Animal rights ideologues really bring out their deep misanthrope by opposing all animal research, no matter the potential human benefit.

They say that such research never does any good. They claim that lab animals are as important as the suffering humans the research seeks to alleviate. They say the research is just as cruel as the that done in the concentration camps. They grossly mislead when claiming that animals are never needed, that cell lines and computer programs can do the job.

It isn’t true. Animal research is essential to the advancement of science and the creation of new medical treatments.

For example, animal work provides essential basic biological information that leads to better approaches. It offers the only way to test a new drug or technique on living organisms, without endangering people.

And animal experiments before testing on humans is a key human rights protection contained in the Nuremberg Code and the laws passed internationally to protect human subjects in its wake.

Heres an important example — and if it works out, it could be really big: Scientists have found a drug that turns back the memory strangulation of Alzheimer’s. From The Independent story:

A painkiller widely used to treat rheumatoid arthritis has been shown to reverse the symptoms of dementia in the brains of laboratory mice, raising hope that there may soon be an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, scientists have said.

The drug, salsalate, is a licensed pain killer but in mice with a form of dementia similar to Alzheimer’s it reversed the changes to a key protein in the brain that builds up in patients with the debilitating neurological disease, they found.

The researchers said it is the first time any drug has been shown to have an effect on the “tau” protein that accumulates in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s and a range of similar dementias known as “tauopathies”. It could lead to an effective therapy even for patients in the later stages of disease, the researchers said.

This is no sure thing, of course. Work in rodents doesn’t always transcribe into the same effect in man. But it points to a way that must be pursued, and would not have been known but for the use of the mice.

Understand this: Animal rights activists would deny scientists the legal right and ability to conduct these tests — no matter how high the stakes — because they believe that rat and mouse lives are as important as those of humans. Any way you spell it, that’s anti-human.

Let us stand with man and wish these researchers well as they necessarily sacrifice these mice, hot on the trail of a new therapy that could do tremendous good for suffering humanity.