Stuff You Should Know - How Animal Testing Works

Episode Date: September 6, 2016

The use of animals for commercial and scientific testing is a quietly controversial topic. That we humans have advanced as a species because we use animals as literal and figurative guinea pigs is undeniable. But do we have the right to do that? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

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Go to squarespace.com and set your website apart. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. This is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.

Not the least of which is membered by Jerry. Well, that was exciting. I have a bag cold. Yeah. My brain's not functioning quite right. Yeah, but this is not the old days where you have the six weeks of cold. Right.

Hopefully this'll be just a couple of episodes. That's right. Bear with us. Yeah, bear. But to make up for it, I have all my teeth, finally. All right. It's just a constant pendulum. That's right.

It swings from one of us to the other. Got all toothed up yesterday. Feeling good? The eight months is over. Like, click your teeth together for everybody. I'm afraid to. Oh, okay. Are you, like, depressed?

Yeah, I gotta treat them very carefully. And I got fitted for a bite guard, so I'm gonna grind my teeth at night. This doesn't keep happening. So things are looking good. Everything's coming up, Chuck. That's funny. Yumi has a bite guard, too, from grinding her teeth.

So two of the most significant people in my life. Grind their teeth. Both grind their teeth. Does she bite her fingernails? But I don't. Does she bite her fingernails? No, she doesn't. Yeah, I take out my stresses on my body.

Yeah, those are short nails. Do they hurt? Do they just ache? No. Because sometimes I... If I overdo it, they do. If I, when I cut my nails, and I file them a little too short,

they just ache for a day or so afterward. Yeah. It's a habit. I've always done it. Yeah. Like, since you can remember. Yeah. I wore that bitter polish for a while

when I was a kid to try and spell. Oh, yeah. I just chewed right through it. Yeah. I was like, oh, it's so bitter, still must bite. I kind of like it in a weird way. Yeah. The part of me that hates myself loves that taste.

That's so weird. Oh, Chuck, let's talk about another habit. Okay. A habit that humans have had for a very long time. And that is the habit of using animals as models for humans, as stand-ins for humans, when we want to test new things, find out new things about ourselves.

Yeah, like, will this kill me? Let's put it on an animal. Right. Does the heart or the lungs actually pump blood around the body? Let's cut a dog open and find out. Yeah. That we've been doing it for a very long time.

Yeah. And this article came with its own intro story, which was pretty interesting, I thought. Yeah, we haven't done one of those in a long time. That used to be like a standard aspect of this. Yeah. Now we just babble. Yeah.

Yeah. We just share what's going on in our lives or days. Pretty much. Sorry, everybody. It must be a real letdown now that I think about it. Should we do this though? Sure. All right.

Let's go back in time. Back to 1937, and there was a company called, a pharma company called SE Massengill out of Tennessee. And they had a great, I almost want to say wonder drug that was an antibiotic that worked really well in its powdered form. And people started clamoring and said, we love this stuff, but it sure would be great

if we could put it as a drop under my tongue instead. Right. I'm not big on liquids, I'm not big on powders. Sure. Like that weirdo, Richard Petty, who just takes Goody's powder like. That's me, I'd love that. Dude, that's my go-to.

Yeah. It's got caffeine, that's what helps. Yeah, for migraines too. Oh really? Caffeine's a big one. Yeah, Emily can't do them, but it's my. I couldn't either. It's my hangover cure.

I see. Did I say that out loud? You did. Yeah. It works wonders. I thought Bloody Mary's were your hangover cure. No, I'm not a hair of the doggie. That's what it was invented for, you know.

Yeah. All right, I'm getting a self-check, I apologize. So they decided we need a liquid form of this. What was the name of the drug? Sulphanil... Man, I just had it. Sulphanilamide. Yes.

Or Sulphanilamide. I think Sulphanilamide. Okay. That's how I would say it if I were in 1937, Tennessee. Well, they had a chemist named Harold Cole Watkins who went to the lab and said, all right, let's dissolve this stuff in something called diethylene glycol. Diethylene.

That one I know. Worked pretty well. So they added a little raspberry flavoring to make it palatable. And they said, it smells pretty good. Tastes pretty good. Looks pretty good. Let's sell it. Yeah.

And they did. They sold a bunch of it. And just like one month after mixing up a batch of this stuff, they had 633 shipments all over the country. Yes. Because there was a huge demand for this. I mean, like Sulphanilamide was already an established drug. The idea of it being in some sort of palatable form, that was gangbusters.

