My Ethics of Animal Testing, Basically

Firstly, let me start off by commenting on The Sun's portrayal of the tax rise on cigarettes and tax cut on nicotine patches as a bad thing..............grow up you fuckwits.
That's that done then.It's that kind of ignorant attitude that stops the genuinely conscientious people who want to quit from doing so. I thought you had to have a vague amount of common sense to work for a national newspaper. My mistake.
Okay, rant out of the way. Moving on, my summer elective application was accepted today, in spite of several glaring holes I left in my proposed schedule, including the fact that I only applied to do four weeks of work in India and not the "compulsory" eight. I suppose that the School of Medicine is sympathising with us and our tough third year course, and recognises that we deserve a summer of relaxing, and not one involving work in another hole in a third world country. Either that, or they couldn't be arsed to check my form thoroughly enough.
Also, today I got a brief view of what I'd be doing for the majority of my fourth year. I'll be spending quite a bit of time in sole charge of a rather expensive, rather complicated confocal microscope. Basically, it shines a futuristic type laser at slides and churns out pretty colourful pictures that tell you where all the different chemicals you injected your mouse brain with are. Yes, that's right, mouse brain. For want of a more humane method, my project involves mice. I won't say we kill them for science, but they're alive when we start and when we finish, they're, well, not. We send them off peacefully (I think, is being injected with formaldehyde and heparin painful? Shit, it doesn't sound that nice actually), but that's a bit of a cop out.
On a sensible note, and to stop my house being fire-bombed by mad tree-hugging hippie warriors, I'm not a big fan of animal testing at all. I'd much rather it could be done using another method, but it can't. However, given the choice between a load of mice dying and eventually curing Alzheimer's, or being lovely to mice while our grandparents and parents die in droves (and it is not a nice disease), I know which side of the fence I fall. Again, I'd rather we didn't have to do the maths and calculate which form of life is more worthy, but nobody said life would be fair and sometimes we don't have a choice.
Moving on, if the research turns out to be any good, which with me and my infantile knowledge of neurology as a main driving force is a remote possibility, I may have to chance to do something nifty like bugger off abroad and present it to people who actually understand. Or, it might get published in a journal, which would increase my chances of getting a non-shit job by quite a bit. Plus, my name on a scientific paper which would be totally incomprehensible to the general public might at least make me seem to be fairly brainy. Here's hoping.