| Abstract: | Discusses the use of experimental animals, particularly rats, in research exploring the effectiveness of compounds such as painkillers. The author describes an experiment testing the effectiveness of a pain killer, Pentazockine. In past clinical trials, if the drug failed to produce the desired analgesic effect with the rats, further experimentation was terminated. In one particular instance, the investigators in a clinical study chose to ignore past failure of the drug on rats and tested the effect of the drug with humans--and it worked. The implications of these unexpected results on further experimentation with rats is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
