About your idea for volunteers: Say you got 4 volunteers, all expecting to die within three months. Too actually check if the new drug works, two of them will have to get a placebo.

I think on the most part that if the illness is serious enough that there will be plenty of willing volunteers; there are scores of people with debilitating illnesses that fight to get into drug trials . If the illness isn’t particularly serious then perhaps we need to consider not killing and maiming animals in the pursuit to irradiate it. And in the case of cosmetics they can go fuck themselves.

I’m over simplifying, I know, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to move toward a better model that takes the selfish (and technically completely unnecessary, arguably damaging) pursuit of extending our lives out of the hands of unwilling animals.

I’m just able to recognise that apes also feel pain, and are not willing volunteers to extend our lives. I’d love to know how that makes me a nutcase, and you sane – please go on.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why no one takes organizations like PETA seriously; they tend to be full of misanthropic nutcases who exhibit a Mengelian disregard for human pain.

I’d rather die at 30 than live with that.

(edit: the ‘fuck ethics’ was for dramatic effect, in all honesty I don’t think testing on third world humans is any worse than testing on apes, to suggest any differently must surely rely on some religious inspired ego trip that were somehow more significant than anything else).

Guess what also! I’m sure there’s many humans who would be glad to be tested on in exchange for money. And that’s of their own free will!

Unfortunately, that means you have to draw the line above what some human lives will ever reach.

Given there’s less difference between the average human and a chimp than between the average human and immortals like DaVinci or Einstein, that’s fine by me.

Little effort has been made to find alternatives to the use of other species in research because they are viewed as merely the equivalent of beakers and test tubes.

Citation, please?

What you say may be absolutely true, but right now has the epistemological status of “something someone asserted on the Internet.” Research with primates is very expensive,  so in an expensive  endeavour (medical) or  money grubbing industry (human consumer products), I’m surprised that people wouldn’t be looking for alternatives.

Not saying you’re wrong. I’m sincerely curious about this issue.

But ‘little effort to find alternatives’…? I’d have assumed that if a proposed experiment isn’t sufficiently justified, a bioethics committee (or whatever they’re called) would ensure the researcher has no choice but to find an alternative.

As for the supposed oxymoron of doing evil that good may result, that kind of idealistic absolutism doesn’t stand up in the real world. Everything is a cost/benefit equation. If you can identify a more justifiable ethical framework than utilitarianism, I’d sure like to hear about it.