Reading report

Name: Cristina Soledad Guzmán
Date: September 5
Title: Humane league
Source: www.economist.com/index Date of publication: Aug 30th 2007

Vocabulary

Dubious: 1. Fraught with uncertainty; undecided. 2. Arousing doubt; questionable.
Rodent: Any of an order of mammals, such as a mouse, rat, squirrel, or beaver, with large incisors adapted for gnawing or nibbling.
Rove: To wander about at random; roam.
Mandatory: 1. Required or obligatory. 2. Of or containing a mandate.
Spot: 4. To mark or become marked with spots. 5. To locate precisely. 6. To detect or discern, especially visually.
Withdrawn: 1. Retiring; shy. 2. Emotionally unresponsive.
Outweigh: 1. To weigh more than. 2. To be more significant than.
Pursue: 1. To follow so as to overtake or capture. 2. To strive to accomplish. 3. To proceed along the course of; follow: pursue a course. 4. To be engaged in.
Batch: 1. An amount prepared or produced at one time. 2. A group of persons or things. 3. Computer Science. A set of data to be processed in a single program run.
Cute: 1. Delightfully pretty or dainty. 2. Clever.
Subtle: 1. a. So slight as to be difficult to detect. b. Not obvious; abstruse. 2. Able to make fine distinctions: a subtle mind. 3. a. Skillful; clever. b. Crafty.
Creep: 1. To move with the body close to the ground. 2. To move stealthily or slowly.
Straightforward: 3. In a direct or frank manner.
Raw: b. Not subjected to adjustment, treatment, or analysis
Enhance: 1. To make greater, as in value, reputation, or usefulness.

Main ideas

¨ Academic centres suppoting alternatives to animal testing have emerged in China and America in recent years.
¨ Animal testing is expensive and can be of dubious scientific value.
¨ The number of animals used in experiments has fallen by half in the past 30 years, and most of those employed today are rodents.
¨ A new law in chemical subtances regulation will increase about 4 million toxicology experiments on animals.
¨ This extra testing will also result in the withdrawal of a lot of chemicals that are in fact safe.
¨ Experimental animals may react badly to things that would not harm a human and viceversa, as a result false positives could outweigh false negatives 75 times ever.
¨ Genetic engineering might offer one way round this sort of problem.
¨ Chineese ingeneers are changing monkeys for genetically altered mice in the testing of a vaccine for the polio virus.
¨ To ensure only that each new made vaccine is identical to the culture from which it is derived would reduce the number of animals required.
¨ Sharing data freely between the national agencies would help.


Personal reaction

This article is about animal testing and exposes the pro and cons of this practice.
I think that animal testing should be reduced because sooner or later many of the animals that are used will be extincted. As more products are invented or improved more animals will be needed to test them.
No matter they are small rodents or monkeys, scientists should not forget that they also suffer and that there are many chemicals and other products to which they react in a completely different way than humans do.
It is also true that if it wasn`t for animals these testings would be done with humans, so that I support animal testing but I also think that it should be reduced as much as possible.