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Fortunately for us, the IRB only governs human experimentation. You need very little approval to experiment on animals, in the US at least.
by munin 9y ago
Fortunately 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.