A duck gives birth to a chicken.

[Yusshin]

Yeah, I added that above:

The most we can do is protest, but if that falls on deaf ears, what can you expect more (other than crazy riots or something)?

As you were posting, I guess.

I don't actively protest, but I do sign petitions and the likes when I can.

Like I said earlier, I'm not some PETA member running around saying eating animals is inhumane, but I do feel our (Canadian) government could do a better job at funding alternatives to animal testing. I personally think it's a "duty" of ours to find such alternatives, as animals themselves ought to be considered, in some ways, part of the moral community. You wouldn't make a child suffer through such tests, so why bunnies and pigs, etc.? Because they're not humans, and thus inferior species? Yet they can feel pain, like humans do. Isn't that fact enough for us to look for alternatives on our own whim, without protests?

I think it's especially inhumane to test on animals for stupid reasons like make-up - things that aren't even necessary to live. That's what really irks me. It's frivolous suffering. Reproducing extinct animals isn't as "frivolous," but the Earth is too populated already, and ecosystems are disappearing, etc. to sustain humans. Why introduce new species (through horrible trial & error methods, as with the goats) when there's no space? To advance science? Boost our egos? Say, "Hey, mom! Look what I did"? Surely there are more important things to fund i.e. cancer cure, an :actual: cure for HIV/AIDS (read about some interesting "cures" in another thread), replacing petrol with water in cars as to protect the ozone layer and reduce pollution (and thus, bettering the health of everyone in general - no more smog-related respiratory illnesses)?

 

[Caelus]

Pretty intrigued by this latest find. As long as it's not harmful to the animals I don't really have a problem with them doing this.

Maybe we could bring back the dodos and mammoths. Would be pretty cool to see that happen.

 

[Kanzler]

I'll try giving my take on why scientists aren't swayed.

What scientists would like to do is test on humans. Not that because they are sadistic and would like to see humans suffer. But because they would like to observe the effects upon a human body in order to judge whether or not it is safe for consumption. But, testing on humans is problematic because scientists have tried that on unconsenting people before! Like Nazi scientists and with injecting black people with syphilis and that's the reason why we don't do that anymore.

We work on animals because they are model organisms. Because of ethical difficulties of working with humans, and because scientists acknowledge the significance of evolution and recognize that many of our bodily mechanisms evolved from common ancestors (even those we share with bacteria), we can work with animals because we can infer what might happen to a human from what happens to a monkey. We would like to test on broccoli but unfortunately broccoli do not have stomachs or skin or brains or kidneys. But broccoli do use energy the same way we do, and so we could test cyanide poison on broccoli because it would have the same effect of inhibiting an enzyme that allows us to produce energy. But that's as far as we get because broccoli don't have a nervous system or a respiratory system. Our conclusions could only be that cyanide inhibit are ability to produce energy and lead to death at high enough doses. So an important factor is to find something as similar as possible to a human body without using a human body.

Which is precisely why it is so difficult to find an alternative. You might get a good result with rats. But then you'll want to consider primates. And only when those results are good enough do you try clinical trials on humans. It's kind of a fail-safe. The better you want your results to be, the more similar a system to the human body you must experiment on.

So common alternatives try to imitate a human body - basically offer an artificial replica. But this too is a dead end. Any proper scientist will tell you that in vitro never compares to in vivo. Just because something works in a test tube doesn't mean that that will translate to a living organism. I read on PETA's page that some scientists have developed an artificial liver. But the liver is dependent on so many other systems, like the endocrine system for our hormones, our nervous system - and that coordinates everything. If your drug works well with an artificial liver, all you can conclude is "well, it didn't kill the liver." You wouldn't know if it caused hormonal imbalances, that may lead to neurological disorders and so on and so forth.

And sometimes you don't know if the chemical will affect another organ system altogether. Viagra was tested for the purpose of treating hypertension. If they tested it on an artificial circulatory system (which doesn't exist), then they would have never discovered its magical properties, at least not until the public started consuming it XD. A living organism is incredibly complex, and that complexity can never be sacrificed in testing. In science and medicine, precision and accuracy is absolute - especially when human lives are at stake.

