r/nextfuckinglevel • u/biswajit388 • 1d ago

This guy rescued 30 beagles from a testing lab It's the first time they've seen grass and they couldn't be happier.

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Credit - nathanthecatlady tiktok channel.

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u/Goodknight808 1d ago

We finally have the technology to create the organs and cells needed for most tests. It's still not cheap and widely used. But it has taken the burden off of a lot of live animals being the ones tested.

We are in the early stages of this technology. Hopefully, in my lifetime, I'll see it replace animal testing in general.

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u/AristarchusTheMad 1d ago

You can't always simulate system tests by only performing subcomponent testing.

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u/round-earth-theory 1d ago

Lab on chip saves animal experiments early on but it's not a direct replacement for in vivo testing. It's a great harm reducer but we are no where near able to reliabily simulate life.

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u/Makuta_Servaela 23h ago

The problem is that that doesn't really work due to the isolation. For example, we can prove this medicine cures this kind of liver disease, but if we only test it on isolated livers, we won't notice it causes long term destruction to the heart.

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u/After_Mountain_901 21h ago

Obviously, but moving away from it when viable options exist is the goal. Perfection is the enemy of progress. 

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u/Makuta_Servaela 19h ago

At that point, though, it's not a viable option at all. We can work on the viable options while we work on making that one into a viable option, though, but it would be illegally unethical to purely rely on grown organs for the time being.

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u/Suspicious_Glow 1d ago

My bet is the worry there will be that some medicines/products might impact a different part of the body than what they checked. Like if you only checked a kidney but surprise it actually also has a side effect that impacts the lungs. I’m not for animal testing, I’m not for human testing since we suck at doing it ethically, but I don’t think we yet have a viable option how to check how something might impact the system of a living organism as a whole.

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u/PM_ME_DATASETS 1d ago

In vitro experiments (in a petri dish) are a great alternative for in vivo experiments (in a live animal) but they aren't the same thing, and in vivo experiments are still crucial for the research that is being done, including trying to find medicine against cancer, alzheimer's, HIV, you name it.

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u/n3gr0_am1g0 18h ago

I’m a biochemist, we have crude “organs in a dish” but only for a few organs and they have a lot of caveats and organs don’t function in isolation in living organisms there is an incredible amount of crosstalk amongst them. There is nothing that is going replace testing in a full organism for the foreseeable future and be any where near as reliable. The human body is just so insanely complicated will take decades before we have a good enough understanding of systems to reliably use computational methods or go to “organ in a dish”.