the reason i ask is that i don't want to be reponsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent animals.

I also don't like animal testing, but what if Rosetta generates some cure for a desease, is there an alternative to animal testing? No, I guess! Or to ask in a provocant way: Are you volunteering to test the new drugs? I guess not, I wouldn't either. So, how should new drugs then be tested if not with animal tests? If you have a serious desease and are already a "death candidate" then you might volunteer in testing. But what if you suffer from - let's say - Parkinson? Are you willing to risk your life to eventually(!!) cure a non-lethal desease?

i think a more appropriate question is 'will the research increase or reduce animal testing?'

I say that because animal testing currently occurs and so inaction - i.e. not participating - prolongs that. Any drugs produced require some form of testing, and as scsimodo says, that (currently) has to be either animal or human. Reducing this testing to a bare minimum must be a step in the right direction.

So I believe the answer to the question above is that it will almost certainly reduce animal testing. Virtual design/screening etc will allow many candidate drugs to be more specific for their targets than current methods allow.

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Another way to look at it, is that once Rosetta can accurately predict protein structures, and how drug candidates will interact with them, must less animal testing will be required, because your odds of success will be much higher then now where you may test 100 compounds to find one that is effective.

Another other way to look at it is that once Rosetta is good enough to generate cure proteins for humans, the same will work to address viruses and diseases in animals. So you will be able to immunize livestock against diseases as well as people.

The Rosetta scientists are working on the biochemistry. Their work is then used by pharmaceutical scientists. They would be the ones that would be conducting any kind of trials. And, as I mentioned, that testing will likely be more streamlined then without Rosetta.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

the reason i ask is that i don't want to be reponsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent animals.

I also don't like animal testing, but what if Rosetta generates some cure for a desease, is there an alternative to animal testing? No, I guess! Or to ask in a provocant way: Are you volunteering to test the new drugs? I guess not, I wouldn't either. So, how should new drugs then be tested if not with animal tests? If you have a serious desease and are already a "death candidate" then you might volunteer in testing. But what if you suffer from - let's say - Parkinson? Are you willing to risk your life to eventually(!!) cure a non-lethal desease?

there are plenty of alternatives to animal testing,they just test drugs on animals because it is cheaper and drug companies only care about money,not curing diseases of helping people.

think about it,if there was a cure for every disease,drug companies would go bankcrupt overnight.

so would doctors

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No, the drug companies would leave the sector and concentrate on areas where already far too many are moving, i.e. into vanity drugs. Allowing rich old women to try and pass themselves off as young things.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

No, the drug companies would leave the sector and concentrate on areas where already far too many are moving, i.e. into vanity drugs. Allowing rich old women to try and pass themselves off as young things.

Come on, lets have a little less cynicism! We are all contributing our resources to a worthwhile cause, and most of the staff in the drug companies think they are contributing too.
Without the drug companies I would already be dead. It is the manufacturers' trials that are keeping me alive.
Well done everyone who is working to understand our chemistry and physics. There will be plenty more new jobs to be tackled, when current tasks are resolved, just as has always happened in the past.

My reply was behind a couple of posts which were assuming that all disease had been cured.

I do remain cynical of the sector however. Given the chance of creating, for the same cost, a drug for an obscure third world disease, and a drug which prevented cellulite in western women, (or baldness in men - I'm not sexist, or obesity in their dogs - I'm not speciesist(?) either!), I honestly believe most drug companies would take the latter as there is simply more profit to be gained in western vanity then third world life/death situations.

Let's face it, age related problems are not a huge problem in the third world, most people don't live long enough to "suffer" from them.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

drug companies expermental trials are what kept my mother in law alive for an extra 4 years. did they experment on animals with their trials? probably. but most likely mice and not much of anything bigger.

another argument on testing on animals but on a different idea.
if you don't like testing on aniamls then you need to dislike the companies that breed mice and such for feeding to reptiles. thats also for pure profit.

business is all about profit and taking the least amount of risk possible.

that is the way of the western world.

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there are plenty of alternatives to animal testing,they just test drugs on animals because it is cheaper and drug companies only care about money,not curing diseases of helping people.

think about it,if there was a cure for every disease,drug companies would go bankcrupt overnight.

If every disease were cured, drug companies, doctors, nurses and many researchers would lose their jobs.

If war, famine and drought were ended once and for all, many who work for the UN and charity organizations would be out of work. Clearly these people all all greedy and evil.

It's not true that there are plenty alternatives, at least not ones that are equally accurate. Often, it's not the drug companies choice to test on animals, they are required to for the drugs to be approved.

Also, a lot of research is going in to developing alternatives. I recently read about a method developed by a cosmetics company to grow human skin that has been approved for testing cosmetics and medicine for irritancy.

Also, as many have pointed out already, rosetta will almost certainly reduce the need for animal testing.

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rosie results can help limit animal testing to the final stages of testing when the drug is about ready to be released. thats probably a bit of ways off, but its coming. it took a long time to finally be able design a car or airplane on a computer and to reconstruct or simulate crashes on a computer. so now its sciences turn to create programs that can simulate alot of the things that are a mystery to scientists now, that only animal/human testing can prove.

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Whether or not you think animal testing is necessary the conditions that these animals live is atrocious. Just watch videos from Huntingdon Life Sciences where they literally just punch dogs for no purpose.

Edit: Sorry for the epic necropost. I found this through a search and din't look at the dates.

Whether or not you think animal testing is necessary the conditions that these animals live is atrocious. Just watch videos from Huntingdon Life Sciences where they literally just punch dogs for no purpose.

Edit: Sorry for the epic necropost. I found this through a search and din't look at the dates.

I almost hate to revive this thread but....I used to deliver dry ice to labs that tested on animals and those people I met were very nice to their animals. They petted them, took the dogs out for walks, hand fed the rabbits etc. It was not at all like any of the videos intended to inflame the public. Now I only saw 3 labs that animal testing was done on but NONE of them mistreated their animals at all! And one of the labs even did Ebola testing, that building is long since torn down and the land scraped clean and there is now something else there. Even those though people did not mistreat their animals! I am sure there are labs, as there are people, with different standards than others but not ALL animal testing labs are bad to their animals. The dry ice was used to preserve samples, not for actual testing on the animals. I had free run of the lab, with a security pass etc, but obviously did not see every inch of the building. I would go from the loading dock to the lab and back several times carrying either blocks of dry ice or bags of dry ice pellets. Sometimes when the dogs were out, I am not a cat person so I stayed away from them, I would pet and play with the dogs, they seemed happy and playful and other than living in a lab seemed like normal dogs.

if i run rosetta at home,will the resulting data be used in experiments that use animals?

the reason i ask is that i don't want to be reponsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent animals.

The rosseta@home project is all about computational biochemistry. They are trying to predict a protien structure from a gene sequence. Its all math and computer science. There are no animals involved. That I have ever seen over the years.

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if i run rosetta at home,will the resulting data be used in experiments that use animals?

the reason i ask is that i don't want to be reponsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent animals.

The rosseta@home project is all about computational biochemistry. They are trying to predict a protien structure from a gene sequence. Its all math and computer science. There are no animals involved. That I have ever seen over the years.

I agree I think Rosetta is waaaaay to early in the process to be using animals for their research. Maybe waaaay down the line after Rosetta narrows down the possibilities some other researcher may take the data and adapt it to their own research and some animals may be involved, but the Rosetta stuff is not applicable to animals.