I Was an Animal Experimenter • Hacker News Board

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#81

Post by EmlynC » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 9:05 AM UTC

stdbrouw wrote: post #45

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/…

Unfortunately, science isn't the sort of endeavour where anything can resolutely be considered necessary to start with. Arguably there should be some doubt about whether your research will lead to something important else you can't be doing anything novel. There is nonsense in any endeavour and that is why there are layers of ethics committees, reviews and audits within animal research that limits wanton nonsense. The price of any endeavour is that there will be waste — humans cannot help it — it is unfortunate that the waste is at the expense of animal life.

The first article you link to is about the abuse of frequentist statistics, it is not a piece of nonsense primary research (1182327). The article is correct and an interesting read, but not in support of poor use of animal experiments. The second article (8124111) is about clinical research, not pre-clinical animal research although the arguments raised in the article are applicable to pre-clinical research. It is very difficult to find and expose nonsense research!

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#82

Post by EmlynC » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 9:17 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #52

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…

I am fairly certain that there is an ongoing experiment at the NIMH in Bethesda where they are creating lesions (scooping out sections of their brain) in Rhesus Monkey brains and observing behavioral effects. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15509386 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18410164 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/11902612_Effects_of_... I personally am about to embark on a scientific project tha…

Your point is quite right, I don't think it's self serving at all. Complex physiological diseases like cancer can be observed as tumours grafted to a scaffold in vitro, but you cannot observe the effect of drugs, it's relationship to the whole organism, without using a whole organism.

Monkeys have immune responses that are as similar to humans as we can hope for. Further, Mice while they have some conservation of immune related genes there are many divergent expression of immune related genes including alterations in master-gene (cis) and innate immune gene (CD4) expression [1] which may explain why they don't translate very well into humans. We have an awful time trying to get decent responses to allergic stimuli with mice and guinea pigs! Rodents have very robust immune systems in my experience.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581886/

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#83

Post by EmlynC » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 9:26 AM UTC

atlantic wrote: post #79

Thriptic wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact of the matter is that translational life science, medical device development, and pharmaceutical development are not safely possible without animal experimentation at this time. Our in vitro and computer models are simply not good enough to accurately mimic the human body. It's completely legitimate to take the stance that animals should never suffer, but then you must also be willing to accept that our abil…

For me personally, it doesn't make any kind of sense to force members of other species to live miserably and undergo various forms of de facto torture so I can avoid disease and live longer. It seems a bit selfish. I understand other people can and do take other positions on this matter.

Animal experimentation is repellant to many people, I can see why. The point is that society has decided that they'd prefer well-researched, empirically-observed working medicines.

Regulation must strike a compromise between allowing research to continue with enough oversight to limit abuse. It is the sort of compromise developers use with security; enough to limit abuse, but not too much that no-one can use the system!

Re: I Was an Animal Experimenter

#84

Post by Luc » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:12 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #80

Luc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we took that as a measure ('is this so important that it can save human lives'), we'd stop the vast majority of testing on animals. So that would be an easy win. But the lowest hanging fruit is killing animals for meat. Mainly for the joy of having a nice taste in their mouth people who don't really need it eat vast quantities of clever, sentient animals who lead miserable, short lives. The trade off seems ea…

My point was more that logically deriving your moral beliefs from reasonable-sounding principles isn't a very reliable method of ethics because you end up at very strange consequences, and if you maintain them because of the logical validity of your chain of reasoning, you quickly become a crackpot: example, anarcho-capitalists, or people who really like Ayn Rand. I wasn't really looking for an argument about animal…

I got your point about the logic sequence, and I meant to convey that while that is something that I found appealing in the book, it is not by far the only foundation for its conclusions.

As for your second paragraph, I don't think it stands up to scrutiny.