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The New Ethics. (18+, tw: animal cruelty) I recently did a project where I talked about the analysis of corneal neovascularization. In a nutshell, this is when new capillaries start to appear in the cornea (a kind of protective layer of the eye, dense but transparent) due to damage, trauma, or disease. This makes the cornea opaque, is a symptom of keratitis and other diseases, and is generally quite unpleasant. But here's the thing: The cornea is a part of the body that is very accessible and very easy to examine. And the number of blood vessels in the cornea can be affected not only by eye disease, but also by taking special medications. And what does it take to understand how a particular medication works? That's right, tests. And what do you think? To test the effectiveness of drugs that stimulate or inhibit the creation of new blood vessels, mice have a piece of paper soaked in alkali placed on their eyes. This lesion stimulates vessel growth, the activity of which is later measured. Brutal? Yes. Painful? Probably. But where is the public attention? This is one of the many dilemmas of biological ethics, which deals with these issues. Surprisingly, it is one of the young sciences, established less than a century ago! The foundations of bioethics were laid after World War II, when the horrific details of the experiments of German and Japanese scientists of the time became known. It was then that it became clear how important it was to have rules and limitations when conducting biological experiments. Among the advances in bioethics are the strictly controlled principle of voluntary consent for experiments involving humans, the regulation and control of experiments on animals, and the gradual shift to cell cultures wherever possible. All this makes experiments as humane as possible and prevents the killing, maiming and harming of subjects, whether they are animals or humans. It is surprising that people have realized the importance of ethics in biology so recently in the history of science. But better late than never, right? What do you think about this?