And the more we imitate a living organism, the closer we are to creating an "artificial living organism". Think of Bicentennial Man, as that leads to other moral dilemmas.

I haven't read any expert opinions, but this is basically why I believe that the scientific community is extremely quiet on alternatives. You can't simply go out and "find" an alternative, not while this paradox is at play - you want to imitate the human body without actually getting to a human body. But isn't the path towards a human body increasingly unethical?

Edit: And hey, antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS did go through animal testing. And a cure for AIDS would most likely do the same.

 

[♣Gawain♣]

It's a bad idea to bring back extinct species that died out millions of years ago back to life. They would have cope up with our climate. It's okay for those who recently died like the Great Auk and the Dodo(although they too must cope up with the ever evolving food chain).
Mammoths + hot climate = Epic Fail.
And the only point of cloning extinct animals is for scientist to use them as lab rats. To observe their behavior in real time. It's like observing Proxima Centauri using manned probes, which in our current technology we can't. We can't stop the progress of cloning, which they are hardly close in "perfecting" it. But we know of one thing. We are next in line.

 

[Yusshin]

Has anyone seen the movie The Island or read the book House of the Scorpions?

Both are about cloning. In the movie The Island, humans are cloned as organ donors, birth givers and labourers. When the "actual" person has their life endangered or are considering conception, the clone's organs are removed (effectively killing the clone) to save the "original," or the clone is used as a surrogate and is administered a lethal injection after birth. One lady was so happy to see her baby - that she had been "chosen" and miraculously conceived a child - only to be stabbed with a needle in the neck and killed, the baby ripped from her dying hands.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GFmL1WC1pY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lMoWToDxNE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-PCs8V7nLg

In the book House of the Scorpions, there's a mob Mexican dude who wants to live forever and has been creating clones for years in order to have a constant supply of "organ donors." The clones only live to around ten or eleven years of age before they're chopped up and the "original" receives their organs through surgery. One boy manages to escape, killing the mob man (since his organs were basically kaput and it would take another ten years to clone and raise "new ones"). It was a good book, but both it and the movie The Island were traumatic for me.

It's messed up.

All in all, I can only think of this kind of science as a slippery slope. Like legalizing assisted suicide by health care professionals.

 

[Kanzler]

It's not a slippery slope when you have ethics boards and other bureaucratic stuff that you have to work through. Bioethics is a big thing and something you'll have to know a thing or two about before you apply for med school. I think what is more likely to happen is that we might be able to clone organs without the rest of the body, but I don't know. What I'm learning in school makes it sound like it could be possible, all you have to do is encourage the cells to specialize a certain way. I'm sure the person who ends up figuring it out will be filthy rich XD

Clones are only offensive to us humans because we think we're all individual and stuff. But in nature you'll find that lots of organisms reproduce by cloning - and further more a group of individuals that might look distinct might just be one organism. Humans have this identity issue where one body = one personality and anything close to infringing on that freaks us out. Imagine how awkward it would be for females to clone themselves and have babies without a male partner. But it works for some species, vertebrates even :P

 

[Echidna]

Personally, I don't see anything wrong in conducting test trials to bring back an extinct species. People seem to forget the bigger picture sometimes. Testing on animals may be bad and all, but I think the means justify the following ends:

• Bringing back an entire extinct species that, if capable of survival, could possible evolve and change into dozens of different species over the course of a few centuries.
• Help in the advancement of science by allowing researchers to conduct experiments on species they've never had the chance to.
• Use this method to bring back extinct plants, insects, and species of bacteria that could provide cures for a number of diseases that don't have one already.

This method of planting the genome of one species into the zygote of another can be applied to seeds as well. What this means is that, as mentioned above, we could bring back extinct species of plants, trees insects and bacteria to aid in our medical trials against certain diseases.

This also means that genetically engineering one fruit tree that is more resilient in a certain climate to carry fruits from a tree that is not, can also be made easier (this has been done before except it's always been a much more complicated procedure).

If you look past the "duck and chick" in the thread's title, you'll see that this sort of scientific method has endless applications and could easily be put to use to solve a large number of our modern-world problems.