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I would assume it's because monkeys are more intelligent than the animals we tend to eat; cows, chickens, sheep & pigs. Also, intentionally paralysing a creatu

I would assume it's because monkeys are more intelligent than the animals we tend to eat; cows, chickens, sheep & pigs. Also, intentionally paralysing a creature, leaving it to live in that condition, and then performing experimental surgery/procedures on it is significantly different than slaughtering it. Whilst I appreciate the scientists mean well, and I do understand how this could benefit humanity; this sort of research still seems unethical to me, and at the very least makes me feel sick. As a software developer and reverse engineer, this feels like hacking anyway. It's not particularly scientific just to "capture and replay" data without much understanding of how it works.

kakarot 10y ago
Someone else already debunked your intelligence argument, but I would like to add something. Think about how the medical field developed... for biological science you often are going to have to break a few eggs. It sucks... I really understand the motivations you have behind your feelings about hurting animals for human gain, but there isn't any "manual" for biology, hacking away is often the only way to test hypotheses.
snowwrestler 10y ago
Trying things and seeing what happens is the essence of science; the only way we have to try to figure things out. Scientists have to get replication of an effect before they can design further experiments to dig into its details. As to whether it's unethical--it sickens me too. It's horrifying but what if it gives us the key to solving spinal paralysis? It's a classic moral dilemma. I highly recommend this short story, which explores this sort of dilemma: http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.pdf http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.p...
- Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
  Science starts with observation, not experimentation. Honestly, if this was software, I'd consider this sort of approach as nothing short of pathetic. When I first reverse engineered firmware flashing software for mobile phones, experimentation was the absolute last thing I did - and all that experimentation could do was damage my phone, not another living creature. Instead I recorded observations of software operating under normal use (USB traces) and identified patterns in this. Only once I'd spent a long time determining patterns and built a model did I decide it was safe to perform some experimentation. To be fair, biological systems are much more complicated than computer systems written by other humans. However, observation should always come first! This study seems crude to me.
  - smhost 10y ago
    > We next exploited cortical signals to decode the temporal structure of extensor and flexor hotspot activation. The spiking activity recorded from the left motor cortex displayed cyclic modulations that were phase-locked with right leg movements (Extended Data Fig. 4a). We developed a decoder that calculated the probability of foot-strike and foot-off events from this modulation to anticipate the activation of extensor and flexor hotspots associated with right leg movements (Extended Data Fig. 4b). Evaluations in two intact monkeys showed that the decoder accurately predicted these gait events in real time over extended periods of locomotion, including when initiating and terminating gait, and during rest. (Source: doi:10.1038/nature20118) Is that kind of what you mean?
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      "Intact monkeys" is this a nice way of saying that they hadn't paralysed them yet?
      - smhost 10y ago
        Ya. They collected data from monkeys 1 and 2, then they injured monkeys 2 and 3. They collected data from monkeys 2 and 3, then they removed the spinal cord from all three.
  - scawf 10y ago
    Do you think scientists are not recording normal use case ? Of course they use technology to observe and record normal and pathological "use". Do you think brain implants are made without using scanner, IRM...?
  - 234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
    You can't compare the two because one was created by humans and one was not. It's ridiculous to compare these two. Here's a more accurate scenario: You need to debug this software without a keyboard, mouse, monitor. The language is an assembly language written by aliens with no documentation that uses quantum states in protons to manage the machine. Oh by the way, it's encrypted and obfuscated into nothing but MOV instructions. And there's 100 billion MOV instructions. That's the kind of complexity we are talking about here. So get off your highhorse and let the experts who just made a paralyzed monkey walk do their jobs.
biofox 10y ago
Scientists are not sadists, and welfare is taken extremely seriously. What people don't see are the efforts to enrich living environments, provide sedation and analgesia, or the reams of protocols on monitoring and rapidly terminating experiments if the animal is distressed. None of this exists in livestock farming. Also, for me intelligence is besides the point. If someone is suffering, I don't factor their IQ into whether or not I should help them. What I am saying is that if we are happy to accept animals suffering for our benefit, then we should not be selective about it.
- Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
  The point is that intelligence is sentience. The more aware you are of your own condition the more capable you are of suffering. A jellyfish does not suffer the same as a human, at least not in the way we'd typically measure suffering.
  - biofox 10y ago
    I partially agree with you, but sentience isn't the same as intelligence. From having had dogs I get the impression that most of them are every bit as sentient as I am. There's also a large amount of speciesism involved in how we feel that's not concerned with intelligence or sentience. As an example, I can conceive of a scenario where someone with a severe learning disability might be less aware and less capable of abstract problem solving than some corvids are. That wouldn't affect my decision of which one to assist in a disaster.
  - pvaldes 10y ago
    and sentience is the new soul
- lostlogin 10y ago
  You are making a generalisation here. There is plenty of poor treatment of animals in science. I'm sure things are better than they were but claiming that everything is good and everyone is too doesn't square with human behaviour at all.
mentos 10y ago
Philosophical and metaphysical question, what do we do about all of the suffering that has occurred in the past? There is no accumulator for suffering, each state exists independent of the next. If it already happened once, how is it any different if it happens again?
- posterboy 10y ago
  Ever heard of karma? Or the popular scientific butterfly effect?
citricsquid 10y ago
The intelligence argument is nonsense. Pigs are as intelligent as dogs. Describe the treatment of livestock (pigs, chickens, cows) but frame it as something that is happening to dogs and you'll drive hundreds of thousands of outraged meat eaters to signing a petition. The reason is cognitive dissonance, we're taught from the moment we can understand that it's okay to farm animals and very few people ever really think about the consequences of that. To be humane means "having or showing compassion or benevolence" which is about as far from how you can describe the treatment of livestock that you can get. To suggest that the the real problem with livestock farming is the slaughter demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of where the real problems lie, slaughter is one of the most humane parts of livestock farming. Dairy cows spend more than half a decade being repeatedly raped and abused until they're slaughtered because their bodies have been destroyed by the milking process, and they spend that half a decade having their young snatched away from them over and over again. If having the emotional intelligence to mourn your stolen young isn't enough to justify ending the inhumane treatment then it's certainly not intelligence that humans care about. If this research is unethical then learn about gestation crates, which immobilise pigs for months of their pregnancy.
- imaginenore 10y ago
  It's not nonsense. Monkeys are smarter than dogs, pigs, cows, chickens.
- perseusprime11 10y ago
  This is great comment! I always wondered why people were ok eating cows and pigs and not cats and dogs. It's got to be how we are conditioned from childhood to obey conventional thinking. Dogs are faithful to humans so we cannot eat them....
- coygui 10y ago
  When I search for "gestation crates", Wikipedia tells me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestation_crate#/media/File:Sow_stalls_us_map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestation_crate#/media/File:So... I'm sure you don't explicitly mean this, :)
- sandworm101 10y ago
Retric 10y ago
Pigs are actually really intelligent as in higher than dogs. So, it really depends on the type of money.
Cpoll 10y ago
> Also, intentionally paralysing a creature, leaving it to live in that condition, and then performing experimental surgery/procedures on it is significantly different than slaughtering it. It seems very similar to intentionally placing an animal in a cage it can't move around in and leaving it to live in that condition. The conditions are, as I understand it, more cruel and unusual than "experimental surgery/procedures."

