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Well my story with the research bureaucracy is, a coworker had to fill out a notice that he got some money for a conference from outside the university and he d
by yk 9y ago
Well my story with the research bureaucracy is, a coworker had to fill out a notice that he got some money for a conference from outside the university and he dutifully filled out everything. Thing is, as a theoretical physicist you are supposed to fill out the first page, check the box on page 27, that there is not conflict of interest, and sign the thing. Any answer on certain questions will trigger a public hearing by some very obscure board.
Public hearing means, that poor guy has to go there in case the public has questions. He filled out everything, so he had to go to the anti-corruption board and the nuclear safety commission and so on. After roughly three weeks of him whining that he always sits there like an idiot, I got curious and came along to one of the hearings, definitely for some reason other than watching him sit there like an idiot, or so I claim.
That was the animal cruelty (against) commission and at the hearing were the committee, a very nervous working group, one unhappy postdoc and a grad student who just wants to watch the show. The PI of the working group then gave a presentation on the sad reality, that you can't study pain receptors if you anesthetize the mouse. (Apparently that was not the first time they were there, so I got just the part on why they are certain that there is really no way to get a statistical meaningful result with less mice.)
Really drove home the point that these procedures are not designed for the convenience of theoretical physicist, but are designed to tackle really hard problems.
- hawkice 9y agoIf the ethical problems of rat suffering are really hard problems, why is it utterly mundane for people to buy products at home depot to deliberately poison them for days and days until they succumb to internal bleeding, for no other reason then "it was bothering me, existing in my house"? Perhaps we should or could start caring, but we definitely do not even acknowledge there being a meaningful question there in any other element of human life.
- munin 9y agoFortunately for us, the IRB only governs human experimentation. You need very little approval to experiment on animals, in the US at least.
- euyyn 9y agoWhat a medical professor at MIT HST told me is exactly the opposite, at least for "higher order" mammals like pigs. The checks are more strict because the animal can't possibly consent to you doing the experiment on it.
- munin 9y agoI dunno what to tell you, the Belmont report was about humans. It's right there in the name. Animal research is often regulated under a framework, just not the IRB. My training was pretty clear on that.
- euyyn 9y agoI mean, he didn't say it was handled by the IRB. He just told me it was more strict. Maybe that was specific to MIT.
- munin 9y agoInteresting. At the institutions I'm familiar with, you can do all kinds of unspeakable crap to animals and no one cares unless PETA gets wind of it.
- euyyn 9y agoIf memory serves me well, a friend of mine there killed mutant zebrafish larvae, after being done with them, with bleach (as the approved protocol). And another friend at Harvard cut the heads off lab rats with scissors like Heidi plucking flowers. My understanding is the less you look like a human in the grand scheme of things, the more unspeakable crap we're comfortable with doing to you.
- mmirate 9y ago"Hard problems"? They're mice, for crying out loud!