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Study That Impregnated Male Rats Stirs Controversy

56 points by samizdis 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago
While this is an interesting line of research it s too invasive to be useful to humans. Artificial wombs seem like an easier (?) to achieve goal
ping_pong 5y ago
I'm pretty desensitized to stuff, but this study is a horrifying. They basically mutiliated a rat by connecting it to another rat's circulatory system, implanted a uterus and then impregnanted it. It feels like this has crossed some boundaries of ethics. It's like that Russian experiment that decapitated a dog, connected it so that blood was recirculating through its brain, and then let it wake up. It's horrifying to think we can allow this in the name of science.
- rblatz 5y ago
  I just can’t imagine how this made it past IRB approval. It doesn’t really prove anything and it seems unnecessarily cruel.
- kibwen 5y ago
  I don't want to belittle your response, but this does not seem especially beyond the pale for the sort of thing rats get subjected to. I've done programming work for some world-class academic neuroscience/biology labs, I've taken the mandatory animal ethics trainings, and I've seen how the sausage is made. For the most part I'm actually pretty impressed at the ethical oversight that is exercised on behalf of animals, this particular university going well beyond the mandatory legal requirements imposed by the government. But rats, or at least one specific breed of rats, are fair game, and it gets pretty horrific.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    As I recall, there are some lab animals that are regulated, and some are not. And I don't remember exactly which, but it seemed kind of arbitrary.
    - sploitable 5y ago
      According to the pre-print, these researchers are based at "Naval Medical University, Shanghai, China" - a country with a terrible record of human rights violations and an even worse record when it comes to animal rights. Of 3,000 people surveyed in China, approximately 2,000 hadn't heard of the concept of "animal welfare". I'd be surprised if regulation on non-human animal experiements even existed in their jurisdiction.
      - skissane 5y ago
        Sometimes I wonder if Chinese scientists are going to make scientific advances that Western scientists won't, due to weaker ethical constraints enabling them to perform experiments that Western scientists can't, or lesser regulations enabling them to get the same experiments done faster and cheaper.
        haihaibye 5y ago
        If only they had accelarated a COVID-19 vaccine by a few months via human challenge trials.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        Yes, I'm saying, in the US, where we may pride ourselves on having standards, there are some lab animals that are exempt, and so I think there's a blind spot, where nobody (in the sense of the lay public) thinks about what's happening to them.
  - Fezzik 5y ago
    Is there any evidence that this type of -entirely inhumane- testing has ever yielded results that a person could argue justifies the cruelty? I feel like all I ever hear is that rat/mice testing is effectively inapplicable to humans… I don’t even know where the line is, but I feel like we’re nowhere near it, if it even exists at all. edit, for clarity: I think be have gone well beyond wherever the ethical line is, not below/beneath… for the first time I was confused by the downvotes, maybe that explains it?
    - sploitable 5y ago
      In fact there are many counter examples. Thalidomide had no negative effects on non-human animals, but created notoriously deformed children in humans. Similary, I think it was paracetamol which when tested on some non-human animal is 100% lethal, and had they tested on those species then this common, essential medicine would never have progressed to the human trial stage. A classic case is the link between lung cancer and smoking. Millions of dollars of public money went to the big tobacco companies in the name of "cancer research". Dispite being able to induce lung cancer in dogs by restraining them and forcing the to chain smoke for hours on end, these were not the results they wanted. IIIRC, it took research with human volunteers before the scientific consensus that we have today came about because the "animal models" did not represent human physiology.
      - skissane 5y ago
        > Thalidomide had no negative effects on non-human animals, but created notoriously deformed children in humans That's not actually true; it causes birth defects in animals as well. Only limited animal testing was performed before it was approved for use in humans; more extensive animal testing, which did demonstrate birth defects, was performed only after it had been withdrawn due to causing human birth defects. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12677202/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12677202/
      - wombatpm 5y ago
