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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?

#61

Post by olodus »

One can look at it like how us developers look at testing. You have multiple steps on the way from code to delivery. There are unit test, more realistic test frameworks, test environments and then finally tests at a customer / usage by a customer.

In the same vain I could see (and even hope) some mice tests could be decreased or removed as better models and simulations gets created. That would be quicker and more cost efficient for everyone. But in the end you want a real world test before giving it to a human. And maybe we could find better things than mice for that as well, but right now I think that is the best we have got. I am not a medical researcher though so I don't know if there are alternatives out there.

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

#62

Post by chr1 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #58
chr1 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you torture someone then use a time machine to restore him to the initial state, did you do anything bad? You can't do this to anyone real but you can easily save and then restore the state of the simulation at any point. Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than imagining someone being tortured, or performing lots of arithmetic operations. So the only logical thing is to admit that torturing/kil…

> Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than imagining someone being tortured, Isn't it? Our imaginations are predictive, not simulative.

Sure, our imagination does not have enough computational power to be simulative now, but in principle there is nothing preventing existance of a living creature with vastly more powerful brain.

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

#63

Post by foobar_ »

hobofan wrote: post #54
foobar_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do understand you are just defending big pharma and cosmetics. I really doubt any new ground breaking discovery has come from animal testing.

Animal testing is all over biochemistry and biology, is not just used for pharmaceutical and cosmetics testing. Many ground braking discoveries have been (and are still being made) via animal testing. There are whole subdisciplines that are based around animal testing like developmental or behavioural biology. Though you can avoid it if you really want to, if you study biochemistry, you will learn how to do animal te…

Citation needed. What specific things were discovered ? Are they useful to humans ? Could they be done without testing ?

All that I read are pointless science articles about aging in mice as if that applied to humans.

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

#64

Post by hobofan »

foobar_ wrote: post #63
hobofan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animal testing is all over biochemistry and biology, is not just used for pharmaceutical and cosmetics testing. Many ground braking discoveries have been (and are still being made) via animal testing. There are whole subdisciplines that are based around animal testing like developmental or behavioural biology. Though you can avoid it if you really want to, if you study biochemistry, you will learn how to do animal te…

Citation needed. What specific things were discovered ? Are they useful to humans ? Could they be done without testing ? All that I read are pointless science articles about aging in mice as if that applied to humans.

> Are they useful to humans?

No, probably not. I'm sure they are just giving Nobel Prizes for Medicine out for funny discoveries rather than for findings that form the basis of most of our current and future medicine.

> Could they be done without testing?

Sure they could! But scientists just love to make animals suffer!

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

#65

Post by foobar_ »

hobofan wrote: post #64
foobar_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. What specific things were discovered ? Are they useful to humans ? Could they be done without testing ? All that I read are pointless science articles about aging in mice as if that applied to humans.

> Are they useful to humans? No, probably not. I'm sure they are just giving Nobel Prizes for Medicine out for funny discoveries rather than for findings that form the basis of most of our current and future medicine. > Could they be done without testing? Sure they could! But scientists just love to make animals suffer!

> Nobel Prizes for Medicine out for funny discoveries

Yes, just like they give oscars to pointless movies. Even roman numerals had its fervent defenders.

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

#66

Post by lachlan-sneff »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #59
dTal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Many philosophers are confused. Free will is a solved problem (we have free will regardless of the metaphysical premise, unless you're using a weird definition of free will, and even I can prove it for any given metaphysical premise), yet they're still working on it. If somebody links "free will" to "determinism", they're very confused about what free will is. There are a lot of philosophers doing genuinely useful wo…

I must be quite confused then, but how is free will not linked to determinism?

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

#67

Post by theptip »

bedobi wrote: post #6

Yeah, 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 t…

> Programs and algorithms can only encode models (which are themselves imperfect) of what we already know.

The Game Of Life seems to contradict this claim. Also worth considering, computational physics and weather/climate simulations.

Scientists of all sorts already do learn new insights by creating simulated models of systems. The simulated systems will continue to get more accurate.

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

#68

Post by frollo »

chrisco255 wrote: post #22
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

It's not completely a waste of time. Animal research is extremely expensive in terms of time, man hours and money[1]. Whatever shortcut you can take to detect ineffective treatments before reaching this stage is arguably going to cost you more time and money than raising a colony of rats for testing your hypothesis out.

[1]: I own 4 (once 5) pet rats. They are only a small colony and, while I love them, I don't keep them at lab standards (for example, I don't a vet sleeping on the couch 24/7 in case of emergencies), yet, in a bad month, I could end up with spending 1000+$ for their health. Now, imagine that for the health standard of lab rats/mice and the numbers required for research.

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

#70

Post by Digit-Al »

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…

I think you are missing something obvious here. Pain does not exist in any objective sense, it is a construct created by the brain in response to certain stimuli as a survival mechanism. If you were creating a simulation of a human body to use in medical experiments then surely you would not give it a brain that functioned in any meaningful sense.

I would not say that a body incapable of feeling pain is an "inadequate replica". A human or animal under anaesthetic does not feel pain - are they inadequate. You can certainly perform surgery on an unconscious person, and you can administer medications to them.

[edit] I should have added that I am totally in agreement that we are not even close to being able to simulate a human body with any degree of accuracy.

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