kakarot 10y ago

Someone else already debunked your intelligence argument, but I would like to add something. Think about how the medical field developed... for biological science you often are going to have to break a few eggs. It sucks... I really understand the motivations you have behind your feelings about hurting animals for human gain, but there isn't any "manual" for biology, hacking away is often the only way to test hypotheses.

snowwrestler 10y ago

Trying things and seeing what happens is the essence of science; the only way we have to try to figure things out. Scientists have to get replication of an effect before they can design further experiments to dig into its details. As to whether it's unethical--it sickens me too. It's horrifying but what if it gives us the key to solving spinal paralysis? It's a classic moral dilemma. I highly recommend this short story, which explores this sort of dilemma: http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.pdf http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.p...

Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
Science starts with observation, not experimentation. Honestly, if this was software, I'd consider this sort of approach as nothing short of pathetic. When I first reverse engineered firmware flashing software for mobile phones, experimentation was the absolute last thing I did - and all that experimentation could do was damage my phone, not another living creature. Instead I recorded observations of software operating under normal use (USB traces) and identified patterns in this. Only once I'd spent a long time determining patterns and built a model did I decide it was safe to perform some experimentation. To be fair, biological systems are much more complicated than computer systems written by other humans. However, observation should always come first! This study seems crude to me.
- smhost 10y ago
  > We next exploited cortical signals to decode the temporal structure of extensor and flexor hotspot activation. The spiking activity recorded from the left motor cortex displayed cyclic modulations that were phase-locked with right leg movements (Extended Data Fig. 4a). We developed a decoder that calculated the probability of foot-strike and foot-off events from this modulation to anticipate the activation of extensor and flexor hotspots associated with right leg movements (Extended Data Fig. 4b). Evaluations in two intact monkeys showed that the decoder accurately predicted these gait events in real time over extended periods of locomotion, including when initiating and terminating gait, and during rest. (Source: doi:10.1038/nature20118) Is that kind of what you mean?
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    "Intact monkeys" is this a nice way of saying that they hadn't paralysed them yet?
    - smhost 10y ago
      Ya. They collected data from monkeys 1 and 2, then they injured monkeys 2 and 3. They collected data from monkeys 2 and 3, then they removed the spinal cord from all three.
- scawf 10y ago
  Do you think scientists are not recording normal use case ? Of course they use technology to observe and record normal and pathological "use". Do you think brain implants are made without using scanner, IRM...?
- 234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
  You can't compare the two because one was created by humans and one was not. It's ridiculous to compare these two. Here's a more accurate scenario: You need to debug this software without a keyboard, mouse, monitor. The language is an assembly language written by aliens with no documentation that uses quantum states in protons to manage the machine. Oh by the way, it's encrypted and obfuscated into nothing but MOV instructions. And there's 100 billion MOV instructions. That's the kind of complexity we are talking about here. So get off your highhorse and let the experts who just made a paralyzed monkey walk do their jobs.

