Harming mice will not treat human speech disorders

Researchers at Cornell University are conducting experiments involving excruciating electric shocks on sentient mice, purportedly to study brain pathways of human speech.

Tell Cornell University to immediately end these cruel and senseless experiments and replace them with superior, human-relevant methods.

Researchers at Cornell University are conducting experiments involving excruciating electric shocks on sentient mice, purportedly to study brain pathways of human speech.

Tell Cornell University to immediately end these cruel and senseless experiments and replace them with superior, human-relevant methods.

Tell Cornell University to stop cruel experiments on mice!

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I was disgusted to learn about experiments conducted at Cornell University psychology department that inflict suffering on defenseless mice, purportedly to study brain pathways of human speech.

These cruel experiments involve giving mice excruciating electric shocks to make them cry out in distress along with painful injections directly into the brain to control gene expression. The research revealed that mice exhibit different brain pathways for sounds of distress in contrast to their normal communications.

While not the intent of the research, this knowledge enhances the understanding that mice are highly sentient beings, capable of nuanced communication. As such, it bolsters ethical arguments against using them in cruel and useless experiments that show miniscule promise for impacting human health.

Increasingly, scientists are reducing reliance on animal experiments, for both ethical and scientific reasons. A burgeoning amount of evidence has shown that animal research fails to correlate with human biology at least 90% of the time. This has caused the global pharmaceutical industry to turn to modern, human-relevant methods to improve drug development. There is no reason to believe that the neural pathways of speech, studied in the Cornell research, will behave differently.

Important and useful studies on processing of speech and sound in the human brain are being carried out on human volunteers using techniques like enhanced MRI and magnetoencephalography. Single neuron recording studies have been conducted using volunteers undergoing brain surgery for medical purposes and have revealed innovations in how the human brain processes speech. Researchers have also trained artificial neural networks to behave like the human brain and observed the neural processes involved in language recognition.

It’s nonsense to think that shocking mice and probing their brains will ever lead to actual treatments or cures for human speech disorders. The brain circuits controlling speech in humans compared to animals are vastly different.

Please end these curiosity-driven, lethal experiments on sentient mice and engage in human-relevant research that will really help people with speech disorders.

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