Comment by contextual | Hacker News Reader

Comment by contextual | Hacker News Reader

Even putting aside the moral and ethic issues, how can animal testing be allowed to continue when the studies are rife with bias and error? Officials at America's National Institutes of Health (NIH) state over three quarters of all published biomedical findings are irreproducible due to fraud and incompetence.

Moreso, the number of retractions has grown over tenfold in the past decade - but it's only 0.2% of the 1.4 million papers published in academic journals. The studies that were retracted were only done so when fundamental flaws were exposed by others. Many more false studies go on unnoticed and continue to be referenced.

Worse of all, 90 percent of drugs that were "successfully" tested on animals then failed in human trials.

EDIT: It should be a criminal offence for researchers to subject animals to harm and death and produce fraudulent papers.

Sources: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t...

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/how-get-rid-animal-tes...

What makes you think that they aren't trying to get it right? The animal to human failure rate isn't really related to scientist's insight, skill, or knowledge, but to the fact that biology is really fucking complicated. A researcher can pour their life and soul into their work, watch it work its way through all the layers of testing, showing consistent and sencial results, and then watch it blow up when it reaches a human, cause surprise! Third and higher order effects can't be predicted!

Also, your line of logic seems like a non-sequitur. The poor overall quality of papers (irreproducability for example) has nothing to do with animal testing. If you put aside moral and ethical issues of animal testing, the question isn't 'how can animal testing continue given how crappy their results are' its 'how can testing continue given how crappy their results are'.

What makes you think that they aren't trying to get it right?

There's countless examples of fraud, complacency and bias in scientific research, but I'll just quote the wise (albeit fictional) Jedi Master Yoda: "Do, or do not. There is no try." Especially when the fate of sentient life hangs in the balance.

Still doesn't make sense. There are countless examples of shit gone wrong, but until you can prove that it is systemic and/or that the responsibility of the fraud, complacency, etc lie in the majority (or hell, say significant minority) of researchers and scientist, it's really not fair to paint them all with the same brush.

Certainly there are countless examples of fraud, complacency and bias in all human endeavors, but that hardly indites all of humanity to "not trying to get it right".

Furthermore, "do or do not" is childish when applied out of its proper context. The intention of "do or do not" is to remind you that in terms of your effect on the world, the effort you put into an unsuccessful act doesn't get you any closer to the actual act. What "do or do not" does not make -any- sense in is in situations with many factors out of your control (especially factors you don't even know about!), and especially when trying to judge someone or a group of people.

I'm not sure exactly what point you're trying to make, but I think its that "when the fate of sentient beings hang in the balance, how hard you tried to do it right doesn't matter in my judgement of your ability to conduct your work". Which is completely nonsense. Go tell that you a paramedic, or a doctor right after they had someone die on them.

Submitting and publishing dodgy, fraudulent or sloppy studies isn't trying, it undermines all of science. And when animals are subjected to pain and death for fame or career advancement, it's morally corrupt, even criminal.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Science is the art of improving successive approximations. If you think that a result is useless unless it is absolutely perfect, you are simply wrong.

I really, really, really hate having to make this argument, but:

Would you rather that all the drugs that didn't succeed in animals fail in humans first?

If humans were tested, many of these badly designed and fraudulent experiments would have never been done in the first place.

A well-designed experiment that kills the subjects still kills the subjects. I'd rather that those subjects not be humans.

I agree that the experimental rigor ought be higher, mind you.

Then how would we have found the 10% of drugs that did succeed?

Putting ethical and philosophical issues front-and-center, absolutely. Why is this a difficult argument to make? It's our disease. It affects our bodies. If we want a cure then we should put our own skin in the game.

"Our" or "your"?

So basically you want to treat humans like animals?

I assume you think you want to treat animals like humans, but that's not going to happen. If people listened to you it would end up going the other way.

So I'm glad your opinion is a marginal one and that virtually everyone on the planet disagrees with you.

Traditionally, we would be exclusively using "others" usually identified by race and religion, or perhaps socioeconomic class, so that's a pretty big wrench in the ethical / philosophical works. Not as simple ethically as rodents vs humans, more like rodents vs (most likely) non-white humans. Probably better off killing rodents than deciding which religion to genocide.

The Germans did some scientific research under this protocol in the early 40s, its still highly controversial WRT should the results be destroyed and ignored out of respect or kept around as a memorial or ...

Point of inquiry:

Suppose it costs the animal kingdom 1,000,000,000,000 microbial animals of various sorts, 1,000,000,000 macroscopic arthropods, 1,000,000 vertebrates, and 10,000 mammals to live one life according to the lifestyle we expect in western society.

If that's so, is it your moral/ethical/philosophical duty to kill yourself, and to kill other humans, whose environmental footprint is so great? Why not?

