The 21st Century Scientific Credo for Animal Researchers
"Allow me to select the species of mammal. Tell me what you want me to prove, in either direction, for or against. Give me enough money and I'll bend over to become your bitch." If there is an animal species willing to hold still while scientists prod and poke and slice and dice, science can demonstrate just about anything regarding that horrible invader in a pod called soy. Cause thyroid tumors? Damned right. Does aspirin cause Cooties? Without any doubt. Will broccoli cause diabetes, heart attacks, loss of vision and hiccups? Better believe it. Hic!
Thank goodness for animal research. Where would we be without it?
Hundreds of years ago, Jonathan Swift wrote (in Gulliver's Travels) about an island of research scientists living atop a cloud that floated above the earth's surface. Swift's description of research studies appears as absurd to today's reader as present-day research will appear to 22nd century philosophers, sociologists, and scientists.
Can soy and broccoli consumption cause thyroid dysfunction? Absolutely. Thyroid cancer? Every time, you can take that to the bank, particularly if you are an unethical scientist willing to bend the rules of logic and morality, and then, only if your subjects are genetically engineered albino male transgenic mice, created to naturally have thyroid cancer by the insertion of, and re-combination of human and rodent genetic material.
Any human using logic and reason must reject all rodent research. Half of the cancers that rats get, mice do not get. Half of the cancers mice get, rats do not get. To accept applied data from one rodent species to humans, when one rodent species cannot fairly be applied to another rodent is one of the key fatal flaws of animal studies. Animal research is a betrayal to both humans (who rely upon such data) and animals (who needlessly die in pain). One example of the betrayals is what was learned from polio research during the 1940s. The Polio vaccine would have been approved for use 15 years earlier, had not all of the test subjects (chimpanzees) died.
Rats and mice are both fed standard animal feeds. When I was a young researcher, we used Purina rat chow. Unfortunately (for me at the time), the rat chow was made from alfalfa, a substance high in phytoestrogens. As my work was performed in the field of neuroendocrinology and mammalian sexual behavior, the feeding of phytoestrogens to rodents presented an extraneous variable which compromised and negated my own work.
In thyroid cancer/soy studies, all of the test animals are given a standard animal feed that is rich in soy, even the control group subjects are fed soy-based feed. That factor alone should negate such biased studies during the process of peer review prior to publication.
In the future, when asked to comment upon a scientific study, I may very well throw my hands up into the air and refer you to today's column. Digging for truths often unearths treasures accompanied by curses.
So, is research needed? Of course it is, but unless that research has been performed upon humans, it's worthless.