Tuffelmire 1

Jarod Tuffelmire

English 102

Arguments to Inform and ConvinceFirst Draft

13 September 2017

Showing Some Skin

In the world of today, every new advancement leads to intense scrutinization over the

best possible outcome and the worst case scenario of said advancement. One of the more popular

over the past few decades now has been the subject of cloning and artificially creating living

things. An example of this would be artificial skin and its use in place of testing on animals.

Despite having numerous benefits, using artificial skin for scientific testing does have its own

downsides. Yet, the profit from using artificial skin heavily outweighs the drawbacks.

There are a few main upsides to using artificial skin for testing. The first of these things is

the ethical matter of no longer having to use animals for this testing. Along with it being morally

better to not use living animals for testing, the testing is more reliable. As stated by Alan Joch in

Saving Skin, Scientists dont have to extrapolate human responses from animal-derived data.

The last reason is that the subject is no longer a variable in these tests. Dealing with animals or

living humans can lead to differences that produce different results. When you are doing tests

with drugs, you want to reduce the variables as much as possible. The nature of these copied

cells are uniform from sample to sample whereas slight biological differences between

individual lab animals can sometimes affect test results(Joch). These are just three benefits that

come from using this artificial skin.

 Tuffelmire 2

On the other hand, there is just one big glaring downside. This would be drugs that affect

the entire system. These needs to be observed on a macro scale by looking at the whole body and

seeing how these drugs react with the entire organ system. Just using artificial skin will not

suffice when it comes to these drugs. They cannot be used to see just how the drug will react

with all of the organs interacting with each other. As said by Charles Hewitt We cant get all the

responses we need to test just from our model(qtd. in Joch). Although the artificial skin can

provide a great amount of benefits, it will never be able to give us data for this macro scale.

There is no doubt that everything has its flaws and that nothing is perfect. Even though

this technology is groundbreaking, it does have its one downside, it will not be able to give data

for the organs interacting with each other. Despite this, the uses of the tissue models heavily

outweigh the downside of its application. From the morality or using it compared to living

animals, to being uniform and consistent with results, to being more reliable when seeing the

effects on humans, the artificial skin is very beneficial to scientists. This technology of creating

tissue models will greatly impact testing in the future for the better.
 Tuffelmire 3

Works Cited

Joch, Alan. Saving Skin. 11 Feb 2002.