Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

news.northwestern.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#81

Post by nonameiguess »

genomer wrote: post #36
dpcx wrote: post #31

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.

It’s what you think it is, and it happens to more than just mice. I toured a bioengineering lab where they were actively severing the spines of chimpanzees to perform fiber rerouting experiments. I think the normal citizen never thinks much if at all about this kind of thing because they’re never exposed to it. A few researchers have opened up to me personally about their personal psychological trauma caused by invol…

I was originally a biology major and only ended up finishing the minor in part because of this. We had a lab assignment to do a live vivisection of a limpet to be able to view some of the circulatory systems in play in a still-living creature. We were supposed to paralyze them first, but whatever I did was incorrect. That thing was writhing and squirming and trying to get away and showing all the outward physical signs of being in pain the entire time.

Limpets don't even have brains, just cerebral ganglia, so it's likely it isn't really a sentient creature that has any conscious awareness of what is happening to it, but man, that scarred me. It felt like I was torturing something horribly and I knew that was not the career for me. There is no way I'd have ever been able to do that to a mouse.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#82

Post by GordonS »

markdeloura wrote: post #77

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/

It's not unusual for dogs to be used in medical research. Aside from the more well-known use of rats, rabbits are also commonly used.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#83

Post by taylorius »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #58
mindcrime wrote: post #32

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

It's funny how this cost benefit calculation is considered valid when applied to research on mice, but any such calculation used to try to justify research on humans would give a "divide by 0" error. I think there's an inconsistency there somewhere.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#84

Post by rlpb »

belorn wrote: post #73
mindcrime wrote: post #32

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…

> We do have an alternative to animal testing. We can use humans who are desperate enough to volunteer...

This situation would presumably only arise because somebody else previously made the decision not to perform that experiment on an animal, but instead wait until a human suffers enough to become desperate enough to volunteer. That decision resulted in human suffering (albeit in the form of the trolley problem). Was that decision acceptable? How much human suffering, and/or how many humans suffering, is equivalent to one animal? Does sapience make a difference to this calculation?

I'm not saying this makes animal testing OK. My point is just that testing only on human volunteers isn't a magical solution to this ethical problem.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#86

Post by [deleted] »

0x0nyandesu wrote: post #48

Recently every thread on HN about life and death has been devolving into a debate with people who insist that these things need to be addressed in the comments and those that simply don't care. It's honestly exhausting. It's sort of like making food and having someone at the table try to discuss the morality of the meat you're using.... Except it's every. single. time. Lab mice are killed off everyday after experimen…

[deleted]

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#87

Post by klipt »

taylorius wrote: post #83
s1artibartfast wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's funny how this cost benefit calculation is considered valid when applied to research on mice, but any such calculation used to try to justify research on humans would give a "divide by 0" error. I think there's an inconsistency there somewhere.

But there absolutely are clinical trials on humans. It's just the humans generally have to volunteer.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#89

Post by belorn »

rlpb wrote: post #84
belorn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We do have an alternative to animal testing. We can use humans who are desperate enough to volunteer... This situation would presumably only arise because somebody else previously made the decision not to perform that experiment on an animal, but instead wait until a human suffers enough to become desperate enough to volunteer. That decision resulted in human suffering (albeit in the form of the trolley problem). W…

I agree, its not a magical solution. Some might even call it exploiting to use people when they are at their most desperate point in their lives, and for pediatric research it would basically involve a situation where its the parents that agrees to the medical experiment.

Its a difficult decision to make, experimenting on either animals or people.

Re: ‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

#90

Post by therein »

pilotneko wrote: post #78
steelframe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just noting that -mab therapeutics are not synthesized directly, they are produced in cloned cell lines. It’s practically impossible for one pharma company to replicate another companies -mab, since they will never have access to the exact cell line used to manufacture the original. Also, Rituximab hasn’t been fully characterized, hence the discovery of new uses. There is no such thing as generic when it comes to -ma…

Interesting point raising regulatory questions for sure.

Should the government compel drug companies to share their cell lines to preserve the same market dynamics as generic drugs once a monoclonal antibody line product hits the timeline to go generic?

After all, otherwise it would be somewhat similar to a drug company rejecting to share the chemical synthesis pathway and precursors saying "an ex-employee built this chemical synthesis machinery and we just put the raw ingredients and comes out the drug from the other end".

But I am guessing for generic drugs, the generic manufacturers are expected to come up with their own synthesis pathway anyway and the original manufacturer has no obligations to help.

Post reply on HN