Ok so I'm belying my username as an ethical vs science question has come up, but I'll definitely be off after this: so much cleaning and wrapping to do!
I would like to see murderers and child rapists used for experiments instead of animals. They could pay back a bit to society and produce some more valid results than animals. Apart from illegality and maybe personal ethics, what would be the pitfalls here OP?
I'm going to try and ignore the ethical issue of using prisoners in this way as a pp has covered it well. I'll say again that I'm a speciest so dosing people who don't need the drug before an assurance of safety from animal studies wouldn't sit well with me.
The scientific reasons why this would not work:
- People aren't clean or healthy enough and the background data are too variable.
Animal safety studies rely on tight limits on animal health, age, and background information on the strain so that we can use clinical pathology and micropathology to see changes related to treatment with the test item. The study designs use the lowest possible number of animal to give sufficient statistical power to recognize real findings from background noise. The more background noise, the bigger the studies need to be.
- There aren't enough prisoners to make a statistically valid determination, which means patient populations could not receive safe treatment.
- Even if we had the death penalty for some crimes there would not be enough organs to examine.
- People live too long: carcinogenicity testing of pharmaceuticals is done by dosing very low multiples of the clinical (human) dose of drug for an animal's lifetime. Basically we dose groups of animals until half of them have been euthanized due to illnesses of old age. They live healthy lives and then we put them to sleep at the end of their lives. The remaining animals are examined in great detail for any signs of tumours or abnormal cell growth in any of their organs. To do similar studies in humans (if we could find enough healthy ones which we couldn't) would delay patient treatment for 70+ years after the drug could have been used. Imagine a world where we have no antibiotics a a cut on the finger could kill you. That's where we'd be even with the same scientific knowledge if we used humans instead of animals for testing.
Well, OK, 3 is spurious reasoning. Edward Jenner wasn't limited by an ethics committee and he discovered vaccination by dosing a little boy with smallpox after giving him a dose of cowpox to test a theory. Edward Jenner got lucky. I suspect that if someone tried that nowadays a thousand daily mail readers would come after him with pitchforks.
In summary:
prisoners aren't healthy enough to show the results well enough. It's just wrong.
*Even if enough healthy people were available and willing to do clinical trials without non-clinical studies first (hey...students are generally in better health) we couldn't kill them and get the data needed; even if we could biopsy all the organs instead of sectioning them we don't have the surgical skill to biopsy every organ and prevent someone bleeding out.
*Using people would delay development of necessary pharmaceuticals and cost patient lives.