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Synthetic Skin Could Replace Animal Subjects'
fangmcgee writes "Synthetic skins are now good enough to mimic animal skins in lab tests, according to research that will appear in the June 5 issue of the Journal of Applied Polymer Science. Bharat Bhushan, a professor at Ohio State University and Wei Tang, an engineer at China University of Mining and Technology used atomic force microscopes to observe the responses of pseudo and rat skins to a generic skin cream. The result? Even at a scale of 100 nanometers — or one-thousandth the width of a human hair — all the samples
reacted in a similar fashion."
How does the new skin taste after being fried in lard and sprinkled with salt and spices? Have they come up with synthetic beer yet?
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
As a synthetic human, I am very disturbed by your headline.
The headline is somewhat misleading, it should say: "Synthetic Skin Could Replace Animal Subjects IN COSMETICS TESTING, SPECIFICALLY DERMATOLOGICAL PRODUCTS". For medical applications we are very far from such a breakthrough, owing mostly to the immense complexity of large biological systems, such as a living animal or human being. For the vast majority of animal testing, this might at best result in a reduced need for small pieces of skin tissue for basic research in laboratory settings, which is hardly the problem anyway.
"Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand..." - James Randi
.. who works with primates... I do so because I'm convinced there is no other way of collecting data that is important to our health and understanding about how our minds work. Food.. there are other sources.. but neuronal data, we're limited. I'm a big fan of the Reduce, Refine, and Replace idea, and if this is confirmed it's a big step, for 2 R's, and that's exciting.
Heh, I always thought the obvious solution was to test on those most opposed to animal testing. Rather than protest, threaten, intimidate, cause destruction and generally be a major pest, they should volunteer themselves in place of the animals. After all, they care so much that they are willing to risk their lives, the skin trials would be nothing in comparison. It's a win/win situation!
The animals don't get tested on, the labs get real human skin to test on (rather than using animal skin as an approximation), and the protesters succeed in their goal, with the added benefit of aiding the rest of humanity.