71–80 of 104 posts
As described, it seems as though it would work just as well for traumatic brain injury as well. Either way it would be a huge boost in the quality of life for a lot of people.
I suspect Christopher Reeve had a hand in this somehow. Creating awareness and motivation to work on this.
Do I want to know how they get mice with severe spinal cord injuries to test on? I'm guessing it's exactly what I think it is, but I'm wondering if there's another way that it happens.
I'm sorry you were downvoted for asking that. I think it's a fair issue to raise. Assuming the mice are intentionally injured to allow testing, it seems reasonable, to me, to question the ethics of that. Of course it's easy to say "they're just mice, who cares?" but it's not wrong to ask "they're living creatures as well, shouldn't we care?" I expect the response to be "it's justified given the benefits we derive for…
I do not however like to view it as medical utilitarianism. The testing will happen regardless if the test subject are human or mice, because people do still want the medical cures. People are however less sad if an experiment accidentally killed a bunch of mice than if a bunch of human test subjects died. Historically people tend to use military service men as test subjects, which is why much of medical knowledge is based on test subjects of a specific gender (male) and age group (20-35). Not that long ago (~1950) people also used people with mental disabilities and orphans. Going just a decade earlier and people used prisoners and war and people deemed unwanted. Hopefully computers will one day replace the need for testing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry you were downvoted for asking that. I think it's a fair issue to raise. Assuming the mice are intentionally injured to allow testing, it seems reasonable, to me, to question the ethics of that. Of course it's easy to say "they're just mice, who cares?" but it's not wrong to ask "they're living creatures as well, shouldn't we care?" I expect the response to be "it's justified given the benefits we derive for…
We do have an alternative to animal testing. We can use humans who are desperate enough to volunteer to a medical experiment knowing that it might not work and could potentially make things worse. The purpose of animal testing in situations like this is to catch early problems before the final human testing. Computer simulation can do a lot to minimize the need for animal testing, but I don't think we are there yet w…
You'll never get that with humans even if you have plenty of volunteers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry you were downvoted for asking that. I think it's a fair issue to raise. Assuming the mice are intentionally injured to allow testing, it seems reasonable, to me, to question the ethics of that. Of course it's easy to say "they're just mice, who cares?" but it's not wrong to ask "they're living creatures as well, shouldn't we care?" I expect the response to be "it's justified given the benefits we derive for…
The the answer in the science and medical communities is Almost Never "they're just mice, who cares" It is rather that this is an important experiment that can't be done any other way and can have large benefit for humans
That's fair. My comment above was maybe overly glib in that sense. But I was just trying to capture the general spirit of the thing, not write an essay, due to limits of time, interest, and knowledge on my part.
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Living creatures might be too much (see bacteria), but if you think we should care about other people - it follows that we should also care about other creatures that can feel and think. Mammals certainly qualify.
> but if you think we should care about other people - it follows that we should also care about other creatures that can feel and think It doesn't automatically follow. I can entirely correctly, subjectively decide which living things I want to care about and which I do not. I can separate living things by a hierarchy of importance. Which is exactly what we do all the time with other people and our relationships to…
The subjective aspects of a difficult question doesn’t mean all takes are equally valid. That’s the same as giving up and saying that nothing means anything.
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BioNTech is working on a vaccine against MS that is supposed to untrain the immune system to no longer attack own tissue. It should at least slow progress of the disease and even seems to have allowed to reverse early damages in mice. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29305956
Through the years I've seen dozens and dozens of "cures" for "MS" in mice (I put MS in quotes because, at this point, I've grown skeptical that the induced encephalitis mouse model is all that helpful in predicting drug performance for humans with MS). The closest thing we have to a "cure" is actually a medication that's been on the market for a while, but it was used to treat certain types of blood cancer before the…
Point is, the cost to create Ocrelizumab may be legitimately higher than Rituximab.
I find myself wondering whether a useful testing step between mice and people might be the community of small dogs with IVDD. French bulldogs, dachshunds, and corgis seem particularly susceptible and many of them wind up with rear paralysis. https://www.thedogsdown.com/how-can-ivdd-cause-paralysis/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living creatures might be too much (see bacteria), but if you think we should care about other people - it follows that we should also care about other creatures that can feel and think. Mammals certainly qualify.
> but if you think we should care about other people - it follows that we should also care about other creatures that can feel and think It doesn't automatically follow. I can entirely correctly, subjectively decide which living things I want to care about and which I do not. I can separate living things by a hierarchy of importance. Which is exactly what we do all the time with other people and our relationships to…