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When I shampoo my hair this utilitarian ablution does not trigger concerns about the liquefaction of my eyes, the septic festering of my scalp, or my death. I remain safe from dermal absorption or ingestion of the detergent, various cosmetic additives, preservatives, their collective impurities, and adventitious microbial contamination comprising the shampoo. That tens of albino bunny rabbits and hundreds of lab rats and mice may have expired to assure the validity of my unconcern bothers me not a whit.
Toxic shock, that can be rapidly lethal, is massive systemic collapse elicited by cell wall fragments of Gram negative bacteria (Lipid-A or pyrogen) that survive sterilization. A few billionths of a gram will do. Pyrogen is assayed via the limulus amoebocyte lysis assay, sensitive to almost molecular levels of taint. Blood from horseshoe crabs is the analytical reagent. Better that tens of thousands of horseshoe crabs are exsanguinated than a single human patient is killed by a catheter or a Band-Aid.
Heroin is banned in the US as a Class I drug of abuse, fueling an annual expenditure hard by 20,000 million dollars upon the fraudulent War on Drugs. Fentanyls are drugs one thousand times as potent as heroin and easily synthesized in a garage lab. An impatient chemist/capitalist in the San Francisco Bay area cooked a batch a little too hot, unknowingly popped out a minor piece of his molecules, and destroyed pinhead-sized portions of brain tissue - the substantia nigra - of his addict customers. This furnished the first chemical model of Parkinson's disease, and further degraded a large number of explicitly worthless lives.
Animal rights' harpies would have us believe that tissue culture or even computer models of biochemistry should replace acute and chronic toxicity animal testing, and testing for teratogenesis, mutagenesis, carcinogenesis and other deleterious sequelae to consumer product or pharmaceutical use. That a bad batch of China White ablated a fractional gram of obscure brain tissue whose disablement is devastating and absence is lethal is not the point. The identical molecular moiety was undergoing intense development in a major pharmaceutical company as a molecular transport prosthesis for moving drugs across the otherwise impenetrable blood-brain-barrier of cerebral and spinal blood vessels. What computer model would have predicted the injury to have been wrought from such drugs administered to the sickest of patients, since knowledge of the biochemistry did not exist? What tissue culture screening protocol would have included a tenebrous speck of inner brain? Does your heart liberally bleed for the welfare of mice and bunny rabbits? Would you sacrifice your mother to save the life of an inbred lab rat?
Every chemical substance must by Federal law be escorted by a Material Safety Data Sheet, MSDS. The MSDS for potassium cyanide is 3-5 pages long, detailing in exquisite legal jargon extreme measures to avoid human exposure and safely contain and remove a spill. The MSDS for ultra-pure particle-free chromatography water or table salt uses all but the identical language. California Proposition 65 requires that all vendors and landlords post signs visible from outside their property warning of the hazardous natures of their products and venues. Every grocery store has the maximum warning sign posted, as do all office buildings and restaurants. One could once differentiate life-threatening exposures from mere inconveniences. The tree huggers and the fish kissers have forced legislation removing that distinction. We have replaced a minute human hazard with a massive, corrupt, expensive and perilous insanity enforced not by law, but by the pernicious omnipotence of Federal regulation and its offhandedly awarded fines and imprisonments.
Purebred mice can top $20 each. A single lab rabbit costs more than $500, plus overhead for boarding, feeding, veterinary care and documentation of its perceived happiness according to Federal statutes. Monkeys and apes are more expensive still on a steeply ascending scale. Nobody plays "oven cleaner in the eyes" games in a building filled with animals costing their weight in sterling silver. The most rigorous animal testing protocols can let slip a tragedy like thalidomide because human embryonic tissue less than three months of age is unique, subtle and well beyond animal or computer modeling. Unless our society condones testing upon normally developing fetuses - an inarguable atrocity - we must protect our children against innocent medical indiscretion by evaluating the nearest fungible alternative, animals.
Reserpine was the first tranquilizer - extracted from Rauwolfia root - but had a hypotensive side effect. Reserpine was a drug for lowering blood pressure, with a tranquilizing side effect. Reserpine causes cancer after long term administration to mice and is no longer prescribed to humans. Would you sacrifice your neighbors, parents, children or yourself to spare a lab rat?
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