        I believe the studies were done with a single isomer, which was safe and is still available. The racemic mixture was sold commercially but never tested until later. IIRC the bench top process produced a single isomer, but the scaled up process messed with the chirality producing the racemic mixture.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  The most troublesome part of the article is that any mention of ethics focuses on how this will affect humans and little is mentioned about the cruelty of treating the rats this way. I don't understand how people can be so calloused. I guess they are all fairly confident that karma is not real.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    It's not that at all. The question is whether the cruelty can be justified in service of a greater good, or if it's just plain cruelty to satisfy aimless curiosity.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      Why would that reasoning apply only to certain animals and not others? If it's okay to be cruel to rats for the service of the greater good, then why not dogs, apes or dolphins? Why not humans? Where and how do you draw the line?
      - cm2187 5y ago
        Well there is a line. I don't think twice using insecticide when confronted to a mosquito.
        paopoi 5y ago
        Killing a mosquito is an act of self preservation, as valid now as it was 10.000 years ago. Many of us live an existence pretty removed from the threats of the wild, but we we’re not totally detached from the need to “protect” ourselves. :)
      - throwaway675309 5y ago
        I'm not going to defend this study, but we already have a line between humans and nonhumans, particularly when legally speaking. For example, the sentences handed down for killing another human are far more severe than killing an animal. These lines already exist.
- BoiledCabbage 5y ago
  > It's like that Russian experiment that decapitated a dog, connected it so that blood was recirculating through its brain, and then let it wake up. A side point, but that Russian dog experimentation is so creepy. I remember watching a video of it on youtube I think, and even while knowing it was all genuine footage, was in absolute stunned disbelief at what I was watching - thinking that it had to be fake.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  I think if more people knew about the realities of animal testing and experimentation, they would be slightly less barbaric.
vmception 5y ago
Well, I find many of the experiments on mice to be totally messed up and the justifications arbitrary. I do not therefore find this one more absurd. I think the pushback due to “male pregnancy with multiple surgeries” is unwarranted, unless all mice experiments are also called into question. It is useful to find that uterus + pregnancy blood = major contributing factors to carrying a fetus to full term regardless of sex, as it rules many things out. It is useful criticism to understand these are not the only factors. In that light the experiment was a success and not unnecessary, unless all mice experiments are equally called into question.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Yes this did seem excessively grizzly, but then all the pushback in the latter half was on "male pregnancy", which was awfully suspicious. Maybe it would be good to find some other conjoined circulatory systems + organ transplant studies for context.
- hall0ween 5y ago
  "all mice studies" is broad. i've been a part of humane behavioral studies with rats. hell there's a "do rats laugh" study out there, and the answer is yes. what I'm saying is there's a broad assortment of rodent studies, that vary in terms of mutilation or usefulness to society. this one rates high (especially wrt to the projects i've been a part of) on the mutilation scale and low on the usefulness scale. imagine being one of a "parabionts" throughout the gestation period of a human baby. it's not feasible.
nnoyingvegoon 5y ago
Serious question: if we can, and are comfortable with the idea of factory farms where millions of animals are killed everyday, why should we be outraged by this?
- brigandish 5y ago
  Because condoning the first wasn’t justifiable to begin with.
- sjtindell 5y ago
  The majority are fine with it, not everyone. And they are only fine with it because they are completely disconnected from it.
throw63788 5y ago
I do not get why this study is controversial. We routinely do stuff like freezing and transplanting embryos, or gender reassigment surgeries. 50% of population can not get pregnant. Birth rate in China and Japan is down, we need this sort of technology.
- TheTester 5y ago
  Pretty sure that stuff is controversial to the majority of the people in this planet maybe in a couple places like SF it is not but that is just because the social engineers have desensitized people, anyone even the most meat loving hunter in the world will get a tad horrified at what is described in this article. They basically mutilated a rat by connecting it to another rat's circulatory system, implanted a uterus and then impregnated it. That is just fucked up and things like GR are still pretty bonkers if you even understanding. Like a guy getting a hole that he has to dilate in order to keep open, and most descriptions of this kind of surgery they are disturbing even for the people that believe they want them...
  - mftrhu 5y ago
    > That is just fucked up and things like GR are still pretty bonkers if you even understanding. Like a guy getting a hole that he has to dilate in order to keep open, and most descriptions of this kind of surgery they are disturbing even for the people that believe they want them... Do you put lemon juice on your face often, or is it reserved for special occasions? We are not sitting around a campfire, so your spooky stories about minorities - which are totes real, guys, not inaccurate in the least! - seem a tad unnecessary. On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to mention the - irrelevant! - fact that SRS - with all its complications, such as the initial maintenance necessary to train the muscles and avoid scarring - was first created, and is very much still used, for cis people.
