Study That Impregnated Male Rats Stirs Controversy
the-scientist.com
the-scientist.com
It is useful to find that uterus + pregnancy blood = major contributing factors to carrying a fetus to full term regardless of sex, as it rules many things out. It is useful criticism to understand these are not the only factors. In that light the experiment was a success and not unnecessary, unless all mice experiments are equally called into question.
Maybe it would be good to find some other conjoined circulatory systems + organ transplant studies for context.
what I'm saying is there's a broad assortment of rodent studies, that vary in terms of mutilation or usefulness to society. this one rates high (especially wrt to the projects i've been a part of) on the mutilation scale and low on the usefulness scale. imagine being one of a "parabionts" throughout the gestation period of a human baby. it's not feasible.
I am happy that this work was done. We need to do more!
edit: This comment is positive on purpose. The default pessimism in these comments is unwarranted. And the research has a lot of potential. Some foreseeable. Some not.
For e.g., A lot of comments are making remarks such as, "it just shows male blood is detrimental to pregnancy." However, this isn't what the research shows.
The research demonstrates that certain proteins are required to sustain the pregnancy. That's a fairly remarkable insight. Isolating these proteins, specifying them, and then attempting to measure the precise amounts of these should help to reduce miscarriages of intentional pregnancies in our species.
That's an amazing development. It's a useful model with significant applications.
Which is?
The argument presented by scientists in the article is that they don’t believe it offers anything useful.
I've done programming work for some world-class academic neuroscience/biology labs, I've taken the mandatory animal ethics trainings, and I've seen how the sausage is made. For the most part I'm actually pretty impressed at the ethical oversight that is exercised on behalf of animals, this particular university going well beyond the mandatory legal requirements imposed by the government. But rats, or at least one specific breed of rats, are fair game, and it gets pretty horrific.
edit, for clarity: I think be have gone well beyond wherever the ethical line is, not below/beneath… for the first time I was confused by the downvotes, maybe that explains it?
That's not actually true; it causes birth defects in animals as well. Only limited animal testing was performed before it was approved for use in humans; more extensive animal testing, which did demonstrate birth defects, was performed only after it had been withdrawn due to causing human birth defects.
I think you inverted the meaning of the parent comment. They asked for exceptions where animal experiments do apply to humans, saying that the rule seems to be they don't.
Thalidomide was never approved for treating in nausea in pregnant women in the US. It was prescribed off label, but the FDA rejected it for that purpose.
Why did the FDA reject it if animal tests didn’t show deformities?
To be clear, that’s not a rhetorical question. I’ve heard rumors the FDA wasn’t convinced thalidomide would be effective - which is very different from worries over fetal abnormalities.
Do you know the background there?
Given the context that this experiment supposedly achieved something humans have wanted enough to risk their lives for, for quite some time, it seems like an astonishing accomplishment.
I, personally, would not trade these rats lives for a uterus, but I don't feel like I can decide for the rest of humanity.
There also must be an awful lot of research that's gone into fertility treatments in the past, was that justified, when it wasn't about the "unnatural" goal here?
Sentient beings do not want to be brutally experimented on. This self-selecting industry of sociopaths belongs in the 19th century.
This is obviously false, because transplanting a uterus to a genetic male was done on a human, voluntarily, long before this experiment.
I can't argue whether someone should be concerned about humans or rats and how much and what experiments are worth it. How you balance one creature's suffering with another. Nobody can or has ever answered that.
I meant to counter the idea that transplanting a uterus has to be without purpose and can only be attributed to idle cruelty.
They are, experimental animals have and should have bigger protections against the cruelty that can get directed to them, for warranted and unwarranted reasons.
A side point, but that Russian dog experimentation is so creepy. I remember watching a video of it on youtube I think, and even while knowing it was all genuine footage, was in absolute stunned disbelief at what I was watching - thinking that it had to be fake.
I tried to phrase this as non-offending as possible, so please treat this like a serious question.
Cruelty in animal farming is bad, but it does serve to feed human populations.
That seems even worse than torture for the pursuit of knowledge.
And people will throw it away on whether vermin are being "mistreated."
I also don't think that the future implications are the problem of the scientist. This discussion reminds me of how schools in the USA are expected to solve every social problem involving children. Let the scientists study their stuff. If we don't like a technology, we can just ban its use later.
Because it's unethical to cause unnecessary suffering. If rats experience suffering, then we should not cause them suffering as much as reasonably possible. We wouldn't want advanced aliens to treat us like we treat rats in experiments, just because we're smarter than rats.
I think that’s the crux of the debate for me: Are we treating rats as well as our learnings about them are capable of supporting? Would I trust aliens to treat me with better dignity than we’ve historically treated our own ‘lesser’ species, if it’ll cure cancer?
Do we honor their social and thermal preferences? Do we design minimal experimentation and experiment judiciously? Do we monitor their pain levels using whatever means available and terminate experiments, and rats, early and painlessly — rather than force them to endure suffering for the sake of completionism?
We absolutely should want alien experimenters to treat us like rats in experiments, because we should be treating rats with the maximum respect and dignity possible to us. We certainly can’t stop motivated aliens, but we can show them by example that we treat lesser species with dignity, and maybe they’ll do the same to us.
