I read that same article and it broke my heart.
Fucking scientists and their incurable "Playing God" syndrome... it makes me want to take a chainsaw to their skulls. I mean, really, what scientific theory were they trying to prove by doing this?

"Because spider webs resemble crystal lattices, toxologists can employ statistical crystallography to gauge a substance's toxicity."

That is a really fancy way to describe boredom.

Yeah, we suck. It's weird because I definitely looked at that and thought "wow - that's really neat to see", before I thought about how lousy a thing it was to do.

And scientists totally perpetuate the idea that this is ok. As a TA for an introductory bio course, we had one lab on Developmental Biology. One of the things students did was they took a live chicken egg, dissected out the embryo, and watched under the microscope as its heart slowly stopped beating. Then they mixed sea urchin eggs and sperm, and watched the eggs being fertilized and starting to divide. At the end of the class, they poured them down the drain along with some bleach. The worst part was looking at the tadpoles though - they had to anesthetize them and then look at them under a microscope. The lab manual said to be very careful with the amount of benzocaine that they used so they didn't kill the tadpoles. When I asked the head instructor why the students weren't supposed to kill the tadpoles, he said with a straight face "because we want them to have respect for living things". (By the way, the tadpoles were killed and thrown out at the end of the lab too, after the students left, because they're a non-native species and it's illegal to release them into the wild in California).

I felt really awful for being part of all of that. There are ways to teach many of the same things without killing animals. And I always told my students that they didn't have to do any of this if they were uncomfortable with it - they were always allowed to just read the lab manual and watch another student do the "experiment".

I am seriously torn between being thouroughly amused and completely and totally disgusted. I personally like spiders and hate scientists using animals of any kind for experiments that are POINTLESS...

However, with species that are plentiful and have been for a very very long time, sometimes it has been helpful to us to run tests on them. I just think there may be a better way.

*shrug*

guess you never saw the one where they dosed it w/meth and lsd then? whoa...