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Comment by quilombodigital | Hacker News Reader

"What better reward for a monkey, than a banana"? what about FREEDOM?

I am not a vegan/whatever/animal activist, but maybe we should allow terminally-ill or death-row volunteers for this kind of experiment... With good money for the family, and I think some people would like to help mankind in the end. It is better than dying without accomplishing anything in life.

So, you have at most one year with an inoperable tumor, and you will not travel because you want to be close to your family. Would you be a volunteer for this research, for 500 thousand dollars? (monkeys are cheaper, but you are the real deal)

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You said you’re not a vegan, so to be clear your okay with factory farms crushing pigs to death but minimally invasive surgery on monkeys so they can play pong is too far? I don’t care about your stance on animal consumption particularly, but don’t you find that a little hypocritical?

Yep, I agree this sounds hypocritical,but everybody has different "lines" to cross. I guess mine is how close they are to humans. (98%), and I also differentiate "food" from "experiment".

They crush pigs to death? What? Nothing would surprise me at this point, but I couldnt find a citation for that at first glance.

OP might be referring to pigs crushing each other to death because of overcrowding in badly-run farms and during transportation. Farmers don't throw pigs in trash compactors (and why would they? Non-compacted pigs is how they do earn their money.)

Patients undergoing brain surgeries are routinely asked to volunteer for neuroscientific studies and they often do so. Terminally ill patients also donate their brain tissue for tons of studies more often than you would think. But the scope of experiments that one can do with them and the available multimodal data available from parallel studies in human cortex is extremely limited.

On the other hand, non-human primates are readily available in a controlled environment, can be used to generate huge amounts of data specific to a diverse set of tasks and experiments that you just can not do on the human patients.

The brain is a complex machine that is extremely hard to decipher just by studying a single species or one kind of experiments. The need for studies across species with a hundred different ways of collecting and analysing data is essential to first understand the mechnasims of the brain and only then (hopefully) be able to causally alter it for specific applications in medicine and so on.

Yeah I'd volunteer for implant testing if I had a 6 month life expectancy due to a terminal illness.

I don't think it's a good idea to allow death-row inmates to do this though; They'd likely be pressured into volunteering as the only way to delay the execution.

This sounds like the plot of a movie: death-row inmate forced to volunteer for implant testing, but he manages to connect to some kind of military robot and fights for his freedom.

Death Rowbot (2022)

I did not thought about this, but at the same time, "punishment" cannot coexist with "reparation"? Money would go to victims.

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