Yeah, raspberry liquid. Everybody had syphilis that they needed to take care of back then. And this kind of thing would help. That's right. And if it could be a pleasant experience, well, then great. And then that was September when they made their first shipment, right? Yes. By October, middle of October, October 11th to be specific,

a group of doctors in Tulsa contacted the AMA, the American Medical Association, and said, we think there's something really wrong with this new Massingill product, which they called Sulphanilamide elixir, or elixir of Sulphanilamide. We think it's killing people, actually, and killing them in one of the worst ways imaginable. Yeah. It wasn't just go sleepy time now. It was a pretty bad death. Right.

You're writhing in agony. You're probably puking your guts up. You're dying from being poisoned. Yeah. The AMA got ahold of some stuff, and they said, you know what, the actual drug is fine, but the solution we mix it with is the culprit. It is pure poison. Yeah.

Who knew? Nobody knew. And the reason why no one knew is because Massingill and Cole Watkins or Harold Cole Watkins and his group of chemists were not obligated to test this stuff out. Yeah. Well, people knew, though, that was the one frustrating thing, is there were studies out that said this stuff was poison. Right.

And they just didn't read them. Right. They didn't research the literature, which is a big deal, but they also didn't test it out on human or animal ahead of time. And again, they just looked at the appearance, the smell, a little bit of the taste, but no one took a full dose of this, apparently. And people died. I think 100 people died in 15 states in about a month or so before they could get the shipments

back. Yeah. And I think the FDA, the barely born FDA, this is one of its first actions, was going and getting this stuff. Yeah. And the president of the company said, you know, we haven't broken any laws because I guess there weren't laws on the books at the time. And the head chemist, very sadly, killed himself because of this, like the story goes from

bad to worse. Right. And that was pretty Japanese of him. Yeah. You know? Yeah. What on that? On suicide?

On, I mean, Harikari, but it had another name, too, right? Sapuku. Yeah. Did we do that or did we just mention it? I'm sure we just mentioned it. Okay. Yeah. I think in the Japanese stragglers and probably the samurai and the revenge one.

Yeah. Boy. It's hard to keep track these days. Oh, yeah. It really, really is. This led to a 1938 Congress in the U.S. enacted the FDA Cosmetic Act, which said that, you know what? You need to test these drugs on animals, and that therein sort of started, at least

in the U.S., the official, like, decree that you can and should do this. Right. But it had been going on a long time before that. Right. Our buddy Galen, who we've talked about before. Well, even further back than Galen, if you look at the Greeks, at least as far back as about 500 B.C., the ancient Greeks were using animals for testing, poking around, figuring out how the human body works.

And there was this idea that there was an analogy between all animals, that humans shared a lot of the same physiology of all animals, and there was a great disagreement among the Greeks in particular about whether that was true, but it didn't stop guys like Aristotle and... Aristotritus. Yeah, and Hippocrates as well, from basically poking around inside live animals, which is where the term for animal testing came from, the other term is vivisection. Right.

Vivisection is cutting something open while it's still alive. Yeah, specifically an animal, right? Or is that... No, you can vivisect humans. Okay. Yeah. Is that what surgery is? It occurs after death.

Vivisection is cutting open... I think technically surgery would be, but the idea behind vivisection is that this is just for experimentation, usually. Yeah, actually. Not like, let me heal that organ right there. Right. Which, by the way, go back and listen to our human experimentation episode, that was a great one. I remember that one.

So flash forward a bit to 2nd Century Rome, where our friend Galen, who we just talked about him in a podcast. Our live stuff in UK and Ireland. That's right, which hopefully people will hear soon. Yes. He was a medical specialist, and he said, you know what, I'm going to do a demonstration in the public. I'm going to rent a hall.

Watch this. Yeah, basically. I'm going to get this pig. Watch this pig. And I'm going to prove that we are all a bundle of nerves by snipping certain nerves of this pig. You want to see him not squeal anymore? Watch me snip this nerve.

Right. And it was all planned, and this philosopher, he's a pretty popular guy. He had punch and cookies out. He was really excited for this day. Philosopher that was in attendance named Alexander Demacinus, one of those two. He said, you know what, this is BS, doesn't prove a thing, and in fact, none of these demonstrations prove anything, because that's a pig, and we're humans. Why are you bothering?

