The first clay animal I made was a lab rat. |
I recently read an excerpt from a book by Hal Herzog, who
wrote a chapter about the ethics of animal testing. He poses many philosophical
and ethical questions about the use of mice in experiments. I was amazed how
scientists can specially order mice with almost any disorder they wish. Mice are used
because they have roughly the same number of genes as humans with about 25,000
and 99.5% of the genes have a known human counterpart.
Here is a list of the mice to disorders someone can order:
Hundreds of strains
are afflicted with rare cancers, others are prone to facial deformities, and
some are born with malfunctioning immune systems. There are mouse models for
defects of vision, hearing, taste and balance. Jax mice come with high blood
pressure, low blood pressure, sleep apnea, and Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and
Lou Gehrig’s disease. Researches trying to cure infertility have their pick of
eighty-eight strains of Jax mice with defective reproductive organs. Then there
are the mice that just don’t fit in – the obsessive-compulsive, the chronically
depressed, the addiction-prone, hyperactive, and schizophrenic mice.
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