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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that's the great argument you think it is.

Doesn't it seem a bit coercive if the people who want/need this are so desperate for it that they literally cannot care about the ethics of the company behind the product?

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I guess it depends on how important you hold the lives of lab mice considering they make up the vast majority of the 1500 number cited.

I have no idea how that matters to the argument I made. I'm very confused by your statement in the context of what I said.

The key distinction here is that "unnecessary" isn't really an objective measure. You are taking that for granted, while the person replying to you was not.

Ah. That makes sense. Thank you.

I assume you also never kill mosquitos, flies, or any other kind of pests, or take antibiotics and vaccines?

I think you misunderstand science and are maybe presuming that it’s okay to be sloppy because it will eventually result in a cure, and the only people who are disagreeing with you are animal rights activists.

What people are actually criticizing is that this technology is built on shaky science with sloppy experiments casting doubt on any claimed medical breakthroughs. We cannot just presume that because the possible quality of life increase is massive that we should stop caring about ensuring a quality of life increase.

It’s entirely possible (and has happened historically) where someone over promises a massive quality of life increase and it thereby ends up shortening peoples lives and causes more suffering precisely because whistleblowers at animal trials were ignored.

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