Right. Apparently, the Romans had adopted from the Greeks the idea that empirical evidence didn't really prove anything, even if you saw something, it doesn't mean it was true, which is a weird philosophy. I'd like to understand a little more. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that, but that's just like such a completely radically different paradigm from what we have now. The paradigm of science we're seeing is indeed believing that it requires empirical evidence.

Used to be the opposite, and that was Alexander's big objection, like, hey, man, you can cut that pig's nerve all day long, and sure, I saw it, and sure, it had that effect, but it doesn't prove anything. And Galen was like, I hate you, I hate that idea, I hate Aristotle, because Aristotle was apparently somebody who said, yeah, I've poked around in a pig or two in my time, and I've concluded that the heart and not the brain is the center, this idea that a nerve connected to the brain can control anything is hogwash, if you'll forgive the pun. Yeah, Aristotle was just a big dummy.

The dumbest of them all. So Galen did, in fact, say I'm leaving. He said, I'm taking my medical bag and I'm going home. And then everyone there was like, Bo, I really want to see this pig get cut apart. Come on. Please don't leave. So he said, OK, you guys, I'll do it. You twisted my arm.

Come back in, perform the experiment, the demonstration, and this was one of the first recorded examples of experimenting on animals for science. Yeah. So the ball was rolling. Yeah. And I don't know if Galen hadn't done it first, and he obviously hadn't done it first because he came a few hundred years after Aristotle who had done that, but if Aristotle hadn't done it, eventually somebody who was curious enough would have grabbed a dog or a chicken

or something and just cut it open and started looking at what was inside. Yeah. You know? For sure. Like it would have happened, but these are the people who were recorded doing it first. Go forward in time a bit to the late 19th century, and there was a microbiologist from Germany named Robert Koch. Koch?

And he got some anthrax, he got some blood from cows killed by anthrax, started looking at it under a microscope and said, you know what, something in there looks funny to me. That might be the anthrax. So let me take that and put it in a mouse and see what happens. The mouse died and he said, I'm on to something here. I'm pretty sure that was the anthrax. Yep. And it was a big deal.

It was a big deal. Again, using an animal to experiment in order to further human understanding and protect human health and life. That's right. Those are the biggies that people have used animals for. Yeah, and that was actually like medically let me try and cure a disease. Yeah, not like the early guys like, what is this do? What happens if I sever this?

Yeah, but it went on. Like my ancient Greek impression. The point I was trying to make, I guess, was later on in the 1950s, people started, and notably this Russian Dmitry Believ started using research on animals, not necessarily for curing diseases, but to study behavior. Right. Yeah. Yeah, we talked about them in our animal domestication episode.

Yeah. So he had the great idea for these cute little silver foxes. He's like, I might like one of those as a pet. Sure. I have a niece who would love one of those. Man, have you seen those fox videos? Yeah. They'd cry and walk around crying or calling or whatever.

Yeah, and they shake their little tail when you scratch their belly. I don't know if I've seen that one. Oh, it's very cute. They make sort of like a little purring, a little chirpy purr and wiggle their tail and wag their tail, and it's just like, oh man, you're the perfect combination of dog and cat. Yeah. Foxes are pretty cute.

Yeah. That's why we wanted to tame them. Well, that's exactly what he did too, and he thought, I know that domestication usually takes many, many, many years, but let me see if I can do it in like 20, 25 years. Right. And Chuck, speaking of behavioral studies, one of the most famous of all using animals was Pavlov's dogs, and I was researching it, and I had no idea. Pavlov didn't just like bring a bell for his dogs to make him salivate.

He surgically altered his dogs. He went and got their salivary glands and put them on the outside of their faces so that he could collect saliva samples more easily. Wow. And he created, remember that cow in Athens that had a porthole in it? Yep. Same thing for the dogs. Wow.

So that he could collect gastric juices, digestive juices for samples as well. So what you're saying is that he was a crazy madman. Yeah, I guess so. Wow. So I think the larger point here is that humans have been just grabbing animals or even breeding animals for the sole purpose of using them to understand things a little more, right? Yes. Whether it be cutting them open to see how anatomy works, to using them as for medical

experiments to determine that anthrax is actually blood-borne and can kill you, to behavioral studies, right? Yeah. And we should point out that at work, he was able to weed out, and by weed out, I mean kill, and by kill, we mean kill. And by kill, we mean probably break their necks. You think? Yeah, I think that's one of the big problems with talking about this stuff is so many euphemisms

are used. Yeah. Like you just demonstrated. Yeah. So what he did was he was able to weed out the foxes that weren't his tame, and eventually he ended up with a fox that was, by all accounts, domesticated. Yeah. A nice little pet.

