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Comment by asciimo | Hacker News Reader

I hoped technology would reduce animal exploitation. It does in some areas, like cell farming to create food without animals. And synthetic models for pharmaceutical research. Maybe this branch of research can evolve to eliminate animals as well.

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There will still exist a fascinating dichotomy, up until we can predict result without either simulation or animal models. An ideal engineered organism would be a delightfully weird homunculus, and a sufficiently advanced simulation could be deemed to be a living creature too.

Perhaps it is best to make sure that lab technicians feel a great deal of empathy for the animals they work with.

Have to be careful, though. Too much empathy and you'll quit your job.

I would hope instead that they refuse to do certain procedures. Then if someone else gets asked to do the same procedure in hope of less empathy there should be alarms going off.

The lab technicians will after all be the experts on the subject; not academics on an ethics board.

The sheer number of animals abused and killed for food [0][1] is 3 orders of magnitude larger than the number for research [2] (at least in USA). Animal research is more abstractly upsetting-sounding than killing animals for food (perhaps because we've been doing it for a briefer part of our species's existence), but the horrid conditions of most livestock raised for food in the US don't seem any better than those of lab animals; at least rats are anesthetized for the more gruesome experiments. There's also no clear reason to eat meat other than pleasure and food tradition, whereas animal medical experiments provide a unique means to massively improve our physical wellbeing.

I think that once we've reduced our meat consumption by 99.9%, then it might make some sense to spend energy coming up with alternatives to animal testing for medicine. For now, it's hard for me to see animal testing as the key bottleneck. If you profiled your code and found that one badly-implemented function was taking up 99.9% of your execution time, why would you ever waste any time optimizing the 0.1% function?

[0] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/report...

[1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/report...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218261/

Looks like we're moving in that direction for some things with organ on a chip systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ-on-a-chip

Technology may eventually help reduce humans who don't mind exploitation.

Beyond that, I'm afraid it'll be business as usual.

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