TheAM

A roundabout way of admitting that they metabolize substances differently. Dr Vernon Coleman has a book with 50 drugs in it that cause cancer in laboratory animals yet are on the market anyway, the official position being that those results are 'not relevant to humans', which they may or may not be and nobody actually knows without human data to corroborate them. But, given that you claim that any drug shown to cause an increase in cancer in laboratory animals cant be used in humans, why are they there? So, you're essentially admitting that different species metabolize the same drugs differently. Hence the different outcomes, eh? A systematic review of 20 treatments. http://www.bentham-direct.org/pages/content.php?RRCT/2008/00000003/00000002/0002RRCT.sgm and: http://www.curedisease.net/news/080801.shtml The differences are there, they are real and they make extrapolation impossible, hence the massive amounts of damage and failure of a whole multitude of treatments that worked successfully in animal 'models', i.e. fake conditions created artificially as they do not naturally develop human diseases, in the main. Again, 'similar' really isn't a word in science. It is just another way of saying different. I do not write 'misinformation'. Why are organ systems not available for every human organ? Strangely, many people believe that chemo drugs will 'work', despite their being extremely toxic. I dont recall evolutionary theory stating that mice/rats etc have a particularly recent 'common ancestor' to humans, yet they are predominantly used for animal experiments. The reasons given for the failure of 92% of drugs that enter clinical trials with positive accompanying animal safety/efficacy data are predominantly safety/efficacy issues. This has always been the figure, more or less, so claims of 'insufficient animal experiments', especially as the numbers have gone up, not down, will not wash. Although this ploy has been used to convince the gullible and the brainless for decades. The 'predictive' success is abysmal. It is blind chance that anything useful for humans comes out of it. But then what do you expect when you test a drug in a species that, 1) responds unpredictably different to us to the same drug and 2) doesn't have the condition you wish to treat, just a phoney, unrelated 'replica' !!! This simply isn't true, there are a wide range of drugs on the market that cause cancer and other problems in some species or another, yet are on the market anyway. Tamoxifen springs to mind. Indeed, 92% of drugs that pass animal safety/efficacy tests fail when given to humans, on those grounds. There are many drugs used in humans that are useless and/or fatal in animals. Aspirin is used in humans yet is highly toxic to cats. Digitalis is useless in dogs, unless you want to raise their blood pressure, yet it has the opposite effect in humans. Morphine stimulates the CNS of cats, and some other species, yet has a depressive effect in humans. Tamoxifen has cancer data in some species but not others. At least at human equivilent doses. Testing substances on mice or rats, as if they were little people 'makes no sense' yet it still continues unabated despite the evidence piling up against it. ...and still manages to bear absolutely no resemblance to the human condition it is sought to immitate. Yes, and you typed a lot of 'wrong words' in between also, why apologise about that one specifically? The vast majority of animal experiments are wrong. The reasons are species differences, errors in experiment design, etc. But they are wrong all the same. The small few that by chance are not wrong, are lost in amongst the many. As nobody knows whether or not an experiment is by the general way of things, wrong, or by pure chance, right, then all animal experiments are completely useless and non-informative. Aspirin is 'toxic' according to animal experiments, yet it is useful in humans and has probably saved, or at least prolonged, a fair few lives. It would be eliminated by animal tests so as to 'protect' (by killing) those people that have benefited from it. Digitalis would be removed also, as it has the opposite effect in dogs to that which it has in humans. There is an extremely long and practically never ending list of other drugs or substances that would be eliminated by animal tests, that are beneficial to humans. Animal experiments do NOT remove 'toxic' drugs, in general, they only remove drugs that are toxic to the species tested upon, assuming they are even listened too. Most of the drugs they claim will be safe or efficivacious fail when tried out in humans, many times with devastating effects, vioxx, thalidomide, et al. Yes, using the scientific methods available, such as micro-dosing, which is much safer than animal toxicity data, which is worse than tossing a coin. Pull the other one. Animal experiments have increased year on year out. This is simply another deception on behalf of the animal experimenters who believe in their practice so much they actively try to sabotage any scientific evaluation of the process!! There is a mountain of evidence for this, if you care to look for it: What about if it is safe in human fibroblasts but then toxic in some random species? Given the number of drugs on the market that are removed, after some fight, this statement makes no sense. They generally hide behind animal data for as long as possible though, denying the clinical findings, see vioxx, thalidomide, etc. This statement has no meaning without numbers. Thalidomide is non-teratogenic in practically all species at human equilivent doses. Many doctors who saw evidence of birth-defects in their human patients continued using the drug because when they took recourse to animal experiments they could not reproduce the findings. Morphine has a stimulatory effect on numerous species, notably cats. It has the opposite effect in humans. This list would include penicillin, aspirin, digitalis and many, many more. Possibly the entire pharmacopia. Plenty, digitalis (raises blood pressure in dogs), aspirin (highly toxic to cats) and lots more besides. Yes, i am selecting the facts from the nonsense. Unfortunately, when performing animal experiments there is no way to select any small number of genuinely factual ones from the vast and highly damaging number of incorrect ones, hence why they are all collectively uninformative. INow has since retracted his/her position, and admitted that the dogs didn't have diabetes, as artificially destroying a dogs pancreas is not diabetes. It is quite different to the natural processes that accumulate over time and create the spontaneous and natural condition, in humans. Hence, my 'facts' are already straight.