He said, Dimitri, I love you. And it's not just animals that are cute that we can tame. Animals on what most people would say are roughly the lower end of the spectrum as far as life is concerned are very frequently used, like nematodes, fruit flies. They come into use largely because they have some similar processes, like if you're studying a very ancient process, or a very ancient part of the body, like insulin regulation, you're going to find it throughout the animal kingdom. It's going to be pretty widespread.

So the idea is if you can track insulin regulation in a fruit fly, you could conceivably extrapolate those findings onto a human, and a human's insulin regulation. And the advantage of a fruit fly or nematode is that they're really easy to breed, and they reproduce very quickly. There's a lot of them. So if you're like Dimitri Belayev, and you're studying foxes, it took him 25 years to go through 20 generations. It would take you roughly a month, I would guess, to go through about 20 generations of

fruit flies. So therefore, you can track mutations much more quickly, much more inexpensively. So the fruit flies, the nematodes, other, again, lesser life forms have been used extensively in medical testing as well, and they count. They qualify. It's a live organism that's being used for experimentation purposes. Yeah, and it kind of depends on what your aim is, what your goal is, to what animal you do use, because you can't just use any animal for anything.

And here's a fun fact. I did not know that the armadillo is an animal that can actually get Hansen's disease, a.k.a. leprosy. We knew that. We talked about it in the leprosy episode. I don't remember mentioning the armadillo. I am scared to death of armadillos now because of that. Really?

Oh, yeah. When I see it, I just look at them like leprosy. You don't hug them any longer? No. No, and you'll see them on the side of the road, hit by a car or something like that. Yeah, Texas. I always double-check. Well, here in Georgia, too.

Yeah, a little bit. I always check to make sure that my air recirculator is on when I pass them by, that the leprosy didn't waft into my car as I drove past the road tail. Wow. That I was damaged by the leprosy episode. Well they actually have the perfect body temperature to allow study on vaccines for leprosy. And speaking of, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just found out last night that koalas carry chlamydia and transmitted sexually and can die from it.

Oh, man. And they're actually partially endangered in some ways because they have chlamydia. Think about that next time you want to hug from that cute little critter. Right. You know? Oh, well they'll tear your face off, too. Should we take a little break here? Yeah.

All right. Let's take a break and we're going to come back and talk more about the different animals used and why. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Chuck, before we get back to it, I want to say this is, um, this, this episode and the

other one that's coming out Thursday. Oh yeah, there's a suite. Yeah. And they're kind of done in conjunction with these guys, um, Joe and Tim, who run a site called primersstories.com and, um, they do seasons. They're like animators, um, web dudes and it shows. They know what they're doing and they've basically taken, they'll take essays. I wrote an essay, then they take it and they break it up into chunks and they animate it.

Right. So as you're going, scrolling down, you're, you're reading, but you're also experiencing, um, the, the, the art, the animation that really kind of brings out the ideas of each one. It's really, really neat site. They, um, they contacted us after our San Francisco show last year, or no, early this year and, um, they said, Hey, do you want to do one of these? And I went and looked and I was amazed and said, yes, I totally do.

So you can go, um, check out the essay I wrote at primersstories.com slash sysk. And that one is the one we're, uh, releasing after this one. Correct. Well, it ties into both. It's, it's kind of this essay about, um, humans changing attitude toward animal rights. Yeah. But, uh, it was fun to do and they're cool. They're cool dudes for sure.

And I like what they're doing. Um, this is their fourth season. Nice. Fourth season. Nice plug. Nice work. Thanks. Uh, all right.

So we were talking about, um, using different animals and how, uh, if it's, you know, fruit fly or anemone toad, people don't get their hackles up too much. No, it's true. Um, if it is a rat or a mouse, people start getting their hackles up a little more. Yeah. Um, and mice are very famously used a lot, uh, 90% of our genes overlap with this, um, mouse, um, specifically this one, which is it moose or mousse genus mice, Mises genus mice.

They're the one that they use most often that, uh, has the 90% overlap, uh, and their cell structure and organ, uh, organization are basically the same as ours. So, um, they do a lot of testing with these mice as a result, uh, everything from, you know, disease and stuff to, uh, genetics, uh, to behavioral, they, they kind of run the gamut. Right. For mice. Yeah.

