Must be maidenly musings

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

@velvetdemon I'm doing a full reply because I want to give this question the time and space it deserves, and I really do appreciate your curiosity about this.

The short answer: It is deeply unethical. There are nowhere near enough willing patients in the world to be able to do this, and it would be criminal to put them through this.

The long answer: The one side of the equation you're focusing on is: how much of a drug is too much, to the point where it will cause negative side effects or even death? And this is crucial to know. But it's not just a matter of finding out the lethal dosage of a heart cholesterol medication, you need to know that it can actually lower the cholesterol of any living thing. There is no way to know this without giving it first to...a living thing.

But beyond this, I need to emphasize: The goal of a drug trial is to effectively cure people who are already suffering from disease, who are living on limited time.

Drug trials don't just happen on any member of the public, they need to happen specifically on people affected by the disease you're trying to treat. There is at any time a very limited and very marginalized population of the world affected by early onset, familial Parkinson's disease. Because you cannot ethically induce disease in a human being, you are working with, speaking with, and helping patients and their families who are hopeful and desperate for a cure.

If you were to jump straight to human trials from petri dishes, not knowing absolutely anything about how the drug functions in a living, breathing animal body, it would look like this:

We didn't know that minute quantities of the drug interact lethally with x, y, z medication that people are commonly also taking. X number of patients have died as a result.

We didn't know that the drug is fatal to people with [common variant] in their genetics. X more patients have died.

We didn't know the drug exacerbates x, y, z chronic illnesses. X number of people have acquired permanent, lifelong disabilities.

We didn't know the best way to deliver the drug, so we tried multiple ways: the people who received it intravenously are now suffering from a painful, costly, and debilitating condition that did not happen with the ingested form.

I could go on, and on, and on.

The vast majority of these problems can be nearly or almost entirely averted by testing other animals first.

These are all people who possibly could have waited for the normal progression from animal testing to human testing and thus received better outcomes. Some people will pass away in the time it takes to get to that point, and that's heartbreaking, and we all wish science could be faster.

animal research is not the mad scientist wild west that PETA wants you to think it is. there are extremely strict federal laws in place to protect the well being of these animals. animal welfare organizations like AAALAC ensure that lab animals are treated with dignity & respect and are given enough specialized care & enrichment to be happy and content in captivity, just like AZA accreditation with zoos.

not a single animal from a zebrafish to a mouse to a dog to a macaque goes unaccounted for. if an animal gets moved to a new cage, paired for breeding, has a procedure performed on it, gives birth, gets sick or injured, dies, etc. it is legally required that this information is recorded and kept on file for the US federal government to access. failing to record & retain this information is very much punishable by US federal law.

let me tell you - if you abuse or kill an animal, even a mouse - you are almost certainly getting both fired & blacklisted from the industry. if you abuse or kill a more ‘advanced’ animal, such as a dog or monkey, you will likely face criminal charges. killing a monkey is as serious and disastrous as a nuclear meltdown. you are expected to reasonably explain every illness, injury, or death of an animal under your care. you must record all of this information. animals that are clearly suffering with low QOL are required to be euthanized according to AVMA guidelines.

research animals are highly expensive. yes, even the "lesser" animals like mice. the cheapest mice will run you a few hundred $ per individual, with some of the most expensive mice i've cared for being $25,000 per individual. in research we have the "three Rs" - reduction (reduce amount of necessary animals to a minimum), refinement (refine processes to ensure research is accurate and animals feel no pain or distress), and replacement (replace animals with non-living research models as they become available). i can assure you no proper research team is wasting animals (*do not* say "b-b-but elon musk--" his research team is actively being investigated for animal abuse by the government).

research methods that do not require live animals are currently being looked into & efforts spearheaded by - you guessed it - the animal research industry itself (notice how the animal rights people are strangely silent & unhelpful when it comes to this?) but current technology is rudimentary and does not compare to live animal models.

some research animal fun facts (US edition):

all species of animals are only allowed to have one single major surgery performed on them in their entire lifetime.

institutions with nonhuman primates must have a behavior program in place (run by knowledgeable primate specialists) to ensure that they are happy and receiving enough daily enrichment and social interaction.

institutions with dogs are required to have physical exercise programs in place. this means every individual dog gets a substantial amount of leashed AND free-roaming exercise daily, including playgroups with other dogs.

a majority of nonhuman primates get to retire to sanctuaries like peaceable primate sanctuary, and almost all dogs get retired and adopted out by organizations like homes for animal heroes. some institutions will also adopt out unneeded young rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, etc.

some strains of mice glow neon green (or orange or blue) under UV light. this is not harmful to them and is commonly seen in cancer research.

