• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    All they need is oxygen, water, nutrients, and disposal for CO2/waste. If we can clone entire systems, we could keep them alive too.

    As for the brain, I find the ethical minefield of brain death is a helpful topic for understanding a possible path towards ethical testing environment. If the technology exists to grow cloned organs and keep them alive outside the body, growing cloned brains should also be possible. From there, growing a vegetative brain that can never wake up (because there was never any ‘there’ there to wake up) would open up many possibilities for testing on the brain. Imagine if we could test on human brains without needing to translate from animal models. It’d be a huge leap forward.

    And no one has to get hurt anymore.

    This could at least be a goal, even if you want to keep hurting animals in the meantime and aren’t willing to halt all animal testing. Do you really think we’ll be forced to test on animals forever? In a thousand years will we be testing new drugs on mice? I doubt it.