Animal Experimentation hurts more than it helps

In order to examine this issue, it is useful to first ask ourselves whether in theory it is acceptable to harm animals in order to help humans and then proceed to examine the reality of the practice.In Theory: Is Harming Animals to Help Humans Permissible This seems to be a main point of contention with Pro, who mentions in point 9 of her introduction that "the value of each life in and of itself cannot be superseded by its potential value to anyone else". Which ostensibly means that the life of an animal is of the same value as the life of a human being.Yet we do establish on an intuitive level a differentiation between different types of life. We are perfectly aware, for instance, that bringing water to boiling point would cause the death of countless micro organisms. In spite of this we are not wont to accuse accuse tea-drinkers of amoebal genocide. A movement would be very short-lived indeed if it advocated abstinence from consuming vegetable life, as broccoli are also living things, and yet we tend to attach more value to vegetable life than unicellular or fungal life, and even invest in fighting plagues of the latter in order to defend the former. Just as vegetable life is orders of magnitude greater in worth than bacterial life, and animal life regarded as orders of magnitude greater than vegetable life, we are not irrational in establishing a separate and greater category for human life.Why is this, if taxonomically speaking we are in the same family, the Animal kingdom? Because we recognize that those traits we consider valuable in animals (intelligence, awareness of surroundings, feelings) are found in us in greater measure, along with other characteristics which are simple non-existent in other animals. Sentience (self-awareness), will, reason, art, symbolic thinking. These and many other characteristics are exclusive to human beings, and are what make us even capable of speaking and thinking in the language of rights and duties. We are able to construct ethical and moral arguments based on reason and experience and act in accordance to these considerations rather than instinct in order to make those actions "good" or "evil". If a lion kills the offspring of his rival we say he killed the offspring of his rival, not that he committed infanticide; if a baboon forcibly copulates with a female, we say he forcibly copulated with a female, not that he committed rape. This ability to transcend the physical and think morally marks such a separation between human beings and animals as to make comparisons border on the ridiculous.Does this mean that anything goes?Not remotely. Precisely because of man´s capacity for moral reasoning, we are obliged to recognize that insofar as an animal possesses those advanced traits we have moral duties towards them. I would even argue that the general beauty of nature is of intrinsic value and binds us to care for it and avoid bringing harm to it. This is often called the duty of stewardship.If this is the case we are obliged to create an ethical framework to govern the practice of animal testing. Many governments have laws in effect which tend to do precisely this(2), although for argument's sake we could theoretically summarize this framework in three rules: There must be sufficient benefit derived from the experiment to justify the potential harm to the test subject. Where possible, animals of lower order should be preferred to animals of higher order (mice before pigs before monkeys). If it is possible to use other arrangements discussed by Pro on point 7 (computer models, cadavers, artificial tissue etc) without sacrificing results, these should also be preferred. The more advanced the animal in question, the stricter we must be with criteria 1 and 2. In Practice: What Are The Benefits?Pro is right in saying not every advance in medicine is due to animal testing. The information given, however, attempts to mislead the reader into believing that the impact of animal testing has been negligible. To cite personal experience, my grandfather, Ysidro Valladares, was an oncologist who spent most of his life in the laboratory investigating cancer through experiments which involved provoking tumors in lab-mice and monitoring their immunological response (2). The results were hardly negligible, as he was able among other things to: Isolate the first politumoral DNA virus Discover the phenomenon of transfection Monitor the first in-vitro virical transformation and establish the transformed cell-line Describe the process of inverse transcription Incorporate the viral genome into the cancerous cells Discover the mutual conversion between DNA and RNA viruses Describe the transcription of exogenous DNA and the effect on informosome production Isolation of cancer-specific antibodies associated to cancerous cells These are hardly irrelevant findings, and many such findings in laboratories around the world using similar methods of investigation have made it the case that many types of cancer have a 90%+ survival rate if caught in time. To suggest, as Pro does, that as many treatments which worked on mice do not translate well to human beings(ignoring the many that did and the insight to the inner workings of cancer cells the failures give us), or that since life expectancy in the US is not the highest in the developed world (ignoring the lifestyle, environmental and other reasons for this fact) animal testing is not relevant or necessary to the fight against cancer is a spurious argument at best. We could make a similar line of argument (with different investigators and discoveries) for other areas of medicine.ConclusionWhile I concede that not every medical advance has come from animal testing, the advances animal testing has given us is enough to merit a consideration of its value. As far as I can fathom it, the key to this debate, to determine the relative harm and help or animal testing, lies in establishing whether there exists, as PRO´s opening statement (For those among our readers whose appetites were whetted by the "Read More" endings, I encourage them to read the full article on the PETA website via the link PRO kindly provides for us) seems to imply, a moral equivalence between human life and animal life. I categorically deny this equivalence, and look forward to defending this position in the course of this debate. Sources:(1) http://en.wikipedia.org...(2) http://es.wikipedia.org...