We carry decades experimenting with animals. Despite the Ethical issueand that we see more and more vegan products that imply that there has been no experimentation in animals, until Large technological ones resort to this method. And in 1995, NASA made one of the more curious experiments To measure the drug toxicity.
And they did it drugs.
Measuring toxicity. It is not that someone woke up one day and wondered what would happen if we die LSD to spiders. Or well, exactly that is what happened, but for a good reason and not for fun. In 1948, the researcher Peter N. Witt He wanted to help his colleague HM Peters, a zoologist who wanted to modify the schedule in which his laboratory spiders began to weave the nets.
To do this, he administered substances such as LSD, Mescalina (hallucinogen), amphetamines, caffeine and strychnine (stimulating such as cocaine) To the arthropods and discovered something: the schedule did not change the least, but the patterns of the cobwebs. Depending on the drug Administered, the pattern changed, and that revelation served as an economic model to prove the neurological impact of drugs and toxic on living systems.
Why spiders? The problem is that the nervous system of arthropods is different from ours, so it is useless to draw conclusions when we want to try effects on humans, but it is interesting to know how these psychoactive substances influence their organism. In 1995, NASA, inspired by Witt’s experiment, chose spiders for new research, but also did it for An ethical issue.
They wanted to measure the toxic effect of different compounds, but without resorting to mammals or “higher organisms.” They needed a sensitive and reliable organism, but not controversial. In addition, spiders are perfect because their cobwebs follow fixed and instinctive patterns that, as Witt already demonstrated, was extremely sensitive to chemical alterations.
The experiment. Baptized as “Using Spider-Web Patterns to Determine Toxicity“, he experiment It consisted of exposing different European garden spiders to different drugs. To do this, they dissolved a certain amount of drugs in sugary water and administered it directly to the spider through the mouth or by means of flies previously fed with the solution.
Once administered, they let each spider weave their air and, later, photographed the web that had been fabric, comparing that creation with cobwebs photographs that those same spiders had made before applying the drug.
If you get drugs, don’t tile. The results They speak for themselves:
In addition, the methodology was stricter than the one carried out by Witt half a century earlier when using statistical tools to measure changes in the number of complete sides of the ‘cells’ of each web and the general regularity of the design. In other words: high doses of caffeine, for example, and because it is the one that produces the most chaotic result, generated disorganized and incomplete patterns. Until the lowest doses they already allowed irregularities to be observed in the web that allowed researchers to correlate toxicity with tissue morphology.
Consequences. We must not be a genius for this, but the greater the toxicity, the more incomplete and chaotic the web was. But the most important thing is that this thorough methodology of NASA converted the experiment In an alternative to traditional toxicity tests, especially in a scenario that, as we said, had less tolerance to tests with other types of animals. They were biological evidence, yes, and chemicals were also administered to living beings, but in a little invasive way and without losing rigor.
And, precisely, the visibility of this work helped the debate on animal ethics to increase even more, evidencing that alternative, but economic methods could be used, with rigorous and replicable results, being more ethical than other models that were made -and they continue to do.
Like Witt’s, NASA’s experiment provided very valuable information, but not applicable to humansdue to the differences between the nervous system of a human and other animals … and that of arthropods. For example, caffeine causes total chaos in spiders, but in humans, although It is not good if we want to make certain decisionsIt does not produce the same effects.
Image | Das Morton
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