Are we treating rats with the most dignity and respect possible? If not, then we deserve no better from aliens.
This is why it’s important to me to consider the ethics of treatment of rats. Not to end all animal testing, but to ensure that we, with our big smart brains, are able to find it in ourselves to treat well those beings we view as lesser. It sounds ridiculous to discuss it in terms of aliens, but that’s what we are to rats, and that viewpoint makes it a lot less ridiculous to consider.
ps. I would absolutely turn myself over to alien science if the need was great enough, especially if my quality of life was heading downhill, but only if I knew it would benefit the rest of you.
> I would absolutely turn myself over to alien science if the need was great enough, especially if my quality of life was heading downhill, but only if I knew it would benefit the rest of you.
That's noble of you, but I'd rather the aliens left us alone if it was between that and experimenting on us for their (or our) own good. No thanks.
We can arbitrarily draw the line between human and the non human.
Giving up any pretence that there’s a rational argument to defend and not just something arbitrary only justifies the criticism.
I mean if the concern if experiments on live humans then why can't one just specifically address the concern and draw the line ?
If you think it's not arbitrary then you are free to make that case, and then I or someone else will point out flaws like the special pleading that is already glaring. Peter Singer's work on speciesism is a good place to find out the obstacles you will have in constructing a non-fallacious, non-arbitrary argument.
> Animal rights are a purely emotional impulse
That would be like saying you're going on holiday but there's no need to take account of the climate or weather.
Humans have emotions, therefore they are a consideration. To ignore emotions is not rational at all.
> We know that by training other humans not to harm humans we reduce the likelihood that we will face hardship. There is no reason to include animals in this system other than that some people feel more sympathy for them.
I, and many others throughout history would disagree with this assertion. As Tolstoy wrote: “As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.” Psychopaths that hunt humans are well known for beginning on small animals and working their way up.
You may say that not all of society are psychopathic, but then we could ask if you would want to live somewhere where animal rights are strong, like the UK, or China, where they aren't even part of public consciousness.
If the powerful treat the less powerful badly, then I'd say it's naive to rely on their making the same arbitrary distinction between humans and other animals as you're relying on here.
Edit: missed out that very important word!
Because when one is disproportionately powerful, it's one's responsibility to maintain high standards of ethics. It's the burden of being powerful. This almost fetish way of thinking about knowledge is wrong. Just because one can do something that will benefits does not mean it should be done, let's try to have a larger circle of empathy.
This research does not provide any life saving or (afaik) improving knowledge, what gives us the right to mess with another living being just because of curiosity?
Edit: wrong word used
When thinking about right, I usually go the inverse. What makes one not have that right?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6821981/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15532739.2019.1...
Uterine transplant offers the same promise of a solution for males or trans individuals wishing to gestate a child as it does for genetic females with UFI. Nevertheless, the Montreal Criteria require that the recipient be a genetic female. This warrants both justification and discussion. To date, only female recipients have been used in animal and human trials of uterine transplant. There are many interesting yet daunting theoretical medical issues concerning uterine transplant with a nongenetic female recipient, including the creation of adequate uterine vascularization de novo, the necessity for appropriate hormone replacement to sustain implantation and pregnancy, and the placement of the uterus in a nongynecoid pelvis.
Personally I think society needs to draw a line, somewhere. It's becoming harder to define where that line should be, but this ghoulish commodification of our bodies with its prerequisite torture of countless helpless animals is just not something I can accept as moral. How many tens of thousands of rats and chimps will we need to torture and kill for the patented FDA-approved $5 million male UTx procedure with expected multi-billion annual revenue? In the future will the rich post instagram celebrations of their purchase of a transplanted "surrogate" uterus from a female in need of the money?
The transhumanist dream of designer human bodies may eventually be inevitable, but if this is the cost we have to pay to pursue that dream with today's primitive technology, that cost is too high.
What would CCP do in Xinjiang (or any of their death row prisoners) if there were a market for reproductive organ transplants? Voluntary participation in a market for reproductive transplants seems fraught with ethical issues. It is one thing to sell a kidney when you have too, in exchange for some amount of money and possible later health issues, but totally another if you lose the ability produce offspring. Will the hypothetical transplant sellers have position to negotiate in the full price of lost offspring?
These issues are too late to be resolved when the technology exists, because at that point there is tremendous pressure for anyone with any power to take the path of least resistance and maybe the largest personal profit. It is possible that the ethical route is not to do some kind of research (because we can), but start developing approaches we not yet can do but would result in a better future.
Right now just end up with a bunch of sterilized guy/girls and that's not useful for anyone.
More honorable death for the mouse than testing out the latest shampoo at least.
People's worth and validity are not measured by their ability to produce offspring. This isn't even specifically a transgender issue.
50% of population can not get pregnant. Birth rate in China and Japan is down, we need this sort of technology.
Do you put lemon juice on your face often, or is it reserved for special occasions? We are not sitting around a campfire, so your spooky stories about minorities - which are totes real, guys, not inaccurate in the least! - seem a tad unnecessary.
On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to mention the - irrelevant! - fact that SRS - with all its complications, such as the initial maintenance necessary to train the muscles and avoid scarring - was first created, and is very much still used, for cis people.
The good reason is that many people want their own children and though you might find their desire immoral, they are not bound to accept your morality standards.