I worked with a guys who said 'one of the reasons' he quit medical research was because of the amount of mice he had to kill on a daily basis. He said, "the quick way is to snap their necks with the back of your pencil." as he demonstrated on the desk the technique of how to hold the pencil a certain way.
In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#22This 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 know about the state of current tests, but it doesn't seem to me like the author is necessarily proposing to switch left and right to use computer models instead of a real mice. Instead, the way I'm reading it, they are recommending to use computer models whenever possible, and only resort to live animal testing when the limits of the modelling are reached.
It's a waste of time. There isn't a model that can sufficiently simulate the chaotic behavior of biological cellular systems and the complex interactions with potential chemical treatments. Models are Mickey mouse representations of reality.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about all the chemicals that never get to human testing due to harmful effects coming up in animal testing? Is that not a net positive from a human perspective?
Are there absolutely no alternatives to test that ?
Not as far as our brightest scientists in the relevant fields have been able to figure out. What do you propose?
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#24Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#25This isn't the right point to make.
There are a lot of unnecessary animal experiments because the way in which experiments are planned is very unprincipled. in silico approaches have great potential to improve the efficiency of animal experiments.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#26Earlier 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…
> That literally makes no sense. How exactly would a quantum computer assist us in simulating problems like drug transport and binding?
You can use quantum computers to simulate quantum mechanical systems, such as ones studied in chemistry. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1147/JRD.2018.2888987
Indeed, simulating quantum systems was the reason quantum computers were proposed by Feynman in the first place!
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about the state of current tests, but it doesn't seem to me like the author is necessarily proposing to switch left and right to use computer models instead of a real mice. Instead, the way I'm reading it, they are recommending to use computer models whenever possible, and only resort to live animal testing when the limits of the modelling are reached.
It's a waste of time. There isn't a model that can sufficiently simulate the chaotic behavior of biological cellular systems and the complex interactions with potential chemical treatments. Models are Mickey mouse representations of reality.
There are companies who make money by wasting time like that. I'm no expert in this field but from what I gather sometimes Mickey Mouse Models can help too. Economics is built on such models.
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#28Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is…
You can ask the reverse question - if the Robot version of a mouse is sufficiently similar to a mouse, maybe the mouse also doesn't actually feel pain, and is really a kind of biological robot.
Maybe so are you.
Dualism holds that living entities are special, and can never be replicated artificially. So your question can actually be turned into dualism vs monism (which is not a question with a settled answer).
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there absolutely no alternatives to test that ?
Not as far as our brightest scientists in the relevant fields have been able to figure out. What do you propose?
Test with synthetic proteins ?
https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation...
Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
#30Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is…
Easiest way I can come up to go with it is to admit we sometimes exploit life for the greater good, and also swear to yourself that you do your best to keep it as natural, efficient and minimal as possible. Otherwise you don’t get to even grow and eat single grain of wheat do you...