareness of ethical issues directly relating to the technology itself and to the attitude towards nature underlying it, irrespective of the consequences. These issues only come up when the animal is perceived in a holistic way, which comes close to our perception of animals in our daily life.

The Use of Animals for Research on Animal Diseases: Its Impact on the Harm–Benefit Analysis

The use of animals in scientific experiments is sometimes controversial. Usually, the debate focuses on the advantages or disadvantages of using animals in biomedical research or for testing products for safety or efficacy in humans. This has been the case in the previous World Congresses on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences. Such studies can be subjected to a harm-benefit analysis that attempts to assess the expected benefits of the research to be done in relation to the harm done to the experimental animals. This paper suggests that studies carried out in the target species offer a higher level of fidelity and discrimination (confidence in the proper expression of the disease and greater ability to detect the impacts of any treatments under investigation) than do experiments carried out in animal models of a different species. A number of examples are given to show the benefits that have accrued to the welfare of domesticated animals through research on the diseases from which they suffer. These examples suggest that there will be an ongoing need to use animals in research to develop methods for the control or eradication of newly emergent diseases.

Strategies for replacing animals in biomedical research

In 1959, Russell and Burch published their recommendations for applying the Three Rs (reduction, refinement and replacement alternatives) to the use of animals in scientific experimentation. At this time, they could not have predicted the effect of this fundamental concept on academic and industrial animal experimentation and in biomedical education. Although more than 30 years have passed, their ideas are gaining respectability and wide acceptance. This article reviews the recent advances in the use of non-animal methods in biomedical research, and discusses the outlook for the further implementation of 'alternatives'.

Paradigm Shifts, Scientific Revolutions and the Moral Justification of Experimentation on Nonhuman Animals

An estimated 70 to 120 million nonhuman animals are killed every year in scientific experiments. l The justifications for the use of nonhuman animals in scientific experiments to benefit humans are based on two conflicting paradigms or models regarding the nature of human and nonhuman animals. This paper will trace the origins of these competing paradigms and the assumptions underlying each of them as they relate to scientific research. According to Thomas Kuhn, in his landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, when there are two competing and incompatible paradigms, one of them has eventually to give way to the other.2 Scientific revolutions, by their very nature, involve a shift from an old or traditional paradigm to a new paradigm. A paradigm shift, we wiU argue, is presently taking place in tlle biological sciences. The effect of this shift is currently being experienced in the conflict and uncertainty over what policies to adopt regarding the use of nonhuman animals In scientific experiments. 1. The Traditional Paradigm Underlying Animal Experimentation

Human vs Animal Rights

For centuries, opposition has been directed against the use of animals for the benefit of humans. For more than four centuries in Europe, and for more than a century in the United States, this opposition has targeted scientific research that involves animals. More recent movements in support of animal rights have arisen in an attempt to impede, if not prohibit, the use of animals in scientific experimentation. These movements employ various means that range from information and media campaigns to destruction of property and threats against investigators. The latter efforts have resulted in the identification of more militant animal rights bands as terrorist groups. The American Medical Association has long been a defender of humane research that employs animals, and it is very concerned about the efforts of animal rights and welfare groups to interfere with research. Recently, the Association prepared a detailed analysis of the controversy over the use of animals in research, and the consequences for research and clinical medicine if the philosophy of animal rights activists were to prevail in society. This article is a condensation of the Association's analysis.

Human vs animal rights. In defense of animal research

For centuries, opposition has been directed against the use of animals for the benefit of humans. For more than four centuries in Europe, and for more than a century in the United States, this opposition has targeted scientific research that involves animals. More recent movements in support of animal rights have arisen in an attempt to impede, if not prohibit, the use of animals in scientific experimentation. These movements employ various means that range from information and media campaigns to destruction of property and threats against investigators. The latter efforts have resulted in the identification of more militant animal rights bands as terrorist groups. The American Medical Association has long been a defender of humane research that employs animals, and it is very concerned about the efforts of animal rights and welfare groups to interfere with research. Recently, the Association prepared a detailed analysis of the controversy over the use of animals in research, and the consequences for research and clinical medicine if the philosophy of animal rights activists were to prevail in society. This article is a condensation of the Association's analysis.Members of the American Medical Association's Group on Science and Technology present a condensation of the AMA's 1989 White Paper on Animal Research. Among the topics covered are the history of scientific research with animals, philosophical challenges to justifications for animal research, animal rights activism, current arguments against animal research and their refutation, and a defense of research with animals. The AMA argues that animal research is essential to maintaining and improving human health, and commits itself to the preservation of such research.

Regulation of Animal Experimentation

This article examines the nature of the controversy between animal activists and the scientific community over the need for and desirability of additional regulation of animal experimentation. We critically review the existing federal and state regulatory environment and discuss a number of proposals for new federal legislation for regulating the use of animals in scientific experimentation. We identify and discuss three factors that encompass the issues that are at the core of the controversy and use these to suggest a conceptual framework in which to analyze schemes for regulating animal experimentation. Finally, we discuss the implications that such regulation will have for animal experimentation and conclude that it is neither necessary nor desirable.