- sploitable 5y ago
  The reason it is controversial is because people who perform experiments on non-human animals are supposed to have be able to justify the necessity of doing such experiments, and "I was curious" is just not good enough. I expect the reason the birth rates are down in these countries is sociological. There are already too many people, I don't think we need more. There are literally millions of children in the world who need adopting.
throwawaysleep 5y ago
Why are rat rights a thing at all? We learned something. We learned something! Learning new knowledge is precious. Learning new knowledge is hard. And people will throw it away on whether vermin are being "mistreated." I also don't think that the future implications are the problem of the scientist. This discussion reminds me of how schools in the USA are expected to solve every social problem involving children. Let the scientists study their stuff. If we don't like a technology, we can just ban its use later.
- goatlover 5y ago
  > Why are rat rights a thing at all? Because it's unethical to cause unnecessary suffering. If rats experience suffering, then we should not cause them suffering as much as reasonably possible. We wouldn't want advanced aliens to treat us like we treat rats in experiments, just because we're smarter than rats.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    That is definitely a point that is made by modern ethics and is widely supported, but it’s not necessarily one that should be taken for granted. Q in Star Trek TNG treated us like this, and it’s a serious topic of debate whether we ended up better as a race as a result of his influences. I think that’s the crux of the debate for me: Are we treating rats as well as our learnings about them are capable of supporting? Would I trust aliens to treat me with better dignity than we’ve historically treated our own ‘lesser’ species, if it’ll cure cancer? Do we honor their social and thermal preferences? Do we design minimal experimentation and experiment judiciously? Do we monitor their pain levels using whatever means available and terminate experiments, and rats, early and painlessly — rather than force them to endure suffering for the sake of completionism? We absolutely should want alien experimenters to treat us like rats in experiments, because we should be treating rats with the maximum respect and dignity possible to us. We certainly can’t stop motivated aliens, but we can show them by example that we treat lesser species with dignity, and maybe they’ll do the same to us. Are we treating rats with the most dignity and respect possible? If not, then we deserve no better from aliens. This is why it’s important to me to consider the ethics of treatment of rats. Not to end all animal testing, but to ensure that we, with our big smart brains, are able to find it in ourselves to treat well those beings we view as lesser. It sounds ridiculous to discuss it in terms of aliens, but that’s what we are to rats, and that viewpoint makes it a lot less ridiculous to consider. ps. I would absolutely turn myself over to alien science if the need was great enough, especially if my quality of life was heading downhill, but only if I knew it would benefit the rest of you.
bpodgursky 5y ago
Comments calling the study pointless, but if society is going all-in on sex changes, seems like we might as well seal the deal and make MtF reassignment actually functional. Right now just end up with a bunch of sterilized guy/girls and that's not useful for anyone. More honorable death for the mouse than testing out the latest shampoo at least.
- slavak 5y ago
  > Right now just end up with a bunch of sterilized guy/girls and that's not useful for anyone. People's worth and validity are not measured by their ability to produce offspring. This isn't even specifically a transgender issue.
  - throwawaysleep 5y ago
    I don't agree with his phrasing, but I am sure that some trans people would like to have children.
areoform 5y ago
This research is awe inspiring in its brilliance. The fact that humans had this perverse reaction to it is absolutely fascinating to me. And it is in a service to a greater cause. I am happy that this work was done. We need to do more! edit: This comment is positive on purpose. The default pessimism in these comments is unwarranted. And the research has a lot of potential. Some foreseeable. Some not. For e.g., A lot of comments are making remarks such as, "it just shows male blood is detrimental to pregnancy." However, this isn't what the research shows. The research demonstrates that certain proteins are required to sustain the pregnancy. That's a fairly remarkable insight. Isolating these proteins, specifying them, and then attempting to measure the precise amounts of these should help to reduce miscarriages of intentional pregnancies in our species. That's an amazing development. It's a useful model with significant applications.
- goatlover 5y ago
  It's repulsive and horrible to the rats. We wouldn't want it done to us.
- mjfl 5y ago
  not really. They mostly showed that male blood interferes with normal female pregnancy. They could have done this through less invasive, more precise means, like transfusion, which would have allowed them to select precisely what part of male blood they would add back in.
