Sunny, esentially all of these animals were bred for the purpose, and spend most of their (admittedly often short) lives in conditions far more regulated than that of the average family hamster. Short life or no life?

They leave behind them no grief, no fading memories, no lost potential. It’s not the same. I know that is just sentimental, but your position is no less so. As we are both coming from roughly the same secular ethic it couldn’t be otherwise.

To extend human testing is bad enough, to say that it is preferable to animal testing is something I can’t let go by.

But I’d still rather humans got tested on than animals – that’s the only way we’re going to re-think this obsession with chemicals and drugs testing IMO.

‘Corporate bodies have no soul.

Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill. The principle of private or natural conscience is extinguished in each individual (we have no moral sense in the breasts of others), and nothing is considered but how the united efforts of the whole (released from idle scruples) may be best directed to the obtaining of political advantages and privileges to be shared as common spoil.’

This being the case we can assume that Big Pharma will seek out those places where costs are lowest and restrictions least onerous. That they will maintain ethical standars no higher than they are held to by the law of the country in which they are operating and that even these standards will be disregarded if they feel they can get away with it.

The high skill levels available in India and the extent to which research is integrated with the rest of the world make it a plausible operation. I don’t want to offend anybody (at the moment) but I seriously doubt that, overall and in the long run, concern for informed consent and standards of safety will be as high as they are in the UK. and we all know what happened here. However India is a relatively open society with an established system of advocacy groups and investigative journalists. But the whole point of outsourcing is that when it is possible to save a buck by relocating, corporations do it in a heartbeat. The next step will, I believe, be a move to countries with neither of those constraints.

May I refer those interested in what that means to #24 on;

http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/335

It’s almost a double edged sword but if the motivation is money on both sides then there is unlikely to ever be a solution to this kind of problem unless the gov’t steps in and does the right thing.

Cheers Don. Only here for a few days though!

I linked this article about two weeks ago when it came out as part of a series of articles advocating human testing over animal testing.

Since then a big incident has occured here, with six human volunteers becoming severly ill after a drugs trial gone wrong. I’m writing another piece about that but this is quite interesting… will write thoughts about it later.