For sure. And from that point up, they tend to, I think, run the gamut. Some are a little more specific than others, like beagles apparently. Yeah. Uh, really come in handy when you're testing prostate cancer, um, or muscular dystrophy both. Yeah. Um, because they can contract those or develop those.

So they make great animal models. Yeah. These cats, because, uh, their sight and their hearing and their balance. I have to ask, how are you feeling right now? About this episode? Well, what do you mean? Like about the topic, uh, because you're holding it together really well. You mean I'm not crying yet?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I've, I've checked my emotions out of this one. Okay. I think this two part suite will get points across. Sure. I'm just relying on that. I'll get weepy later tonight.

Do you remember the secret of Nim? Yeah. Sure. I had forgotten what the secret was, or I don't think it ever dawned on me what the secret really was, and I went back and was reading about the, those were mice, right? They were rats. Rats. Yeah.

And the secret of Nim. Well, we probably shouldn't say. Would that be a spoiler? Yeah. I think so. It's like the spoiler. Like that's in the title. What if the secret of Nim was that Bruce Willis in the sixth sense was dead all along?

You know what I think was an even, oh wait, is that a spoiler? Yeah. I think it was. It was years ago at least. If you haven't seen the sixth sense by now, it's a TS for you. My favorite email. Go see the others though. A lot of people haven't seen the others that saw the sixth sense, the one with Nicole Kidman.

Oh yeah. That was good. Man, that was great. Very atmospheric moody film. That one and the orphanage. Yeah. Another good one. Yeah.

It's fantastic. I agree. I think the orphanage is maybe even the better of the two. Oh yeah? Yeah. So monkeys, primates, well, non-human primates, we should say. Nice. So the macaque monkey is used a lot because there's a lot of them and they're widely distributed

and have a robust population. So they've made a lot of advances into neuroscience thanks to the macaque monkey. And then there's some animals that'll just do because they contain flesh, like pigs and goats are used a lot in what's called live tissue trauma training, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's used to train battlefield medics in the military and the Coast Guard apparently. And the animals anesthetize deeply to surgical plane levels and shot or blown up or just weird stuff's done to it to stimulate a battlefield trauma so that a medic can do what it's called

live tissue trauma training. So they can save a life on the battlefield. Yeah, but then they euthanize the, they kill the animal afterward. But yes, on the battlefield, that's the whole, I mean, it's the whole point. And they're saying there's no substitute for that. Well, which is sort of what they scientists and doctors say, well, we'll get into all that. One thing we should mention though is that if you look for labels that say this was not

tested on animals, it's sort of like the whole free range chicken myth. It's not exactly what you think it is. Right. Well, free range chickens, it doesn't have to have like a porch attached to the structure. They don't even have to have access to it. You just have to have the door open so they can leave if they want. I got you. But you have people have images, I think, of these chickens running around the fields.

The idyllic countryside. Yeah, but they don't, they're in the barn where the food is and they kind of don't leave. But the doors there, so they're technically free range, unless something's changed when I worked in the chicken industry, those sad, that sad year or whatever it was. I would guess absolutely nothing's changed. Probably so. But if you look for labels that say cruelty free or not tested on animals, it may not mean what you think because technically there's no oversight on a label like that.

And it could mean that we did not, in the final product of this cosmetic, tested on animals. We didn't test this rouge, but all the raw ingredients that went into this from our suppliers were tested on animals. Or back in the 60s or 70s, they tested these same ingredients on animals and there's no need for us to test them again. So now we can say not tested on animals, even though these things were tested on animals years back. And actually China has changed things recently as the West was getting further and further

away. I think the EU banned imports of anything that had been tested on animals, cosmetic wise. And China has gone the opposite direction. It has mandated that anything imported into China, cosmetics wise, must have been tested on animals. So kind of reset things here in the West because there's a lot of Western companies like, I want in on that Chinese market and China saying, well, you got to test your, like the whole thing on animals before it comes in here.

Right. Interesting. So here's the deal. Over the 20th century, we've made a lot of medical advances, life expectancy, this kind of a neat stat, has gone up about three months per year in the 20th century, largely due to stuff like this, testing for disease. Well, yeah, people who are advocates of animal testing say that would not have happened. Maybe at all, had we not used animals, right?