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  > And it is in a service to a greater cause. Which is? The argument presented by scientists in the article is that they don’t believe it offers anything useful.
- hall0ween 5y ago
  This comment must be bait.
Semaphor 5y ago
Those offended by this, do you see this as worse than how most animals for eating are treated? Essentially, a short time of harsh torture vs years of less harsh torture. If you do, is one okay because it’s for cheap food and the other is only for science? I tried to phrase this as non-offending as possible, so please treat this like a serious question.
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  If you read the article, the controversy is because other scientists are arguing there is nothing learned here that is applicable elsewhere. In essence, it’s torture without any purpose or benefit to society. Cruelty in animal farming is bad, but it does serve to feed human populations.
  - hombre_fatal 5y ago
    Well, bullshit aside, how many of us reading this just eat meat because it makes our taste buds feel good? 100% or 99%? That seems even worse than torture for the pursuit of knowledge.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Yes, all-you-can-eat restaurants which serve meat should be banned before vivisection.
    - type0 5y ago
      I know plenty of vegans and vegetarians who support the use of experimental animals for medical purposes because they like everyone else use medicines! But sometimes there is a line to be drawn, this "experiment" does a huge disservice to all legitimate research that need support from the public. Even an undergraduate could see that it wouldn't provide anything we didn't already know, it's an engineering showmanship, you don't have to be a professor in reproductive physiology to see that.
themgt 5y ago
There's an ongoing and growing debate regarding the ethics of uterus transplantation ("UTx") and specifically male UTx, and it's hard not to read this study in that light - that the eventual goal of this research is its application to human beings. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6821981/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6821981/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15532739.2019.1599764 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15532739.2019.1... Uterine transplant offers the same promise of a solution for males or trans individuals wishing to gestate a child as it does for genetic females with UFI. Nevertheless, the Montreal Criteria require that the recipient be a genetic female. This warrants both justification and discussion. To date, only female recipients have been used in animal and human trials of uterine transplant. There are many interesting yet daunting theoretical medical issues concerning uterine transplant with a nongenetic female recipient, including the creation of adequate uterine vascularization de novo, the necessity for appropriate hormone replacement to sustain implantation and pregnancy, and the placement of the uterus in a nongynecoid pelvis. Personally I think society needs to draw a line, somewhere. It's becoming harder to define where that line should be, but this ghoulish commodification of our bodies with its prerequisite torture of countless helpless animals is just not something I can accept as moral. How many tens of thousands of rats and chimps will we need to torture and kill for the patented FDA-approved $5 million male UTx procedure with expected multi-billion annual revenue? In the future will the rich post instagram celebrations of their purchase of a transplanted "surrogate" uterus from a female in need of the money? The transhumanist dream of designer human bodies may eventually be inevitable, but if this is the cost we have to pay to pursue that dream with today's primitive technology, that cost is too high.
- aqsalose 5y ago
  Despite downvotes, I think this is a reasonable concern, especially concerning all morally grey areas of surrogacy and black areas with current organ harvesting and past forced sterilization programs. Reproductive organs and rights to have them are much more important, so all the moral issues with transplants become more pronounced and important when reproductive organs become potential transplants. What would CCP do in Xinjiang (or any of their death row prisoners) if there were a market for reproductive organ transplants? Voluntary participation in a market for reproductive transplants seems fraught with ethical issues. It is one thing to sell a kidney when you have too, in exchange for some amount of money and possible later health issues, but totally another if you lose the ability produce offspring. Will the hypothetical transplant sellers have position to negotiate in the full price of lost offspring? These issues are too late to be resolved when the technology exists, because at that point there is tremendous pressure for anyone with any power to take the path of least resistance and maybe the largest personal profit. It is possible that the ethical route is not to do some kind of research (because we can), but start developing approaches we not yet can do but would result in a better future.
flaq10 5y ago
Studies like these will be the new norm if the gender fascists, who think that everything can be engineered, win. We now have a "birthing biological male"! Real life applications will follow, comrades.
erwald 5y ago
there was a discussion about experiments on rats here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27491498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27491498 :)

