Funny, I was thinking about this same subject the last few days.
I was reading studies done on stress, aging, DHEA, cortisol and the like. Inevitably, most of what we know about the subject of stress killing you, and how it parallels the aging process directly, comes from extremely cruel tests done on rats, mice & monkeys.
Stuff like the fact that when you shock a rat randomly with a low voltage, but give them no way to anticipate the shock or control it, they can die within 2 days. Physically they are not damaged by the shocks. They die from an overdose of adrenaline and glucocorticoids produced by the adrenal gland.
All of these hormones and steroids are made from DHEA which is one of only a few chemicals that declines directly proportional to aging and disappears only a matter of days before death by aging. High levels of DHEA seem to have anti-aging properties and can even reverse malignant tumors.
The studies showed that giving the rats some release for their frustration (a piece of wood to gnaw on, another rat to attack, a wheel to run on etc.) mitigated some of the damage and prevented death. Also, flashing a red light before the shock or letting the rats pull a lever to lessen the intensity or frequency of the shocks drastically minimized the damage of the stress.
There were other sick studies like starving monkeys to death, as well. The stress of famine and catabolic metabolism tended to kill the monkeys before the actual starvation. Furthermore, giving completely non-nutritional artificially sweetened water to half the starving monkeys caused them to live longer, despite it not providing any sustenance. The idea that they were being fed was enough to stave off death for weeks.
Anyway.
These studies and the people who do them are reprehensible in my mind. Torturing animals is just wrong.
And yet, much of what we know about toxins, pathogens, allergens and more comes from this kind of thing. The idea that useful knowledge comes from unethical behaivior is a conundrum that is difficult to get past. I mean, the experiments of Josef Mengele are among the evilest things that anyone can think of. He made Hitler look like a cheerleader... but we still use the knowledge he discovered about things like hypothermia to this day.
Not using the knowledge seems wrong in that the people and animals that died would have suffered for nothing. But using the knowledge only encourages other sociopaths to follow the lead. And, even if some enlightened democracies decided to ban the most egregious examples of this, is anyone under any illusion that such studies wouldn't continue in countries where they still don't even value human life?
It seems to me that there are probably quite s few such experiments that have been conducted that never appear in any journals and are denied if anyone even asks about them. This is not to even get started with the forbidden conspiracy theories...
