Animal Testing x Birth Control

It's too bad that the birth control group was missing their history person. The pill has an interesting history. If any of you are interested, PBS made a film cleverly titled "The Pill" which can be found at Walter Library. The official website for the film is here. Check it out.

As for the 2x2, I'd like to direct my attention to animal testing and birth control. These two presentations were of particular interest to me because these are two big black boxes that I see and hear about daily.

What I found most interesting about the animal testing presentation was the statistics. As some people already pointed out, the numbers seemed a little strange. I don't know where the group got these numbers, but I can imagine that it would be very difficult to find completely accurate numbers (honestly, I doubt that they even exist). As far as the general public's knowledge animal testing goes, I think that researchers tend to want to create a black box. Not because they don't want anyone to know what they're doing (one of their main goals is to get published), rather they just don't care much if people outside of the scientific community are aware of details of their work. It's the idea that all the general public needs to know is the outcome and how it affects them, plus the less the animal rights activists know, the better. I wish that the group presenting had some statistics that were focused on the U. I think we're much more surrounded by animal testing than many students realize. For example, I was once in class with someone who was reading a Daily article about a recent study performed using animals at the U who stated "they must have done that off campus or in St. Paul or something, we don't have animals here"–little did she know, the entire basement of the building we were sitting in is filled with mice caged in little plastic boxes. Of course, researchers don't want to publicize their locations seeing as they already receive plenty of threats but it was interesting to me that there are students majoring in "hard sciences" that are unaware of all of the animals in labs on campus.

Birth control (well, sex ed as a whole) is a subject that gets me worked up because unlike what the group stated NOT everyone receives sex education and even those who do go through sex ed don't necessarily hear anything other than "abstinence is 100%"–but that's a different story for a different day. According to Wikipedia, more than 100 million women use the pill. In order for these women to legally use the pill (one of the many varieties of the pill), it is required that the drug go through animal testing. Companies usually spend around three and a half years doing tests in labs before the FDA allows the drug to be tested in humans. All drugs today have to be legitimized by animal testing. Back when the original pill was created, it was not only tested on animals, but it was tested on women in Puerto Rico without telling them of the possible side effects. Then, it was released to the American public and they realized that the early high-dose pill gave some women very serious, sometimes deadly, reactions. And we still don't fully understand all of the effects of the pill. As mentioned in the presentation, many mechanisms have been hypothesized and are included in the packaging. Women are given prescriptions without receiving full consultations on the risks, side-effects, and what can happen when you go off of the pill.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. One other interesting item that I didn't really pay attention to during the presentation but saw while looking through the pictures was on the bottom right of the birth control group's poster. Nine different forms of contraception: eight pink, one blue. Is it just easier to "control" fertility through the female body or does this say something about our culture? They are working on a pill for men these days...