In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#2This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Yes, computational models do have a place in science and drug discovery, but I don't know anyone in the field who seriously thinks they will reduce the number of animals used in medical research.
If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, where when you increase the efficiency of something (in this case, animals used in medical research), usage actually goes up.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#3This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Yes, computational models do have a place in science and drug discovery, but I don't know anyone in the field who seriously thinks they will reduce the number of animals used in medical research. If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, where when you increase the efficiency of something (in this case, animals used in medical research), usage actually goes up .
I don't think it'll happen tomorrow, but computer technology hasn't finished advancing...nor has our medical knowledge. Perhaps within the next century bits will turn out cheaper, faster, and more effective, perhaps even enabled by quantum computing. Biology seems massively parallel, and we've only just gotten started with parallelism in computing.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#4This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Yes, computational models do have a place in science and drug discovery, but I don't know anyone in the field who seriously thinks they will reduce the number of animals used in medical research. If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, where when you increase the efficiency of something (in this case, animals used in medical research), usage actually goes up .
> If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox,
Thank you for that. I think it might help explain why no matter how large my hard drives get I seem to have no problems filling them as the sizes and number of files seemed to increase to keep me constantly upgrading.
As for the lab mice, if we ever do reach the point where models are enough to replace the need for live animals it does open the door for even the most casual experimentation that might be considered too cruel and inhumane to be performed on living creatures. I'm not sure what kind of useful results could come from that kind of research, but at least then it could be explored without moral considerations or causing trauma to the researchers who would otherwise have to become torturers.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#5This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Yes, computational models do have a place in science and drug discovery, but I don't know anyone in the field who seriously thinks they will reduce the number of animals used in medical research. If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, where when you increase the efficiency of something (in this case, animals used in medical research), usage actually goes up .
I don't think it'll happen tomorrow, but computer technology hasn't finished advancing...nor has our medical knowledge. Perhaps within the next century bits will turn out cheaper, faster, and more effective, perhaps even enabled by quantum computing. Biology seems massively parallel, and we've only just gotten started with parallelism in computing.
That literally makes no sense. How exactly would a quantum computer assist us in simulating problems like drug transport and binding? (quite a few problems are purely empirically solved right now) How exactly is biology massively parallel? I suppose you could argue a cell is just a weird form of SIMD but that is a vast oversimplification. We’ve also been doing parallelism pretty much since computers were invented (and even before that, assembly lines were a thing) it’s just that now we really care cause our one trick of shoving transistors in doesn’t work so hot anymore.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#6Yeah, no.
Programs and algorithms can only encode models (which are themselves imperfect) of what we already know. There's countless things we know that we don't know, and yet more that we don't know that we don't know.
As bad as animal (and human) studies and trials can be, the beauty of them is we don't really have to know how or why things work, we can just do the thing and if the results are good, we have a new treatment. Lots of super common drugs, even paracetamol, are like this.
Of course, knowing and accurately modelling the action is great, but it's not necessary.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it'll happen tomorrow, but computer technology hasn't finished advancing...nor has our medical knowledge. Perhaps within the next century bits will turn out cheaper, faster, and more effective, perhaps even enabled by quantum computing. Biology seems massively parallel, and we've only just gotten started with parallelism in computing.
That literally makes no sense. How exactly would a quantum computer assist us in simulating problems like drug transport and binding? (quite a few problems are purely empirically solved right now) How exactly is biology massively parallel? I suppose you could argue a cell is just a weird form of SIMD but that is a vast oversimplification. We’ve also been doing parallelism pretty much since computers were invented (an…
A cell is a three dimensional environment where many weirdly shaped things interact with each other. It's not entirely unlike calculating a 3D video game. A quantum computer would assist us similarly as it helps in breaking encryption - it helps you search the problem space for a solution (e.g. protein shape) faster. Genomics is basically statistics.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#8Doing drug development without animal testing is like trying to modify a huge, messy, legacy code base without integration tests.
Our computer models are like unit tests. They are relatively self-contained and quick to run. However, they cannot test all the interactions and stuff we do t know about, so we have animal testing as a kind of integration test to make sure stuff works like expected.
And a phase 3 clinical trial is like pre-prod. When you think everything works, you expose test it in the real world with very careful monitoring and plan to keep it from going out into prod if problems are found.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#9Its pointless to use animals in research, it makes no logical sense. Even if the research is successful after 10 years of animal cruelty ... you still have to test it on humans.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#10This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Yes, computational models do have a place in science and drug discovery, but I don't know anyone in the field who seriously thinks they will reduce the number of animals used in medical research. If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, where when you increase the efficiency of something (in this case, animals used in medical research), usage actually goes up .
> If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, Thank you for that. I think it might help explain why no matter how large my hard drives get I seem to have no problems filling them as the sizes and number of files seemed to increase to keep me constantly upgrading. As for the lab mice, if we ever do reach the point where models are enough to replace the need for live animals it does open the door for ev…
That's probably what the beings who are simulating us were thinking.