And life expectancy was extended three months a year from I think like 1840 to 2006 or something like that. That's nuts. Every year. And that was advanced by finding things like antibiotics and vaccines and all of the things that not just extend the human life, but make the extended years more enjoyable as well, more healthy. And that's a huge rallying cry for people who point to animal testing and say, this

is necessary and has to continue. And actually, there is a 2011 poll of biomedical researchers by Nature, which is no slouch of a scientific journal, and they found that 90% agreed with the sentence, use of animals in research is essential. Right. That's 2011. So that's not, that sentiment isn't going anywhere. No, I think that's probably pretty much accurate today.

On the other side of the coin, you have animal rights activists, and even if you're not an activist, just your average Joe on the street or Jane might say, you know what? This is unethical, it does a lot of harm, it's wasteful, and there are better ways to do it. In fact, some people say it's not even doing the job that it should be doing. For instance, they can cure cancer and mice, and we have been able to do this for a while. Cure it in humans of the 85 HIV AIDS vaccines that were tested successfully on primates. They don't work on humans.

And one of them may have even made humans more susceptible to it. Yeah. So it's, you know, there's two very strong sides to this argument. The FDA has said that nine-tenths of all drugs and development don't work in humans after they worked in animals because you just can't tell. Right, and actually, I looked that up, it's a little bit of a fallacy. It's more like 94% fail in clinical trials, but that's all pre-clinical trials. So not just animal testing, but also non-animal testing, where it passed the first stages

when it made it to clinical trials, 94% of all drugs failed to work or actually harmed humans. There's another side of the coin though, too, Chuck. How many sides are on this coin? It's like one of those hundred-sided die that you see in D&D but never know how to use. There are probably a lot of drugs out there that harmed animals and were shelved right then, didn't make it into clinical trials because the animals were harmed, that may not have harmed humans and actually could have cured things.

So there's people saying, no, we need to be testing on humans because we're using this for humans. That's what some, I guess, protestors against animal testing would say. And then another thing that I saw is that you tend to think like, okay, well, it's advancing science so I can't really get in the way of that. But there are, one of the critiques of that argument is not all the science is good at being done. There's a lot of animal lives, if you agree that animal lives are valuable but that using

an animal life to advance scientific understanding to protect human health and life is worthy, it's a worthy use of an animal, then you would also probably agree with the idea that wasting the animal's life in scientific testing is unforgivable, right? So there was a survey in 2009 in PLOS-1, Proceedings of the Library of Science-1, the journal of 271 animal studies that found that 41% failed to even state a hypothesis or objective to the test, 30% failed to describe the statistic methods used in the study, 87% didn't randomize, 86% didn't use blinding, and those are basic scientific efforts that you have to make in any experiment, right?

Those are very basic, which means that those things were wasted, which means those animals' lives were wasted, and the suggestion is that a lot of publicly funded science is just not very good science and it's wasting the lives of the animals involved. Well, that's sad. I'm starting to get emotional. Okay. All right, let's take a break then, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about our old buddy Charles D. Chuck D. Darwin.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

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on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

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Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. You know, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so I teased everybody with Charles Darwin. Oh, is that who you're talking about? Which is what I do every Halloween.

I dress up as Charles Darwin and tease the local teens. Oh, what are you going to dress up as for our show in DC on October 29th? I don't know, but I'm glad you mentioned that because we're doing a show at the Lincoln Theater and we're turning it into a Halloween ball. It's a Halloween bash, not even a ball. It's a rung above the ball. Including a reading of a Halloween story like we do just for their ears only. Yeah, plus we'll be dressed up.

We're encouraging everyone who comes to be dressed up. Maybe I'll go with Charles Darwin. And as far as I know, it's an all-ages show. But it could get spooky and our shows do get a little blue. So just FYI, you've been warned. So Charles Darwin, who I may dress up as. I'm pretty sure I know what I'm going as. I'd rather not reveal it at the time.

He was kind of in on this game a long time ago and he loved animals. But he also wanted to study animals. But he also wanted to treat them humanely while he studied animals. Sounds like Charles Darwin kind of approach. Yes. So in 1874 there was like people were actually starting to get in trouble for some of these things. In 1874, these scientists were actually put on trial for torturing dogs because they wanted

to see how absinthe and alcohol affected their nervous system. So they cut them open and exposed them to these liquids. They just doused them in is what I'm taking from it. I have no idea. I guess so. They were actually acquitted. But it sort of brought things into the front of everyone's minds. And Darwin, people were saying, let's not do this at all.

