Animals are commonly used for testing the toxicity of new compounds before those chemicals can be used in consumer goods–it’s how companies know your shampoo won’t make your hair fall out, or that your sister’s makeup won’t melt her face. But there are a few important drawbacks to animal testing; it is costly and time consuming, and just think of all the poor little animals!
Well good news for all the animal rights activists, bad news for anyone who doesn’t want to increase the speed at which we near robot doomsday. Scientists are now proposing lab robot testing as an alternative to animal testing.
A five year study from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institute of Health will investigate the feasibility of robot-based testing. Robots used in this way would allow researchers to see the effects of toxins on individual groups of cells, rather than the whole organism. This would speed up the process–animal tests typically achieve 10 to 100 tests a year, but a robotic testing system would see about 10,000 tests per day. Since there are approximately 2,000 chemicals that are being studied with regard to human toxicity, a robot to perform tests on would be desirable.
Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, said, “Although that (animal testing) approach has given us valuable information it is clearly quite expensive and time-consuming, it uses animals in large numbers and it doesn’t always predict which chemicals will be harmful to humans.”
Well good news for all the animal rights activists, bad news for anyone who doesn’t want to increase the speed at which we near robot doomsday. Scientists are now proposing lab robot testing as an alternative to animal testing.
A five year study from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institute of Health will investigate the feasibility of robot-based testing. Robots used in this way would allow researchers to see the effects of toxins on individual groups of cells, rather than the whole organism. This would speed up the process–animal tests typically achieve 10 to 100 tests a year, but a robotic testing system would see about 10,000 tests per day. Since there are approximately 2,000 chemicals that are being studied with regard to human toxicity, a robot to perform tests on would be desirable.
Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, said, “Although that (animal testing) approach has given us valuable information it is clearly quite expensive and time-consuming, it uses animals in large numbers and it doesn’t always predict which chemicals will be harmful to humans.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment