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> But one of Van Hooser’s biggest pushes is to make the university’s invisible population feel seen. He encourages scientists to name animal workers in meeting

> But one of Van Hooser’s biggest pushes is to make the university’s invisible population feel seen. He encourages scientists to name animal workers in meeting posters and publications. He also invites researchers to visit animal facilities (their labs are often in a different part of campus) to explain the importance of their science. This sounds grim that this is a big push. Scientists not even working on their own animals, leaving technicians to kill them without ever thanking the technician, and the technician never knowing why animals they feed and clean after for years suffer and die.

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
Becoming too attached will ruin the experiment. Science is done under controlled conditions with as much uncertainty and randomness removed as possible. It's not ideal but we don't have any better options unless you want to do mass sacrifice of animals at scale and use Monte Carlo to derive results.
- serf 4y ago
  >It's not ideal but we don't have any better options as someone else noted, a lot of this is done as a form of grant-securing, and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis. a 'better option' would be the removal of such political and economical games from facilities that are supposed to be doing research; this reduces the suffering and death without much loss to discovery and progress. the trick being that we, as humans in this world, have little hope of removing extraneous politics from where they do not belong. but I just care to point out that we're nowhere-near optimal w.r.t. how we operate in the research sector. it can be better.
  - searine 4y ago
    >and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis. The thing is, you can't just start and stop many kinds of animal research. For certain models, there needs to be ongoing maintenance of a breeding population so that that model is available for researchers when they need it for an experiment. Researchers spend decades making a particular knockout line, and you can't just stick it into a freezer for a rainy day. It has to be maintained or it will no longer exist. Nobody is getting rich off grants. Then maintenance is a necessity if research gains are to be made on these difficult diseases.
    - Fomite 4y ago
      This. The maintenance of many experimental populations is because you can't "spin up and spin down" animals like you can an EC2 instance. Perhaps you need functional colonies. Or specific lines of animals, etc. Science isn't done via single experiments - it's done by chains of them.
    - IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
      >>>>Nobody is getting rich off grants. University administrators and the pharma companies that leverage the "research" to push to market marginal improvement drugs would like to have a word.
- CaptainNegative 4y ago
  A lot of the research is entirely unnecessary. We know cadmium is biologically unnecessary. While it is important to quantify safe doses to understand the impact of pollution, getting the precise LD50 of it across various species does little to improve health outcomes. We already know that dosages above 10 micrograms/kg of body weight is carcinogenic and should be avoided, so establishing where in the 100,000-300,000 microgram/kg range the LD50 resides does nothing for us.
  - jmcmaster 4y ago
    The best LD50 story I've heard was an Agriculture Canada scientist working on biocontrols for pests (think natural pathogenic organisms like fungi or bacteria to control weeds instead of chemical pesticide). Policy and commercialization required an LD50 for a bacterium they were working with. It is nontoxic; the lab calculated the volume of bacterial solution at commercial application strength that it would take for a rat to drown (but obviously did not harm any animals). Sometimes regulatory compliance needs creativity. Unfortunate that not all labs are able to work similarly, especially as you say for doses where we already know harmful levels and LD50 is a bureaucratic requirement or an easy paper.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      I'm already imagining the vapid "400x the LD50" comments that the usual scumbags will be typing when someone somewhere falls into a tank of it and drowns...
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  I think there is plenty of room between "completely oblivious" and "emotionally attached enough to ruin results".
Fomite 4y ago
It's not as grim as you're considering. One of the things you want is people who know what they're doing taking care of the animals in question. When we're working with humans taking blood draws, we want trained phlebotomy technicians taking blood draws, not because we're monstrously detached from our subjects, but because our expertise is elsewhere (for example, antibody detection). If you're working with research animals, you want their care (and yes, their deaths) done and supervised by someone who is an expert in that specifically. Should researchers see the facilities their animals are housed in, and acknowledge the efforts of those workers? Absolutely. But that's hardly because scientists are uncaring - it's a result of things like the animal housing sites often being at the very periphery of campuses, and science generally having not done a good enough job acknowledging the efforts of technicians in all aspects of science, dating back decades.
- imoverclocked 4y ago
  The emotional toll of dispatching lots of small animals, even if you are not bonded with them, is real.
  - Fomite 4y ago
    I never said it wasn't - I know people who work in those facilities, and it takes a massive emotional toll. I'm just suggesting that the scientists who don't deal with their own animals aren't doing it because they're callous - it's because we need people who will do it right, and with minimal suffering to the animal.
    - musicale 4y ago
      > scientists who don't deal with their own animals aren't doing it because they're callous Much like meat eaters who avoid slaughterhouses...
      - JellyBeanThief 4y ago
        I think there's a worthwhile distinction between meat eaters and scientists. The meat eater, even if they eat only the minimum they think is nutritionally necessary, and even if they choose meat products from sources that minimize suffering, and even if they raise, care for, and kill the animal themselves, is fundamentally satisfying only their own body. The scientist, meanwhile, is aiming to build the understanding needed to eradicate illnesses and treat or reverse injuries, both in animals and in humans. They're even interested in building the understanding needed to replace animal meat with, e.g. vat grown meat or plant-based nutritional and culinary equivalents. The popular image of the scientist is that they are driven chiefly by curiosity. And certainly this is true of many scientists, more in some fields than in others. But there are a lot of scientists who see wrongness in what happens in the universe, and who will push at it until the universe disgorges a way to right it. Many of them are attracted to biology and medicine specifically because that's where the suffering is most obvious. A think a person like that deserves better than to be compared to a self-interested meat eater.

