How 'animal methods bias' is affecting research careers | Hacker News Reader

How 'animal methods bias' is affecting research careers

nature.com

36 pointsLinuxBender9 comments

I'm a bit confused on whether "other models that may more reliably mimic human biology" generally exist today. The article mentions a couple non-animal models, but do we know that they are better analogues, or are they just ideas of where research might go if people didn't expect in vivo results? The point of in vivo studies, after all, is that it's easy to build artificial models which accidentally strip out some important complicating factor.

There really is no substitute for testing your drug in a living organism.

Other models (in silico, in vitro, etc) are mostly used for screening. They are not anywhere close to replacing animal or human testing.

> In general, Krebs says, NGO grants for animal-free research tend to be smaller than the longer-term, multimillion-dollar awards offered by government sources such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest funder of biomedical research.

... for now. Given the widely circulated "naughty words" list for grants [1], I would not be surprised at all if this kind of research gets labeled and discarded as "woke" just as well.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2025/03/15/these-197-t...

With that terms index, there will be no more mathematical statistics research!

Pushing FUD on the entire academic sector, that's what it is. Pressure people into absurd self-censorship.

A friend of mine studies Chlamydia, which, when intracellular, replicates in a structure called an inclusion. So all of the Chlamydia researchers had to rewrite their proposals to say "parasitophorous vacuole" which had fallen out of favor.

Should've thought of that before they started punishing scientists who dissented from gender ideology. Something had to be done to stop it stomping further on the rights of women, children, and gay people.

> Should've thought of that before they started punishing scientists who dissented from gender ideology.

What are you talking about? No one got "punished for dissenting".

> Something had to be done to stop it stomping further on the rights of women, children, and gay people.

Again: what are you talking about?!

This is 2025. You aren’t going to debate facism. It isn’t in good faith.

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