biofox 10y ago

Scientists are not sadists, and welfare is taken extremely seriously. What people don't see are the efforts to enrich living environments, provide sedation and analgesia, or the reams of protocols on monitoring and rapidly terminating experiments if the animal is distressed. None of this exists in livestock farming. Also, for me intelligence is besides the point. If someone is suffering, I don't factor their IQ into whether or not I should help them. What I am saying is that if we are happy to accept animals suffering for our benefit, then we should not be selective about it.

Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
The point is that intelligence is sentience. The more aware you are of your own condition the more capable you are of suffering. A jellyfish does not suffer the same as a human, at least not in the way we'd typically measure suffering.
- biofox 10y ago
  I partially agree with you, but sentience isn't the same as intelligence. From having had dogs I get the impression that most of them are every bit as sentient as I am. There's also a large amount of speciesism involved in how we feel that's not concerned with intelligence or sentience. As an example, I can conceive of a scenario where someone with a severe learning disability might be less aware and less capable of abstract problem solving than some corvids are. That wouldn't affect my decision of which one to assist in a disaster.
- pvaldes 10y ago
  and sentience is the new soul
lostlogin 10y ago
You are making a generalisation here. There is plenty of poor treatment of animals in science. I'm sure things are better than they were but claiming that everything is good and everyone is too doesn't square with human behaviour at all.

mentos 10y ago

Philosophical and metaphysical question, what do we do about all of the suffering that has occurred in the past? There is no accumulator for suffering, each state exists independent of the next. If it already happened once, how is it any different if it happens again?

posterboy 10y ago
Ever heard of karma? Or the popular scientific butterfly effect?

citricsquid 10y ago

The intelligence argument is nonsense. Pigs are as intelligent as dogs. Describe the treatment of livestock (pigs, chickens, cows) but frame it as something that is happening to dogs and you'll drive hundreds of thousands of outraged meat eaters to signing a petition. The reason is cognitive dissonance, we're taught from the moment we can understand that it's okay to farm animals and very few people ever really think about the consequences of that. To be humane means "having or showing compassion or benevolence" which is about as far from how you can describe the treatment of livestock that you can get. To suggest that the the real problem with livestock farming is the slaughter demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of where the real problems lie, slaughter is one of the most humane parts of livestock farming. Dairy cows spend more than half a decade being repeatedly raped and abused until they're slaughtered because their bodies have been destroyed by the milking process, and they spend that half a decade having their young snatched away from them over and over again. If having the emotional intelligence to mourn your stolen young isn't enough to justify ending the inhumane treatment then it's certainly not intelligence that humans care about. If this research is unethical then learn about gestation crates, which immobilise pigs for months of their pregnancy.

imaginenore 10y ago
It's not nonsense. Monkeys are smarter than dogs, pigs, cows, chickens.
perseusprime11 10y ago
This is great comment! I always wondered why people were ok eating cows and pigs and not cats and dogs. It's got to be how we are conditioned from childhood to obey conventional thinking. Dogs are faithful to humans so we cannot eat them....
coygui 10y ago
When I search for "gestation crates", Wikipedia tells me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestation_crate#/media/File:Sow_stalls_us_map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestation_crate#/media/File:So... I'm sure you don't explicitly mean this, :)
sandworm101 10y ago

Retric 10y ago

Pigs are actually really intelligent as in higher than dogs. So, it really depends on the type of money.

Cpoll 10y ago

> Also, intentionally paralysing a creature, leaving it to live in that condition, and then performing experimental surgery/procedures on it is significantly different than slaughtering it. It seems very similar to intentionally placing an animal in a cage it can't move around in and leaving it to live in that condition. The conditions are, as I understand it, more cruel and unusual than "experimental surgery/procedures."