And Darwin stepped in and said, he was a little more moderate and said, you know what? Let's craft a bill here in the United Kingdom where you can do this. But do it humanely and that resulted in the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. Yeah. It was pretty great. It was advancement. It was. But the UK actually has long led the way in the West for animal rights.

Even before that, as we'll see, they were trying to protect animals, as we'll see in the next episode. That's right. And then a little later in 1954, the University's Federation of Animal Welfare said, let's get these two dudes, a zoologist and a microbiologist, Russell and Birch, and just do a lot of research guys and come back with some findings that we can use. And boy, did they. Yeah.

They were like, there's a lot better that we can do in protecting animals. Scientists are typically dumb and can only remember things through alliteration. So these guys came up with the three R's, something that could be put on a PSA poster. The three R's, I'm just teasing about the scientist thing, are replacement, reduction and refinement. Right? So your first goal is to find a replacement of the animal. Is there any alternative to the animal in this experiment?

Yeah. Like an ascension animal with a worm, perhaps, instead of a mouse. Right. Or if you can find a willing robot that fits the bill. The second one's reduction. You want to reduce the number of animals used to the absolute minimum. Yeah. You don't want to have any spare orangutans hanging around.

You want to know how many you're going to use, and those are the ones that you can kill. Correct. And then finally, refine, which means, and this is, you know, sort of the opposite of what you were talking about with those awful stats that you said. Right. Like, let's refine this and at least get your technique down so well that the suffering is minimized to its bare minimum as well. The waste is reduced.

Yeah. Yeah. And that was 1959 that Russell and Birch released the 3Rs. This was 2009 that that one study I cited was conducted 50 years later. So PETA, you know, the people for the ethical treatment of animals, we've talked about them quite a bit on the show. They are down with the 3Rs, of course. But they say, you know what, that's not enough though.

We have a lot of studies that show that there are way better ways of doing things these days than using animals with the computer modeling that we have now and software and humans. Yeah. And they figured out techniques using stem cells to grow organs or organ cells or like say skin cells in vitro and then exposing them to the chemicals you want to test. And then not only will you have your reaction or non-reaction, you'll also have it with like a human cells. So it's not like, oh, it messed this rabbit's face up pretty bad.

Well, we'll just assume that it will mess up a human skin as well. It's, no, this stuff really burned through that human skin tissue that we synthesized. So now we know for sure not to give it to humans. Right. So there's something called, because a big objection to that is, well, it's a group of skin cells in vitro that doesn't really replicate these really intricate interplays that make up organs and systems of organs. And there's a company out called, I don't remember what they're called, but their invention

is organ on a chip. Oh, wow. It's amazing, dude. I watched this video about it last night. Like on a tortilla chip? I wish. It's the only way it could be better if you could eat it afterward. It'd be pretty messed up if you did.

So it's like a USB stick size module. That's the word I'm going with, it's transparent. And say the lung on a chip has some branching stuff. And inside there is a layer of lung cells and that replicate and simulate a human lung. So you have human lung cells growing and arranged in the way that they would in the human lung. And then this device allows you to pass air over the top and blood over the top and introduce bacteria and introduce white blood cells and study what they do. So you're replicating the function of a human lung on this little thing.

Which is all a simulation. It is, but it's a real simulation. It's using real lung cells and they're functioning like a lung normally would. Except you don't have to say here, inhale this, we'll just pass this antibiotic across the lung cells and it'll treat it like the human lung would. It's amazing. And then yeah, if you could eat it afterward, eat the human lung cells with some guacamole, you'd be like, the circle of life is complete.

Well that's sort of one of the big points though that PETA and a lot of organizations use is that we're so advanced now with our computer modeling and these simulations that they're actually, they are better ways than like it's sort of archaic to experiment on an animal. Like these are not only cruelty free, but it's smarter and better. Right. That's the argument they make. Yeah.

And I mean the statistics cut both ways. Like if you look at PETA stats, they're like animal models are predictive in this dismal range for human outcomes. And then the people who are in favor of animal testing say, well, these computer models are actually the ones that have dismal results. Right. So both sides, I guess it's just too new maybe, it's unproven. But there does seem to be a movement afoot in biomedicine to replace as much as possible

computer models with or animals with computer models. Yeah. Some of the other things that animal rights groups lobby for are things like, well, how about you just do like CT scans or MRIs, you're actually harming the animal or this thing called micro dosing where you actually give humans just very, very small doses of these medicines that won't be enough to hurt them if things don't work out. But you could tell if it's going to be effective or not. Yeah.