56 points by samizdis 5y ago

While this is an interesting line of research it s too invasive to be useful to humans. Artificial wombs seem like an easier (?) to achieve goal

ping_pong 5y ago

I'm pretty desensitized to stuff, but this study is a horrifying. They basically mutiliated a rat by connecting it to another rat's circulatory system, implanted a uterus and then impregnanted it. It feels like this has crossed some boundaries of ethics. It's like that Russian experiment that decapitated a dog, connected it so that blood was recirculating through its brain, and then let it wake up. It's horrifying to think we can allow this in the name of science.

rblatz 5y ago
I just can’t imagine how this made it past IRB approval. It doesn’t really prove anything and it seems unnecessarily cruel.
kibwen 5y ago
I don't want to belittle your response, but this does not seem especially beyond the pale for the sort of thing rats get subjected to. I've done programming work for some world-class academic neuroscience/biology labs, I've taken the mandatory animal ethics trainings, and I've seen how the sausage is made. For the most part I'm actually pretty impressed at the ethical oversight that is exercised on behalf of animals, this particular university going well beyond the mandatory legal requirements imposed by the government. But rats, or at least one specific breed of rats, are fair game, and it gets pretty horrific.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  As I recall, there are some lab animals that are regulated, and some are not. And I don't remember exactly which, but it seemed kind of arbitrary.
  - sploitable 5y ago
    According to the pre-print, these researchers are based at "Naval Medical University, Shanghai, China" - a country with a terrible record of human rights violations and an even worse record when it comes to animal rights. Of 3,000 people surveyed in China, approximately 2,000 hadn't heard of the concept of "animal welfare". I'd be surprised if regulation on non-human animal experiements even existed in their jurisdiction.
    - skissane 5y ago
      Sometimes I wonder if Chinese scientists are going to make scientific advances that Western scientists won't, due to weaker ethical constraints enabling them to perform experiments that Western scientists can't, or lesser regulations enabling them to get the same experiments done faster and cheaper.
      - haihaibye 5y ago
        If only they had accelarated a COVID-19 vaccine by a few months via human challenge trials.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      Yes, I'm saying, in the US, where we may pride ourselves on having standards, there are some lab animals that are exempt, and so I think there's a blind spot, where nobody (in the sense of the lay public) thinks about what's happening to them.
- Fezzik 5y ago
  Is there any evidence that this type of -entirely inhumane- testing has ever yielded results that a person could argue justifies the cruelty? I feel like all I ever hear is that rat/mice testing is effectively inapplicable to humans… I don’t even know where the line is, but I feel like we’re nowhere near it, if it even exists at all. edit, for clarity: I think be have gone well beyond wherever the ethical line is, not below/beneath… for the first time I was confused by the downvotes, maybe that explains it?
  - sploitable 5y ago
    In fact there are many counter examples. Thalidomide had no negative effects on non-human animals, but created notoriously deformed children in humans. Similary, I think it was paracetamol which when tested on some non-human animal is 100% lethal, and had they tested on those species then this common, essential medicine would never have progressed to the human trial stage. A classic case is the link between lung cancer and smoking. Millions of dollars of public money went to the big tobacco companies in the name of "cancer research". Dispite being able to induce lung cancer in dogs by restraining them and forcing the to chain smoke for hours on end, these were not the results they wanted. IIIRC, it took research with human volunteers before the scientific consensus that we have today came about because the "animal models" did not represent human physiology.
    - skissane 5y ago
      > Thalidomide had no negative effects on non-human animals, but created notoriously deformed children in humans That's not actually true; it causes birth defects in animals as well. Only limited animal testing was performed before it was approved for use in humans; more extensive animal testing, which did demonstrate birth defects, was performed only after it had been withdrawn due to causing human birth defects. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12677202/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12677202/
    - wombatpm 5y ago
      I believe the studies were done with a single isomer, which was safe and is still available. The racemic mixture was sold commercially but never tested until later. IIRC the bench top process produced a single isomer, but the scaled up process messed with the chirality producing the racemic mixture.
DangitBobby 5y ago
The most troublesome part of the article is that any mention of ethics focuses on how this will affect humans and little is mentioned about the cruelty of treating the rats this way. I don't understand how people can be so calloused. I guess they are all fairly confident that karma is not real.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  It's not that at all. The question is whether the cruelty can be justified in service of a greater good, or if it's just plain cruelty to satisfy aimless curiosity.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Why would that reasoning apply only to certain animals and not others? If it's okay to be cruel to rats for the service of the greater good, then why not dogs, apes or dolphins? Why not humans? Where and how do you draw the line?
    - cm2187 5y ago
      Well there is a line. I don't think twice using insecticide when confronted to a mosquito.
      - paopoi 5y ago
        Killing a mosquito is an act of self preservation, as valid now as it was 10.000 years ago. Many of us live an existence pretty removed from the threats of the wild, but we we’re not totally detached from the need to “protect” ourselves. :)
    - throwaway675309 5y ago
      I'm not going to defend this study, but we already have a line between humans and nonhumans, particularly when legally speaking. For example, the sentences handed down for killing another human are far more severe than killing an animal. These lines already exist.
BoiledCabbage 5y ago
> It's like that Russian experiment that decapitated a dog, connected it so that blood was recirculating through its brain, and then let it wake up. A side point, but that Russian dog experimentation is so creepy. I remember watching a video of it on youtube I think, and even while knowing it was all genuine footage, was in absolute stunned disbelief at what I was watching - thinking that it had to be fake.
heavyset_go 5y ago
I think if more people knew about the realities of animal testing and experimentation, they would be slightly less barbaric.

