An advantage of animal testing and one of its counterpoints.

So I think I will revise my research topic even further as I believe that my research topic is more of a statement that I’m trying to prove and at this point, I’m not supposed to prove anything, but define a question and committing myself to finding the answer.  By making a statement and setting out to prove it, I compromise my objectivity.  

At any rate, I have found an interesting book called “Novel Systems For The Study Of Human Disease: From Basic Research To Application” while searching through the UB Library database.  Although I haven’t had time to examine all the chapters yet, chapter pages forty-nine through sixty-nine give detailed descriptions of how lab rats are manipulated on the genetic level to create a genetically homogenous test subject population.  The book also explains within these pages how working with a genetically homogenous population allows researchers to isolate specific genes.  The reason researchers would want to isolate genes is to determine if health problems such as cancer or obesity are genetic or environmental.  If these health problems can be determine to be genetic, researchers can experiment with gene modification to either introduce new genes that combat the harmful ones, or eliminate the harmful ones altogether.   A counterpoint to this methodology as pointed out by the article by Ian Roberts, is that this will not directly produce some kind of gene therapy for humans since animal test subjects and humans are biologically different on almost every level, however, it provides us with a scientific model with which finding some kind of gene modifier that IS compatible with humans DNA.