Becoming too attached will ruin the experiment. Science is done under controlled conditions with as much uncertainty and randomness removed as possible. It's not ideal but we don't have any better options unless you want to do mass sacrifice of animals at scale and use Monte Carlo to derive results.
A lot of the research is entirely unnecessary. We know cadmium is biologically unnecessary. While it is important to quantify safe doses to understand the impact of pollution, getting the precise LD50 of it across various species does little to improve health outcomes.
We already know that dosages above 10 micrograms/kg of body weight is carcinogenic and should be avoided, so establishing where in the 100,000-300,000 microgram/kg range the LD50 resides does nothing for us.
The best LD50 story I've heard was an Agriculture Canada scientist working on biocontrols for pests (think natural pathogenic organisms like fungi or bacteria to control weeds instead of chemical pesticide). Policy and commercialization required an LD50 for a bacterium they were working with. It is nontoxic; the lab calculated the volume of bacterial solution at commercial application strength that it would take for a rat to drown (but obviously did not harm any animals). Sometimes regulatory compliance needs creativity.
Unfortunate that not all labs are able to work similarly, especially as you say for doses where we already know harmful levels and LD50 is a bureaucratic requirement or an easy paper.
I'm already imagining the vapid "400x the LD50" comments that the usual scumbags will be typing when someone somewhere falls into a tank of it and drowns...
>It's not ideal but we don't have any better options
as someone else noted, a lot of this is done as a form of grant-securing, and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis.
a 'better option' would be the removal of such political and economical games from facilities that are supposed to be doing research; this reduces the suffering and death without much loss to discovery and progress.
the trick being that we, as humans in this world, have little hope of removing extraneous politics from where they do not belong.
but I just care to point out that we're nowhere-near optimal w.r.t. how we operate in the research sector. it can be better.
>and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis.
The thing is, you can't just start and stop many kinds of animal research. For certain models, there needs to be ongoing maintenance of a breeding population so that that model is available for researchers when they need it for an experiment.
Researchers spend decades making a particular knockout line, and you can't just stick it into a freezer for a rainy day. It has to be maintained or it will no longer exist.
Nobody is getting rich off grants. Then maintenance is a necessity if research gains are to be made on these difficult diseases.
This. The maintenance of many experimental populations is because you can't "spin up and spin down" animals like you can an EC2 instance. Perhaps you need functional colonies. Or specific lines of animals, etc.
Science isn't done via single experiments - it's done by chains of them.
University administrators and the pharma companies that leverage the "research" to push to market marginal improvement drugs would like to have a word.