You who would see species as peers, as independent entities worthy of a respect for their collective rights, I accuse you of being insufficiently imaginative, and lacking any sense of perspective. Your footprint on this earth is FAR costlier than the 1/1000th of a cow you didn't consume for dinner.

Human exceptionalism, as a formal ethical principle, is pragmatically required if you wish your system of philosophy to be persuasive to essentially anyone. If you can't see this, you are either entirely ignorant of the processes of industrialized civilization, or you're exhibiting magical thinking. The species boundary forms a convenient natural Schelling Point at which it is particularly useful to distinguish between things deserving of empathy on equal footing with us, and things which are subhuman, inferior, not capable and thus not useful to incorporate into our model. Yes, things beyond this boundary still think and learn, still feel pain, and still form social relationships... but they're not, they can't be, the same as us, because they're not capable of fulfilling the roles of, nor exerting the pressure on our social contracts necessary to change them.

A lot of animal testing is general research, not drug testing. For example, it's fairly impossible to do brain research on anything but a brain. Also, a lot of research is basically infinite trial-and-error until you find something that works; doing this on a scale large enough for humans would kill lots of people, versus lots of mice. It's also faster with mice because they breed quickly and prodigiously, so we don't have to wait 300 years for enough testing to find a result.

Your basic argument is "it's error prone so we shouldn't do it." But that's exactly why we do testing - to work out the errors! The fact that all of these failures are occurring is proof that doing human research would simply take more time, not less.

"Organ on a chip" is also only useful to test for specific response. It does not show how the experiment works when introduced to an entire system of organs.

I envision a future when we can grab a handful of organs on a chip, then decide on what kind of experiment we want to run. Want to see if something affects the cells in bone marrow? Bone chip. Want to understand if a drug is cleared exclusively through the kidney? Bone chip + kidney chip vs bone chip + kidney + liver chip. Want to test subcutaneous vs intravenous delivery kinetics? Put together a bunch of chips: bone, kidney, liver, gut, and skin.

Hell, if you're going that way, let's go the whole nine yards and grow mindless clone bodies for testing and transplants. It'd still probably be more expensive and time-consuming than animal experimentation, but it would allow for "human-like" testing faster than we can do today.

I'm pretty sure "the future" is going to be based on time, money and technology. The organ-on-a-chip thing is just one of many possibilities. But until it's cheaper and more efficient than the cost of feeding and keeping rats, keep on dreaming.

This is laughable.

You aren't testing kidneys (or whatever) you are testing your chips.

But your chips and the real world are only partially the same.

If we knew the real world so perfectly we could make a good chip we wouldn't need those experiments.

(This is the same problem as you get when you try to do physics via simulation.)

yep, the same logic of vivisection, concentration camp hypothermia experiments, Tuskegee syphilis experiment, etc... - "it advances science"

>Also, a lot of research is basically infinite trial-and-error until you find something that works; doing this on a scale large enough for humans would kill lots of people, versus lots of mice.

Doing research on humans vs. mice would [these days, though not even 40-60 years ago] force to do the research differently, mindfully and efficiently, instead of meat chopping factory it is now.

We use the resources we have available.

The sad thing about most of the experiments you list is that we gained a lot of useful knowledge from them. Sure it's easy to now look back and be horrified by them because we have the luxury of being able to do so, a luxury that is (in part) derived from the knowledge those experiments give us.

And yes, I think 100 years from now people WILL look back at us and be horrified about how do experiment on animals. But they'll be able to do so because they can afford that luxury. A luxury that's being built now, using those horrible methods.

Morals are never free of context.

Of course it would force them to do the research differently. Like, not at all, for example. Some research involves seeing processes which can only come after death. I can't even begin to explain all the other research that wouldn't happen, because I am not a bioresearcher.

It's really easy to judge an entire range of research with zero insight on what actually goes on or why. I would suggest you go ask a bioresearcher to explain what they do to you, and why it is necessary to do it that way on animals, before you call it "a meat chopping factory".

Science is a process and not a state. It doesn't need to be perfect, as long as you take slightly more steps forward than backwards the extent of knowledge progresses.

I think virtually no one likes experimenting on animals and scientists are acutely aware of all sorts of problems with these systems, but what else should humankind do? just twiddle our thumbs until better alternatives come around? The better alternatives also often come out of this type of research.

I agree, but I can't wait until organs on a chip are cheaper than rats!

I generally agree with your criticisms, but what alternative do you propose? Of course we should have better vetting of studies before publication, more replication effort, and ideally a process that doesn't incentivize fraud/incompetence. But how to implement such a system? Also, I don't see how these issues are limited to animal studies. Your (entirely valid) criticisms of bias, uncaught error, and irreproducability apply much more broadly, to the vast majority of published modern experimental science, again raising the question of how we can address those issues so that the scientific literature is reliable.

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