I Was an Animal Experimenter • Hacker News Board

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#41

Post by vacri » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 12:53 PM UTC

jonchang wrote: post #10

I can say with confidence that this sort of thing would never occur in a modern research laboratory. Note that standards for ethical experimentation on animals (including humans) hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s. A couple of points here: Any type of animal experimentation must be accompanied by an IACUC protocol that is approved by a committee, typically at least 3 people, and usually including a veterina…

Note that standards for ethical experimentation ... hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s

I used to joke "... and then in the 60s, Ethics was invented" regarding biology experiments...

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#42

Post by TheCondor » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

howling wrote: post #32

I always wonder why people feel so upset over millions of animals being experimented every year when we kill and eat billions of animals every day.

There is a giant difference between feeding some and some of the "behavioral" experiments mentioned in the article.

Why do cats play with mice? Are cats evil?

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#43

Post by afarrell » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 12:57 PM UTC

janxgeist wrote: post #14

Lorento wrote: post #9

Animals suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale. If you're really against animal suffering and dying then a far bigger problem is the existence of wild animals with peak populations, unreliable food supplies, predators, fights and disease. Stopping animal research is like trying to stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a difference but you're not .

I think this is a weak argument, because you could just as well use it to argue for conducting these experiments on humans: Humans suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale. If you're really against human suffering and dying then a far bigger problem is the existence of humans with peak populations, unreliable food supplies, murderers, fights and disease. Stopping research on humans is lik…

Yes, we devote X resources from stopping the suffering of humans at the expense of other humans. We currently only spend Y on stopping the suffering of humans from other causes and Y is not massively greater than X. However, the reasons for that are mostly due to the fact that spending on X also works to preserve the power structures (various government) that we use to direct money toward Y.

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#44

Post by afarrell » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #15

BringTheTanks wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a somewhat naive view about how our moral compass moves as a straight lines from bad to good. Before the Nazis performed experiments on humans, it was considered horrible to perform experiments on humans. What Nazis had that allowed them to perform experiments on humans was a carte blanche to do whatever they want by contemporary law, and the ideology that those human beings were in fact "inferior" human bei…

"yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life" I'm not sure what "the cycle of life" is, but just because something may be present elsewhere in the animal kingdom does not mean we should replicate it or justify our actions through it.

But does it mean we should be willing to lock someone else in a cage or ruin their livelihood for doing so?

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#45

Post by stdbrouw » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 1:00 PM UTC

jonchang wrote: post #10

I can say with confidence that this sort of thing would never occur in a modern research laboratory. Note that standards for ethical experimentation on animals (including humans) hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s. A couple of points here: Any type of animal experimentation must be accompanied by an IACUC protocol that is approved by a committee, typically at least 3 people, and usually including a veterina…

Whether using animals is necessary for the research is one thing. I'd also quite like to know whether the research is necessary to start with. I assume that the research design when animals are involved is generally of a higher quality than it would've been otherwise, but still, so much drivel and nonsense gets published (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8124111) that I can't help but wonder how many animals suffer because of a lack of scientific imagination and professionalism rather than because it's truly, absolutely needed to help discover life-saving drugs and treatments.

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#46

Post by pvaldes » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 1:24 PM UTC

Puppet activists playing god and destroying the lives of the young researchers whereas everybody treat them as the great hero of the week. Is a problem, yes. To be young an naive and doing silly things trying to impress your crush is understandable and even likeable. But, when your love plan involves to 'morally torture' or destroy lives of other young girls and guys, and millions of dollars in stuff, papers should adopt a more responsible point of view.

The type of activism that repeat again and again old dated facts as if were current, is mostly a way to climb up socially at any cost, and to find comfort in the group. No intelligent people can argue that to give a expensive dinner of mouses to the wild cats equals to love or improve the life of those mouses. The peaceful and intelligent lab rats set free ceremoniously, with be soon bitten, chased away and most of them will be ripped in pieces for the wild rats before 24 h. The survivors will last a couple of more miserable days terrified, hungry, bleeding and isolated of their families. This is cruel for a social animal, and not much different to stealing a lap dog from this friend owners and house and releasing it alone in the territory of a wolf pack to be teared apart and eated.

Experimentation is mostly a tool to achieve something that a lot of good people disperately need as soon as possible. To make a taboo of this tool will not solve much of our real problems and probably will create a huge amount of human pain.

Labs should have sticks with "Is the Thalidomide, stupid" printed in uppercases, and those type of articles should probably be answered also with the same slogan.

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#47

Post by PerfectElement » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 1:31 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #29

nosefrog wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not have an answer to the question of whether experimenting on nonhuman animals can be justified out of necessity. I have some thoughts, though: Assume that in the near future, we give nonhuman animals the same moral value as humans. And then say we wanted to conduct an experiment on an animal to cure a human ailment. Before we harm a nonhuman animal, we need to ask whether we have the right to harm that animal.…

It is morally illogical to grant non-human values equivalent human moral value. We certainly don't grant it to ameoba, bacteria, the tiny multi-cellular organisms that live on our skin. The micro-wasp (which the aforementioned ameoba is larger than, but which has neurons). But you can win any argument by first granting that it must be true, which is what you do in your second paragraph.

> It is morally illogical to grant non-human values equivalent human moral value.

It's illogical to grant them equivalent rights (right to vote, basic education, etc.) but there's nothing illogical in granting non-human animals rights that are relevant to them.

There's a distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings. If it is accepted that an animal experiences pain and distress, and have the innate desire to seek comfort and avoid pain, then the logical thing to do is to grant them the right to be kept from intentional harm, just like we do with human animals, regardless of their cognitive abilities (we don't exclude mentally impaired humans from our moral community).

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#48

Post by Luc » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 1:35 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #46

Puppet activists playing god and destroying the lives of the young researchers whereas everybody treat them as the great hero of the week. Is a problem, yes. To be young an naive and doing silly things trying to impress your crush is understandable and even likeable. But, when your love plan involves to 'morally torture' or destroy lives of other young girls and guys, and millions of dollars in stuff, papers should a…

> Labs should have sticks with "Is the Talidomide, stupid" printed in uppercases, and those type of articles should probably be answered also with the same slogan.

This made me smirk, because Thalidomide could be the poster child for the ineffectiveness of animal testing.

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#49

Post by return0 » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 1:36 PM UTC

I think modern lab standards are not nearly as horrible. The larger problem is not the harsh treatment, but the huge number of animals that are killed in labs nowadays. There is the prevalent push to publish more and more often, which requires more and more animals in order to report minute results. Rarely do researchers analyze their experiment data to exhaustion; they'd rather run a new experiment than try to figure it out from existing data. If we want to use animals less, we need 1) public availability of all experimental data and 2) more and better computational models that take the bottom-up approach to studying organisms and the brain. Until then we 'll keep piling up dead animals with reckless abandon.

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#50

Post by hartator » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 1:48 PM UTC

TheCondor wrote: post #42

howling wrote: post #32

I always wonder why people feel so upset over millions of animals being experimented every year when we kill and eat billions of animals every day.

There is a giant difference between feeding some and some of the "behavioral" experiments mentioned in the article. Why do cats play with mice? Are cats evil?

Cats are evil obviously.