Nutrition experiments carried out on Canadian Aboriginal children in residential schools between 1942 and 1952, in which various control and experimental groups were deliberately malnourished. Also the Qu'Appelle BCG vaccine trial.

Basically everything the Australian government has done to the Aboriginal people, but especially experiments in the 20s and 30s, which tested basal metabolism by forcing subjects to lie still and breath through a rubber tube for hours, or those testing their response to pain.

Testing of a new antibiotic* on children in Kano, Nigeria, during a meningococcal meningitis outbreak, by Pfizer. The lawsuit the families and the Nigerian government brought against Pfizer also alleged that this further reduced the public's trust in vaccines and contributed to poor uptake of the polio vaccine.

The Tuskeegee Syphillis Study, which is a landmark in medical ethics fuckery that everyone should know about. The US has also carried out variations of this in so many places

Southam's experiments on prisoners using HeLa cancer cells** without their informed consent.

The Rawalpindi experiments carried out on members of the British Indian army to test mustard gas.

I'm not even going to talk about the Nazi ones.

*In this case they actually did do animal trials beforehand, which contraindicated its use in children, but I included this because it demonstrates how unethical research practice can impact public health.

FunFact! The facility/company is SO dedicated to the welfare of their subjects that techniques to reduce mental and emotional stress on the animals brought on by repetitive tasks, interpersonal/colony stressors, industrial setting, and a shitload of other work-related stressors that they EXTRACTED THAT SHIT OUT LATERALLY INTO HOW THEY SCHEDULE AND ORGANIZE THEIR STAFF.

Laboratory researchers in real life: put up memorial statues to remind humanity how much it owes to the lives of even mice

However, prismatic-bell's addition about John Kanzius is nonsense, and I can't in good faith reblog this without addressing that. He did not invent a device that treats cancer and then die because no one would agree to use it on him. He had an idea about using radiowaves to heat metal nanoparticles to kill surrounding tissue, which got caught in the same issue every single cancer treatment gets caught in, which is: how do you kill cancerous cells without killing non-cancerous cells? For his device to work you would need to be able to successfully target nanoparticles into cancer cells, which was simply not possible at the time.

The companies working on his device got bogged down with legal issues in 2015 and went mostly defunct. However, in 2020 one of them did emerge with a device that has entered human clinical trials. The treatment is called hyperthermia and the idea is that it might possibly help other treatments like chemo and radiation be more effective than they would be on their own. And for those of you not clicking through to the National Cancer Institute link: It is not clear if it actually helps people live longer. Searching for clinical trials on hyperthermia produced one result: Chemoimmunotherapy Combined with Deep Hyperthermia and Spatially-fractionated Radiotherapy for the Treatment of Advanced Biliary Tract Cancer. This is a Phase I trial, so the primary objective is determining safety. Note that even if it does work, this is a treatment that would be used in conjunction with other cancer treatments for a very specific type of cancer, because cancer is fucking complicated.

I WILL !!! I WILL DO THAT

some of my favourite indigenous artists, in no particular order:

Inuit artists:

the jerry cans (esp their album Inuusiq)

beatrice deer

twin flames

Māori artists:

jordyn with a why

Indigenous australian artists:

tilly tjala thomas (i particularly love ngai yurlku nhiina)

kardajala kirridarra (srlsly check out ngajabu (Grandmother's Song))

And one of her own:

Oh and of course there's also the HU and Bloodywood for people who like more rock and metal mixed in:

Most of his stuff makes you wanna dance, but his tunes are super-diverse.

CW for the voice of a deceased Elder in this one.

These are both from his debut album Gela, but his second album DJANDJAY is out on his 29th birthday next week, and every track I've listened to from it thusfar is a absolute fire 🔥💖🔥

you wanna dance, but his tunes

are super-diverse.

H.G. Wells

George Orwell

(George) Orson Welles

Orson Scott Card