Well this stands to reason, what with both yourself and I being members of the same species, there is a vastly increased likelihood that it will. But, juvenile pejorative exchange aside, 92% of drugs that pass animal safety/efficacy experiments fail when given to humans on safety/efficacy related grounds. This fact would seem to invalidate your assertion that if a drug works, or is safe, in some other random species that it will 'probably' work, or be safe, in humans. The word 'similar' really doesn't haven't any scientific meaning. Given that the predictive value of any given species for another is less than the toss of a coin, it is clearly the most 'imperfect' and unscientific part of an 'imperfect process'. Indeed, it reduces proceedings to that of a sham. How can any serious scientific mind consider something less predictive than sitting down tossing a coin up in the air and calling heads or tails, to be acceptable? Presumably the 'cell cultures, tissues/organs' are human in origin. If they're not, they really should be. If they conflict with the animal-data as they invariably will, which do you go with? If for example, tests of a chemical compound on human liver cells show that it is toxic, but when tested in dogs it is seen to be 'safe', or vice-versa, which results overide the other? The whole-intact but ultimately different and misleading system, or the directly applicable human cells? As one is less accurate than tossing a coin while the other is around 80% + accurate it makes sense to ignore the animal-data in favour of the human cells, but would this be the case? Every drug on the market is 'ineffective' or 'unsafe' in some species or another and very effective and extremely safe in others. It isn't known until after human experiments which species is an accurate 'model' for the human response, hence why they cannot be predictive. I do not consider a 92% failure rate to be evidence of a system 'working well'. As the dogs in question did not have diabetes i would have to say, 'no'.

If you believe that i have misrepresented any of the statements or inferences of lucaspa then i would appreciate it if you would be so kind as to present a list of such perceived happenings. Otherwise your own response could rightfully be interpreted as evidence of a somewhat smaller strawman on your part and the charge of projection be levelled against you. The vast majority of animal experiments, predominantly for reasons of species-variation, and additionally due to other factors, such as poor experiment design give incorrect 'information', hence are clearly not informative, they are in fact misinformative. The remaining tiny percentage are cast adrift amongst the preponderance of misinformation, hence cannot be informative either. If you do not know whether or not something is 'informative' then clearly it isn't.

So computer modelling is used to test for efficacy? Later you claim the opposite. Given the undeniable differences in metabolism inter-speciem 'it's possible that a drug will metabolize to a compound that is harmful' in humans, that the animal 'models' missed, too. If there is conflict in animal data, which there often is, how does one settle this dispute before proceeding to human testing? That is to say, which is the 'authentic' predictor? Yes, and all of the above factors vary significantly and unpredictably between species, making it impossible to reliably extrapolate between them. Nor can they be accurately 'mimicked' in animal 'models'. No two biological systems are identical, the differences between mouse and man are much greater than the differences between two members of the same species, yet it is considered dangerous and unscientific to attempt extrapolation from, for example, adult to child, so how can it be done from laboratory animal to human patient? The 'live animal' experiment only tells you about it's system, not systems in general, hence it is both uninformative and misleading. Then the sensible suggestion would be to test it for toxicity in that organ too. You appear to have contradicted, jdurg, when you earlier state that computer models are used to remove the drugs that 'will not work', i.e. efficacy testing, not toxicity. An animal experiment can only tell you if the drug 'actually is effective' in the animal tested upon. Not whether the drug is effective in general. ...there is no guarantee that it wont both be useless and potentially deadly in humans. Or to confirm seen toxicity, in the case of conflicting outcomes in different animal species? A predictor is only any use afterall, if it gives one reliable outcome. ...rats with fake conditions that bare little or no resemblance to those natural, spontaneous diseases that occur in humans? The first line contradicts the second one. The latter one makes absolutely no logical sense, either taken in isolation or when placed back into the context of the paragraph it belongs to. Clearly a false dilemma, as animal tests are completely uninformative, hence the requirement for human tests and dangerously misleading in most cases.