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In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

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Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#31

Post by lordnacho »

Sounds like map-vs-territory confusion to me. A model of a mouse in a computer isn't a mouse, the point of doing the experiment is to uncover whether what you thought the model predicted was in fact what happened, because it's possible you didn't incorporate some aspect of the real mouse.

Simulations are useful for making calculations. Say I'm convinced that buildings work a certain way and I have a finite element model of one. I don't know what the predictions are for a new building of a certain shape, so I shove it in a computer to tell me. The computer tells me what I should predict assuming that my finite elements ideas were correct. What it won't tell me is whether there's some aspect of that model that doesn't correspond to what the building is actually gonna be made of.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#32

Post by ganzuul »

This is apparently different from the lab-on-a-chip research which seems to seek to miniaturize organs into a microfluidic environment. I'm not actually sure if they are using organ cells on a scaffold or if they can discard the scaffold for microfluidics and cells alone even after reading a few papers on the subject.

Personally I think living 2D animals in a petri dish would be metal as fuck.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#33

Post by hobofan »

foobar_ wrote: post #29
sk0g wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, those techniques are what we are moving towards and we are slowly getting there, but for the time being they can't be universally applied.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#34

Post by dTal »

ars wrote: post #28
cellis wrote: post #20

Who 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).

This comment doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the existence of a robot copy imply a lack of pain? How can you argue that whether humans feel pain is an unsolved question? Shall we experiment on you instead?

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#35

Post by FeepingCreature »

ars wrote: post #28
cellis wrote: post #20

Who 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).

This would run into the "here is a hand", or rather "here is a fist" objection.[1]

Pain is the ground reality that is to be explained. If you manage to explain away pain rather than explain it, you haven't actually answered the question at all. If your answer at the end is "pain is not real", this doesn't prove that pain is not real, it proves that your premises were wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_is_one_hand

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#36

Post by vixen99 »

sk0g wrote: post #16
foobar_ wrote: post #9

Its 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.

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?

Sure - though plenty of chemicals hurt animals but don't hurt us. One small example: theobromine and caffeine (in chocolate) kill cats and other animals that lack the ability to metabolize these alkaloids rapidly enough.

Oddly enough, our own cat loves chocolate and (following a near miss & visit to the vet) now appears to resent having had that avenue of pleasure permanently blocked.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#37

Post by jfoutz »

A friend of mine works on simulating mouse organs. We had some pretty great talks over beer about modeling and cross model validation. Eventually he'd rant about all models are wrong but some models are useful.

If I remember correctly, they had some success in rejecting animal studies. Things like, we don't know what this will do overall, but we're pretty sure the kidneys or liver will fail like X, so don't bother with the wet lab. Or possibly try the wet lab at small scale so they can validate the model.

We're far far away from full simulation. But we know a whole lot about mice. I internalized those conversations as, my friend writes type checkers for drugs against mouse hardware.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#38

Post by teekert »

This completely bypasses the revolution that will take place long before this: Organs on a chip. With the development of organoids [0] we made the first step. Things like the lung-on-a-chip [1] are steps towards a sort of mini body that mimics many functions and simulates the body not only in the molecular biological way but in the very important physical way (which, it turns out can not be decoupled from the molecular biology).

Why would we put mice in computer chips if we can have pseudo human bodies in the real world?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SG5ivm6jkw

[1] https://wyss.harvard.edu/media-post/lung-on-a-chip/

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#39

Post by gridlockd »

teekert wrote: post #38

This completely bypasses the revolution that will take place long before this: Organs on a chip. With the development of organoids [0] we made the first step. Things like the lung-on-a-chip [1] are steps towards a sort of mini body that mimics many functions and simulates the body not only in the molecular biological way but in the very important physical way (which, it turns out can not be decoupled from the molecul…

> Why would we put mice in computer chips if we can have pseudo human bodies in the real world?

Because a lot of the existing data was gathered on mice.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#40

Post by cosmodisk »

cellis wrote: post #20

Who 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…

Realistically this unlikely to be a problem in this century, however you are raising some valid points nonetheless. A lot of,if not most,capabilities animals, including humans, have are related to one thing: survival. Ability to move rocks, climb trees,or build sophisticated structures boils down to body's need to get food and preserve itself from destruction. These aspects are often overlooked when modelling AI and the whole focus is on pure logic. I sometimes think that one day we'll end up with universal AI and the first thing it will ask will be sometime like: "why should I do it?".
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