Tests on mice may have given us a cure for cancer
I read the news today, oh boy…:
A ground-breaking treatment which cured cancer in mice is to be tested on humans by US researchers. It follows the discovery five years ago of a laboratory mouse that astonished scientists with an immune system which gave it complete protection from cancer. White blood cells taken from the animal and its offspring and transfused into other mice cured them of advanced cancers. Since then, similar anti-cancer activity by granulocyte white blood cells, has been identified in humans. Researchers now want to transfuse granulocytes from resistant individuals to cancer patients in the hope it will prove just as successful in humans as it has been in mice.
In a roundabout way, let’s now return to those, more extreme animal rights activists who are members or supporters of the various animal libration fronts:
Kermit the frog once sang, “It’s not easy being green.” He was right, of course. It’s much easier to see the world in black and white than admit to the existence of other shades and colours. People are attracted to the duality principle: black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. It’s also why certain types of religion that offer this easy fix have always been popular. When you’re talking duality, nothing much can trump the couple: God & Satan.
The best way to attract followers, whether you’re a political or religious shaman, is to offer your flock both a promised land and an (eternal) enemy. People are most easily led when they feel they are both fighting for and against something. This principle works for superpower states and world religions, as it does for the smallest terrorist group and religious sect. You get people to believe in your cause by offering them those comfort zones of duality.
Problem is, of course, that this type of black & white thinking can easily lead to all sorts of extremism. How many Crusades did Europe organise to recapture the Holy Land – and how many people died during the Christian infighting in Europe itself? How many innocent bystanders have already died, or lost their homes and their land, because of our latest War on Terror?
People are all too easily led to extreme behaviour, and most easily when there is that oldest of carrots: the lure of the fight between good and evil.
Take the animal rights movement. It used to be the case (at least in the West) that animals were seen as a commodity. Descartes (of ‘cogito ergo sum’ fame) ‘proved’ that animals had no soul and could not even feel pain – while a biographer of St Francis, the one who preached to the birds, lauded the saint’s sense of humour, when he described how the young Francis had laughed when he saw a pig, whose leg had been cut off by an axe, hobble around the market place, squealing till it died from blood loss, shock or what have you.
Our love of animals is a fairly recent thing. Of course, people have always used animals, and worshiped animals, and people have had private pets for a very long time but love of the animal kingdom as a whole, which leads to the love of each individual animal, is a moderately new phenomenon. As is the concept of animal rights, and organisations to prevent cruelty to animals.
Obviously, whenever people find a new cause, they always follow those same old patterns of duality: of black and white thinking. Hence, the new zealots of various animal liberation fronts – and the amazing human capacity to find the next Great Satan, even if, in this case, the Great Satan is humanity itself. Some animal rights people don’t think it’s enough to say the rights of animals should equal that of humans; they positively think that humans are inferior to all other animals.
To them, all forms of animal testing, for instance, are anathema – and they refuse to see any difference in testing for a new kind of make-up and a cancer research programme. Some of these people truly seem to believe that not to kill a hundred mice is better than to cure millions of people.
While I can follow their black and white argument that people have no moral right to use any other animal in order to sort out humanity’s problems, I also have to admit that when I read a story like the one above, I tend not to care too much about a few dead mice or the totalitarian niceties of black and white morality.
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June 30th, 2008 at 17:52
People tend to come to some pretty convenient conclusions regarding animals, including declaring that animals are incapable of feeling pain so hack away. Computer modeling has gone far to replace the supposed need to sacrifice animals for the good of man. Perhaps a little sympathy towards the suffering of others, if not compassion, would ease rigid thinking on both sides of the “issue”.
June 30th, 2008 at 18:10
Thanks for the comment - and I fully agree!
Thankfully, there is less and less need for animal testing. That is, of course, for a large part thanks to the activity of animal rights groups. Thanks to successful lobbying and publicity campaigns, those who care about the well-being of animals have managed to get most of the public (and thus the political parties) on their side.
Because of that scientists and companies have been forced to seek ways to do research without needlessly killing animals.
All of that is a marvellous thing, in my opinion - but I still think that where (thus far) there are no other means of testing important things, it is ‘acceptable’ to do animal testing. When these tests can result in actual benefits for millions of people, like the research for certain vaccins and medicines, that is - and not for the cosmetics industry, for instance,
J.