legionnaire

To everyone who is no longer on my friends list: I removed you not because I dislike you, but because we don't see each other in real life, and we don't talk back and forth in our journals, so technically we aren't "friends." You can always add me again if it bothers you.

After my orgy of science this past weekend, I've slowed things down a bit and am resuming a more normal work pace, which is just fine with me. Today I basically did some errands around the lab and set up cell cultures to work for next week. I do primary cell culture work - which means rather than using cancerous cell lines that will grow essentially indefinitely in vitro, I take cells from animals (mouse brains, to be specific) and grow them in a dish, where if I'm really really nice to them they'll last maybe a week and a half. Anyway, in order to get the cells from the mouse brains I have to, well, kill said mouse. Yes, I'm one of them.
Doing my mouse experiments today I started thinking about the whole usage of animals for scientific research purposes. I, and most other rationally thinking people, am wholesale against the usage of animals for cosmetics product testing, etc., when there are viable alternatives available. However, the study of biology requires... biological organisms. I can't think of any way around it. Using animals in my experiments never used to bother me at all. That is, until my roommate in my old apartment got a dog, the first pet I've ever lived with. While the dog was incredibly stupid, and eventually ending up living with my roommate's parents in Florida (much more space, more appropriate for a dog) I did grow pretty attached to it. And ever since I've found that I'm more and more disgusted by having to kill animals to do my research. I justify it to myself by saying that if I had a mouse in my apartment I wouldn't hesitate to kill it. But the difference here is that those mice live in the wild - we're competing for a resource (space.) The mice I use in the lab were bred (and genetically designed, actually) specifically by me solely for the purpose of using them in an experiment that requires their death.

You can take the utilitarian point of view; that their death is necessary for the advancement of a greater good, and so at the end of the day when you balance the equation, things still work out for the best. This argument is tough to back up though, because it assigns an arbitary value to the life of the mouse that is less than the arbitrary value of the life of the human being who will potentially be saved by my research. And it doesn't even work out numerically - I guarantee that if my work helps people with, say, schizophrenia, the number of mice required for my research and the research of everyone else involved in the project meets or exceeds the number of people who will be helped by my work. And what if it never amounts to anything practical? I'm of the mind that knowledge for its own sake is a worthwhile goal, but is it a worthy enough goal to justify killing animals? Tough to say.

Anyone else have thoughts on this issue?