A common theme among many science fiction media is the aspect of science vs. ethics. To get right to the point, is there, and/or should there be, a line between scientific advancement and ethics? For instance, many scientific and medical advancements throughout history have come at a horrible price, subjecting innocent people (and animals) to brutal scientific tests. So, do you think that the price can sometimes be too high for scientific advancement? If finding a cure for Hepatitis C required exposing hundreds of unknowing people to potentially harmful and debilitating chemicals, would you? Or can the medical community survive on "volunteers"?
Volunteers and animal vivisection are the methods at our disposal atm. Hopefully genetic engineering can soon provide us with better testing objects -- braindead clones or something along those lines. Vivisection on non-consenting human beings should be considered entirely out of the question in any anthropocentric society, under any circumstances I can come to think of.
I will say as Jacque Fresco. Progress and technologies which are not used to elevate human beings to their highest possible potential are useless. On another note, I will say that we today have the choice to use genetically produced human organs for testing. They will give more accurate results than animal testing.
I agree with sentinel, if we could create human clones that have no cognitive capacity, it would essentially be an extremely advanced dummy and I don't see a problem with experimenting on that. Without a mind or the ability to feel pain, it's just a bag of organs and bones.
having those braindead clones would be extremely useful but i doubt we could produce them on the scale required for a long time. until then we would still have to resort to animal testing and the only real objection to that would be that those animals are not perfect replacements. but i suspect that the ethics question would be more on a scale of forced human testing. ofcourse such a thing is unforgivable.
It's not obvious to me that human clones don't deserve the same ethical considerations human beings do. Even if they are brain-dead, we squirm at going about experimenting on comatose patients. Moreover, I think "brain dead" could be part of the problem. The brain plays an important, albeit largely unconscious, role in regulating operations in the body. We can't reasonably have a "mammalian body" that operates like yours or mine without an (at least partially) functioning brain. A third promising option, still in its infancy, is computer simulation. We have fairly decent mathematical models describing things like the circulatory system under a wide range of environmental conditions. My guess is that pretty soon, computational methods will allow us to better articulate the map between non-human mammals and human responses to treatment. These "bottom-up" models will allow investigators to simulate the response of a human being to a treatment. They will also allow investigators with clear, quantifiable predictions that could be tested piecemeal or whole.