vmception 5y ago

Well, I find many of the experiments on mice to be totally messed up and the justifications arbitrary. I do not therefore find this one more absurd. I think the pushback due to “male pregnancy with multiple surgeries” is unwarranted, unless all mice experiments are also called into question. It is useful to find that uterus + pregnancy blood = major contributing factors to carrying a fetus to full term regardless of sex, as it rules many things out. It is useful criticism to understand these are not the only factors. In that light the experiment was a success and not unnecessary, unless all mice experiments are equally called into question.

Ericson2314 5y ago
Yes this did seem excessively grizzly, but then all the pushback in the latter half was on "male pregnancy", which was awfully suspicious. Maybe it would be good to find some other conjoined circulatory systems + organ transplant studies for context.
hall0ween 5y ago
"all mice studies" is broad. i've been a part of humane behavioral studies with rats. hell there's a "do rats laugh" study out there, and the answer is yes. what I'm saying is there's a broad assortment of rodent studies, that vary in terms of mutilation or usefulness to society. this one rates high (especially wrt to the projects i've been a part of) on the mutilation scale and low on the usefulness scale. imagine being one of a "parabionts" throughout the gestation period of a human baby. it's not feasible.

nnoyingvegoon 5y ago

Serious question: if we can, and are comfortable with the idea of factory farms where millions of animals are killed everyday, why should we be outraged by this?

brigandish 5y ago
Because condoning the first wasn’t justifiable to begin with.
sjtindell 5y ago
The majority are fine with it, not everyone. And they are only fine with it because they are completely disconnected from it.

throw63788 5y ago

I do not get why this study is controversial. We routinely do stuff like freezing and transplanting embryos, or gender reassigment surgeries. 50% of population can not get pregnant. Birth rate in China and Japan is down, we need this sort of technology.

TheTester 5y ago
Pretty sure that stuff is controversial to the majority of the people in this planet maybe in a couple places like SF it is not but that is just because the social engineers have desensitized people, anyone even the most meat loving hunter in the world will get a tad horrified at what is described in this article. They basically mutilated a rat by connecting it to another rat's circulatory system, implanted a uterus and then impregnated it. That is just fucked up and things like GR are still pretty bonkers if you even understanding. Like a guy getting a hole that he has to dilate in order to keep open, and most descriptions of this kind of surgery they are disturbing even for the people that believe they want them...
- mftrhu 5y ago
  > That is just fucked up and things like GR are still pretty bonkers if you even understanding. Like a guy getting a hole that he has to dilate in order to keep open, and most descriptions of this kind of surgery they are disturbing even for the people that believe they want them... Do you put lemon juice on your face often, or is it reserved for special occasions? We are not sitting around a campfire, so your spooky stories about minorities - which are totes real, guys, not inaccurate in the least! - seem a tad unnecessary. On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to mention the - irrelevant! - fact that SRS - with all its complications, such as the initial maintenance necessary to train the muscles and avoid scarring - was first created, and is very much still used, for cis people.
sploitable 5y ago
The reason it is controversial is because people who perform experiments on non-human animals are supposed to have be able to justify the necessity of doing such experiments, and "I was curious" is just not good enough. I expect the reason the birth rates are down in these countries is sociological. There are already too many people, I don't think we need more. There are literally millions of children in the world who need adopting.

