Animal experimentation on dogs leads to fluorescent puppies

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . June 6, 2009 . 5:50PM

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a Poky Little Puppy. This was a very mischievous puppy and he couldn’t seem to stay in his yard. Every day, his mother would call for him and tell him that dinner was ready and that he needed to come in, and every day, that little puppy would be out wandering the world. He would dawdle into the house whenever his poky little legs felt like it and would be very, very sad that he was so slow to come home because his little tummy would rumble. There’s a moral to that story. But that’s not this story.

In this story, the poky little puppy wandered to another land, far, far away. A place where puppies aren’t safe. A place called South Korea. And in this place, the Poky little puppy had his DNA cloned and merged with genes similar to those of a sea anemone, which is an underwater creature. This was done by a scientist who said that he was was doing it to produce a puppy that, because of a long lifespan, might help cure human illness. However, what this merging did was TURN THE PUPPY INTO A GLOWSTICK!!!!

For comparison: The glowstick

The puppy:

Byeong-Chun Lee, the South Korean researcher, is not the first to make animals glow. The question here is why? What is the purpose of making them light up like a Christmas tree? Besides wasting money and time on other efforts, you know like those pesky things such as cancer and AIDS. Instead, some of our top researchers are focusing on making animals glow. It can’t be good for the animals and I fail to see how it’s worth our time and money.

Please, enlighten me?

Use of human cadavers as crash test dummies?

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . May 29, 2009 . 1:56PM

Back in the 1990s there was a song by a group called The Crash Test Dummies and the main lyrics were “mmm mmm mmm mm mmm mmm mmm,” which was sung in a monotone voice. I kind of feel that way after watching a live link video that discusses how human cadavers that were donated to science are used in many ways that the public is unaware. In this case, they are being used to develop safer vehicles, which I think is great, but the family is not notified that their body will be abused, which seems unethical to me, in many ways. Take a look at the video and we can talk more about this.

The controversy over the practice is that the bodies, once turned over to science, have no guarantees as to what type of “science” they will be used to test. Many people make the assumption that the body will go towards the furthering of medical students education, some kind of cancer/terminal illness research or something that the deem equally changing for all of humanity. The idea that their loved one could end up further broken due to testing car standards has people appalled and angry.

My opposition to this stems from all of those ideas as well as the idea of desecration of a person once they are gone. We have other means of testing these vehicles and we use them. If a person knows that their body is going to this purpose, I believe that is one idea that is fine. If they have no idea that they will be further used to this extent, it opens a whole other can of worms.

What are your thoughts? If this was your loved one and you had donated their body to science, would you be ok with the practice?