The National Institute of Health (NIH) announced last week that they were going to start using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments. Naturally, the American Bar Association was outraged, and filed suit, but the NIH presented some very good reasons for the switch.
- The lab assistants were becoming very attached to their little rats. This emotional involvement was interfering with the research being conducted. No such attachment could form for a lawyer.
- Lawyers breed faster.
- Lawyers are much cheaper to care for and the humanitarian societies won’t jump all over you no matter what you’re studying.
- There are some things even a rat won’t do. However, sometimes it very hard to extrapolate our test results to human beings.