throwawaysleep 5y ago

Why are rat rights a thing at all? We learned something. We learned something! Learning new knowledge is precious. Learning new knowledge is hard. And people will throw it away on whether vermin are being "mistreated." I also don't think that the future implications are the problem of the scientist. This discussion reminds me of how schools in the USA are expected to solve every social problem involving children. Let the scientists study their stuff. If we don't like a technology, we can just ban its use later.

goatlover 5y ago
> Why are rat rights a thing at all? Because it's unethical to cause unnecessary suffering. If rats experience suffering, then we should not cause them suffering as much as reasonably possible. We wouldn't want advanced aliens to treat us like we treat rats in experiments, just because we're smarter than rats.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  That is definitely a point that is made by modern ethics and is widely supported, but it’s not necessarily one that should be taken for granted. Q in Star Trek TNG treated us like this, and it’s a serious topic of debate whether we ended up better as a race as a result of his influences. I think that’s the crux of the debate for me: Are we treating rats as well as our learnings about them are capable of supporting? Would I trust aliens to treat me with better dignity than we’ve historically treated our own ‘lesser’ species, if it’ll cure cancer? Do we honor their social and thermal preferences? Do we design minimal experimentation and experiment judiciously? Do we monitor their pain levels using whatever means available and terminate experiments, and rats, early and painlessly — rather than force them to endure suffering for the sake of completionism? We absolutely should want alien experimenters to treat us like rats in experiments, because we should be treating rats with the maximum respect and dignity possible to us. We certainly can’t stop motivated aliens, but we can show them by example that we treat lesser species with dignity, and maybe they’ll do the same to us. Are we treating rats with the most dignity and respect possible? If not, then we deserve no better from aliens. This is why it’s important to me to consider the ethics of treatment of rats. Not to end all animal testing, but to ensure that we, with our big smart brains, are able to find it in ourselves to treat well those beings we view as lesser. It sounds ridiculous to discuss it in terms of aliens, but that’s what we are to rats, and that viewpoint makes it a lot less ridiculous to consider. ps. I would absolutely turn myself over to alien science if the need was great enough, especially if my quality of life was heading downhill, but only if I knew it would benefit the rest of you.

bpodgursky 5y ago

Comments calling the study pointless, but if society is going all-in on sex changes, seems like we might as well seal the deal and make MtF reassignment actually functional. Right now just end up with a bunch of sterilized guy/girls and that's not useful for anyone. More honorable death for the mouse than testing out the latest shampoo at least.

slavak 5y ago
> Right now just end up with a bunch of sterilized guy/girls and that's not useful for anyone. People's worth and validity are not measured by their ability to produce offspring. This isn't even specifically a transgender issue.
- throwawaysleep 5y ago
  I don't agree with his phrasing, but I am sure that some trans people would like to have children.

areoform 5y ago

This research is awe inspiring in its brilliance. The fact that humans had this perverse reaction to it is absolutely fascinating to me. And it is in a service to a greater cause. I am happy that this work was done. We need to do more! edit: This comment is positive on purpose. The default pessimism in these comments is unwarranted. And the research has a lot of potential. Some foreseeable. Some not. For e.g., A lot of comments are making remarks such as, "it just shows male blood is detrimental to pregnancy." However, this isn't what the research shows. The research demonstrates that certain proteins are required to sustain the pregnancy. That's a fairly remarkable insight. Isolating these proteins, specifying them, and then attempting to measure the precise amounts of these should help to reduce miscarriages of intentional pregnancies in our species. That's an amazing development. It's a useful model with significant applications.

goatlover 5y ago
It's repulsive and horrible to the rats. We wouldn't want it done to us.
mjfl 5y ago
not really. They mostly showed that male blood interferes with normal female pregnancy. They could have done this through less invasive, more precise means, like transfusion, which would have allowed them to select precisely what part of male blood they would add back in.
ViViDboarder 5y ago
> And it is in a service to a greater cause. Which is? The argument presented by scientists in the article is that they don’t believe it offers anything useful.
hall0ween 5y ago
This comment must be bait.

