Got A Question Military Members Here (LONG)

[Andara Bledin]

I can't imagine a chimpanzee who knows he his dying is going to care very much about flying.

Surprisingly enough, a chimp that was trained via electric shock did precisely that during a space flight where the shock device malfunctioned and was shocking him pretty much the entire flight.

An attempt to send him up a second time resulted in them being unable to get him back into a capsule.

[s_stabeler]

well, to be fair, the chimp may have been intelligent enough to realize that getting the flight over and done with was the quickest way to get the device switched off. Which ALSO explains why the chimp refused to go in a capsule again.

edit- oh, and animals can be more intelligent than they seem. I remember reading about a study where a crow was given a choice between a straight wire and a bent wire to get food ( I think it was) out of a hole. The crow bent the straight wire itself to get the food out. ( I would LOVE to see how the scientists in question wrote that up in their results.)

[Panacea]

Panacea, since you've seen it, maybe you can answer me this...towards the beginning, after Helen Hunt had had Virgil for a year, her superior shows up one day to tell her the NHF weren't renewing her grant & that Virgil was to be sent to a zoo in Houston. So, my question is, did the superior lie or did the NHF lie to the superior who was only telling Hunt what she herself had been told? Did the military intercede before Virgil could be transferred to Houston or what?

It's been awhile seen I've seen this movie; IIRC there was a mistake in paper work that diverted Virgil to the Air Force.

And being in the midst of the space race they didn't have much time or patience for things like "ethics" to stand in the way. So it was chimps on a rocket sled. Previous to this the USAF had actually done volunteer testing. But they couldn't do outright survival tests with volunteers ( ie major skull, spine, etc trauma ).

Well, and let's be honest. We didn't anthropomorphize animals back then the way we do now. We were still working out the details of the Nuremberg Code after WWII, and we still weren't getting the ethics of testing on human subjects, much less animals, right as late as the 1970's (ie the Tuskegee Experiment).

The sad/ironic part about this is we actually don't get accurate information from animal testing when it comes to things like crash tests. When it comes to testing of this nature ( physical forces, etc ) there isn't a animal that is an accurate enough human analogue to provide accurate data beyond the general scope of "Did the chimp survive? Then a bet a human could too.".

The animal that comes closest is, of all things, the pig. We can get a lot of good data from carcasses.

These days the benefits of biomedical research on primates is pretty small. Most countries have banned or are phasing out primate testing. The US is still the world's largest user of chimps in biomedical research but even it has started phasing out primate testing. Many major pharmaceutical companies have already banned it after reading the winds of public opinion.

The real sad part is most animal trials are done on mice, which anatomically and physiologically are nothing like humans. We often find major problems with a drug in human trials that was missed with animal trials. But we will always need a level of animal testing. We just need better choices in animals.

[Shangri-laschild]

Because a dying animal will follow his danger instincts: trying to hide or trying to resolve the pain. A human that knows he is dying and also understands the goals of the task he is trying to accomplish may decide to work towards completing the goal or reducing the amount of goal failure for his last act(s).

Some humans will, maybe. Not all humans handle dying in the same way. And as shown by the posts about the test where the chimp kept flying fine, not all animals react the same way either. I'd suspect there would actually be more doubt with the human than with the animal. The human is likely to go through all sorts of things like what they are leaving behind, the reasons they don't want to die, etc. Sure, some humans will manage to keep flying anyway. And some animals will manage to keep flying while others will curl up into a ball and give up. Still not really seeing a difference overall.

[Gravekeeper]

Well, and let's be honest. We didn't anthropomorphize animals back then the way we do now.

Actually, animal testing has been a point of controversy and ethical debate since its inception. It has never not been controversial. Its literally been controversial since the 1600s.

The animal that comes closest is, of all things, the pig. We can get a lot of good data from carcasses.

We actually can't to be honest. There's a reason research testing moved on from carcasses to live subjects. They sort of hit the limit of what could be learned so to speak. Pigs are good as an analog for human skin and tissue when testing chemicals, drugs, cosmetics, etc ( any sort of toxicity or surface irritant test ). But you can't strap them into a rocket sled and expect to get any decent data.

The real sad part is most animal trials are done on mice, which anatomically and physiologically are nothing like humans. We often find major problems with a drug in human trials that was missed with animal trials. But we will always need a level of animal testing. We just need better choices in animals.

Sorry, that's completely incorrect. Mice are one of the single best animals to use for genetic/disease/drug testing. So much so the FDA actually requires that a new drug be tested on rodents. Its actually the only type of animal the FDA stipulates a drug MUST be tested on ( The FDA requires drug testing on at least two species of animal, one of which must be a rodent ). Obviously they are not anatomically similar but we share the vast majority of our genes with mice and the mice genome is very easy to work with.

Some humans will, maybe. Not all humans handle dying in the same way. And as shown by the posts about the test where the chimp kept flying fine, not all animals react the same way either.

This was actually a significant problem with chimp testing. Chimps would, naturally, become wary/afraid when any sort of negative reinforcement/restraints/etc were used and end up skewing the data. Lab chimps these days are trained to accept testing parameters ( such as injections, etc ) and acclimatized to being handled and interacted with instead of simply being restrained/shocked/whatever.

Not that that makes any of this a hell of a lot better but it is a step up from shock collars and shackles.

[Gilhelmi]

I do not know that for certain. However, I would not be surprised, see below.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Unethical human experimentation in the United States

The problem with many of the conspiracy theories is that, I understand why they do not trust the government or corporations. I think 90% of the theories are wrong and have no good evidence.

But when I hear someone try and say "US government created AIDS to kill Black people". I cringe, because we have proven where it came from, but I can not help but feel sympathy because that first link. (Many Black people were diagnosed with Syphilis, but never told, so that the scientists could observe its spread in the population.)