It still produces that reaction on a molecular level. It's just not going to have a system-wide toxic effect on it. Yeah. That's pretty neat. Yeah. And there's some change, but at the same time there's also some digging in on both sides as well. For example, with that live tissue trauma training, there's a movement to replace any

live animal with a dummy or a mannequin or something like that. And the people who are proponents of using animals in live tissue trauma training say, man, there's something that can happen to a battlefield medic during combat and that's called freezing. When they're presented with a human being with a major trauma, they can just sit there and freeze and freak out because this is the first time they've been exposed to it. One of the aspects of blowing the leg off of a pig is that this person's having to work on a pig.

And yeah, it's a pig, but it's a live pig. Right. It's not a recessa ante. Right, exactly. And maybe they made the person care for the pig for like a week first so that it has even more. Oh, wow. Well, I just made that up.

But you could see how that would be tough to replace. Sure. That's a tough one to argue with. But I think ultimately the question is raised, Chuck, and this is what we're going to address in the next episode is probably the largest question of all in is, do humans have or have humans ever had the right to use animals for our own means? Right. And we'll talk about that one on the next episode.

Boy, that's a nice cliffhanger. I think so too. Well done. Do we have listener mail this one? Yeah. And you know what? It's a two-part listener mail. Awesome.

That has its own cliffhanger. Man. All right. Well, let's get to it. So if you want to know more about animal testing, you can type that word in the search part, howstuffworks.com, and it will bring up this excellent article. And since I said search bar, it's time for part one of listener mail. That's right.

This one was so robust that it's an unprecedented two-parter from Yvonne, not Ivan. Well, you grew up to be a good man? I hope so. No, that's Yvonne. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, the L's silent. Um, and those weren't the right words anyway, but it's adorable.

All right. Here we go. First off, guys, got to say you're not only my favorite podcast, but you're also my 10-year-old son's favorite podcast. Listen to every episode at least twice. How about that? And my son's also a big fan of your TV show and the animated shorts. Boy, they're in deep.

Wow. However, my beautiful fiance is not. In fact, there have been times when we'll be sitting next to her, and she's reading a book, and I'll have my headphones listening to the podcast so I don't disturb her. And I'll burst out laughing like a crazy person in her words. This quote, crazy, end quote behavior of mine, is directly related to listening to you two. So thanks for that. Mm-hmm.

Anyway, one of the reasons I write is to call your attention. You said, on the Sugar at Powers of Earth podcast in 2014, Chuck says, one day we're going to re-record a show and not realize it, and we're going to hear about it. Well, you managed to do it. You probably heard from someone else by now, but you have covered the topic of customs twice. Yep. The most recent one in August 2016.

The previous one in September of 2010, don't get me wrong, both were great, but I honestly think that both of you legitimately forgot. I was waiting for either of you to acknowledge it the second time, and that never came. And Yvonne, you are right on the money, pal. It's true. Josh emailed me and said, hey, buddy, guess what? We've done this. It finally happened.

Yeah. We released it, and at first I was like, shoot. But then I thought, you know what? We got a nice bit of trivia now. Mm-hmm. It was bound to happen, and now people have, it's almost like an Easter egg. Right. That listeners and fans can say, like, you know which one they did twice?

You're a true fan, you know. You know, it's weird, though. At no point during the research and recording of the customs episode was I like, this sounds really familiar. Or did we talk about this? Nothing. No point whatsoever. Nope.

So that might make the first customs episode the least memorable episode we've ever done. Perhaps. So part two you can look for in the second part of this suite coming out from Yvonne, wherein he made a list of all of our band names over the years, and he also made a list of your puns. I am not punny. I take issue with that. I'll talk about it in the next episode.

Great. That's a great setup. If you want to get in touch with us, like, Yvonne? Yvonne. Yvonne. And what is his son's name, did he say? He didn't say, but I'm Yvonne and son. Yeah.

He's a general home. That's right. You can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast or hang out with me at JoshumClark. You can hang out with us on Facebook at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And check out Chuck at Charles W. Chuck Bryant and me at Super Josh Clark, both on Facebook. We're on Instagram. We're on social media that hasn't even been invented yet. Yeah.

Plus you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.