Semaphor 5y ago

Those offended by this, do you see this as worse than how most animals for eating are treated? Essentially, a short time of harsh torture vs years of less harsh torture. If you do, is one okay because it’s for cheap food and the other is only for science? I tried to phrase this as non-offending as possible, so please treat this like a serious question.

ViViDboarder 5y ago
If you read the article, the controversy is because other scientists are arguing there is nothing learned here that is applicable elsewhere. In essence, it’s torture without any purpose or benefit to society. Cruelty in animal farming is bad, but it does serve to feed human populations.
- hombre_fatal 5y ago
  Well, bullshit aside, how many of us reading this just eat meat because it makes our taste buds feel good? 100% or 99%? That seems even worse than torture for the pursuit of knowledge.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Yes, all-you-can-eat restaurants which serve meat should be banned before vivisection.
  - type0 5y ago
    I know plenty of vegans and vegetarians who support the use of experimental animals for medical purposes because they like everyone else use medicines! But sometimes there is a line to be drawn, this "experiment" does a huge disservice to all legitimate research that need support from the public. Even an undergraduate could see that it wouldn't provide anything we didn't already know, it's an engineering showmanship, you don't have to be a professor in reproductive physiology to see that.

themgt 5y ago

There's an ongoing and growing debate regarding the ethics of uterus transplantation ("UTx") and specifically male UTx, and it's hard not to read this study in that light - that the eventual goal of this research is its application to human beings. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6821981/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6821981/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15532739.2019.1599764 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15532739.2019.1... Uterine transplant offers the same promise of a solution for males or trans individuals wishing to gestate a child as it does for genetic females with UFI. Nevertheless, the Montreal Criteria require that the recipient be a genetic female. This warrants both justification and discussion. To date, only female recipients have been used in animal and human trials of uterine transplant. There are many interesting yet daunting theoretical medical issues concerning uterine transplant with a nongenetic female recipient, including the creation of adequate uterine vascularization de novo, the necessity for appropriate hormone replacement to sustain implantation and pregnancy, and the placement of the uterus in a nongynecoid pelvis. Personally I think society needs to draw a line, somewhere. It's becoming harder to define where that line should be, but this ghoulish commodification of our bodies with its prerequisite torture of countless helpless animals is just not something I can accept as moral. How many tens of thousands of rats and chimps will we need to torture and kill for the patented FDA-approved $5 million male UTx procedure with expected multi-billion annual revenue? In the future will the rich post instagram celebrations of their purchase of a transplanted "surrogate" uterus from a female in need of the money? The transhumanist dream of designer human bodies may eventually be inevitable, but if this is the cost we have to pay to pursue that dream with today's primitive technology, that cost is too high.

aqsalose 5y ago
Despite downvotes, I think this is a reasonable concern, especially concerning all morally grey areas of surrogacy and black areas with current organ harvesting and past forced sterilization programs. Reproductive organs and rights to have them are much more important, so all the moral issues with transplants become more pronounced and important when reproductive organs become potential transplants. What would CCP do in Xinjiang (or any of their death row prisoners) if there were a market for reproductive organ transplants? Voluntary participation in a market for reproductive transplants seems fraught with ethical issues. It is one thing to sell a kidney when you have too, in exchange for some amount of money and possible later health issues, but totally another if you lose the ability produce offspring. Will the hypothetical transplant sellers have position to negotiate in the full price of lost offspring? These issues are too late to be resolved when the technology exists, because at that point there is tremendous pressure for anyone with any power to take the path of least resistance and maybe the largest personal profit. It is possible that the ethical route is not to do some kind of research (because we can), but start developing approaches we not yet can do but would result in a better future.

flaq10 5y ago

Studies like these will be the new norm if the gender fascists, who think that everything can be engineered, win. We now have a "birthing biological male"! Real life applications will follow, comrades.

erwald 5y ago

there was a discussion about experiments on rats here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27491498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27491498 :)