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago

Becoming too attached will ruin the experiment. Science is done under controlled conditions with as much uncertainty and randomness removed as possible. It's not ideal but we don't have any better options unless you want to do mass sacrifice of animals at scale and use Monte Carlo to derive results.

serf 4y ago
>It's not ideal but we don't have any better options as someone else noted, a lot of this is done as a form of grant-securing, and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis. a 'better option' would be the removal of such political and economical games from facilities that are supposed to be doing research; this reduces the suffering and death without much loss to discovery and progress. the trick being that we, as humans in this world, have little hope of removing extraneous politics from where they do not belong. but I just care to point out that we're nowhere-near optimal w.r.t. how we operate in the research sector. it can be better.
- searine 4y ago
  >and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis. The thing is, you can't just start and stop many kinds of animal research. For certain models, there needs to be ongoing maintenance of a breeding population so that that model is available for researchers when they need it for an experiment. Researchers spend decades making a particular knockout line, and you can't just stick it into a freezer for a rainy day. It has to be maintained or it will no longer exist. Nobody is getting rich off grants. Then maintenance is a necessity if research gains are to be made on these difficult diseases.
  - Fomite 4y ago
    This. The maintenance of many experimental populations is because you can't "spin up and spin down" animals like you can an EC2 instance. Perhaps you need functional colonies. Or specific lines of animals, etc. Science isn't done via single experiments - it's done by chains of them.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
    >>>>Nobody is getting rich off grants. University administrators and the pharma companies that leverage the "research" to push to market marginal improvement drugs would like to have a word.
CaptainNegative 4y ago
A lot of the research is entirely unnecessary. We know cadmium is biologically unnecessary. While it is important to quantify safe doses to understand the impact of pollution, getting the precise LD50 of it across various species does little to improve health outcomes. We already know that dosages above 10 micrograms/kg of body weight is carcinogenic and should be avoided, so establishing where in the 100,000-300,000 microgram/kg range the LD50 resides does nothing for us.
- jmcmaster 4y ago
  The best LD50 story I've heard was an Agriculture Canada scientist working on biocontrols for pests (think natural pathogenic organisms like fungi or bacteria to control weeds instead of chemical pesticide). Policy and commercialization required an LD50 for a bacterium they were working with. It is nontoxic; the lab calculated the volume of bacterial solution at commercial application strength that it would take for a rat to drown (but obviously did not harm any animals). Sometimes regulatory compliance needs creativity. Unfortunate that not all labs are able to work similarly, especially as you say for doses where we already know harmful levels and LD50 is a bureaucratic requirement or an easy paper.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    I'm already imagining the vapid "400x the LD50" comments that the usual scumbags will be typing when someone somewhere falls into a tank of it and drowns...
BobbyJo 4y ago
I think there is plenty of room between "completely oblivious" and "emotionally attached enough to ruin results".

Fomite 4y ago

It's not as grim as you're considering. One of the things you want is people who know what they're doing taking care of the animals in question. When we're working with humans taking blood draws, we want trained phlebotomy technicians taking blood draws, not because we're monstrously detached from our subjects, but because our expertise is elsewhere (for example, antibody detection). If you're working with research animals, you want their care (and yes, their deaths) done and supervised by someone who is an expert in that specifically. Should researchers see the facilities their animals are housed in, and acknowledge the efforts of those workers? Absolutely. But that's hardly because scientists are uncaring - it's a result of things like the animal housing sites often being at the very periphery of campuses, and science generally having not done a good enough job acknowledging the efforts of technicians in all aspects of science, dating back decades.

imoverclocked 4y ago
The emotional toll of dispatching lots of small animals, even if you are not bonded with them, is real.
- Fomite 4y ago
  I never said it wasn't - I know people who work in those facilities, and it takes a massive emotional toll. I'm just suggesting that the scientists who don't deal with their own animals aren't doing it because they're callous - it's because we need people who will do it right, and with minimal suffering to the animal.
  - musicale 4y ago
    > scientists who don't deal with their own animals aren't doing it because they're callous Much like meat eaters who avoid slaughterhouses...
    - JellyBeanThief 4y ago
      I think there's a worthwhile distinction between meat eaters and scientists. The meat eater, even if they eat only the minimum they think is nutritionally necessary, and even if they choose meat products from sources that minimize suffering, and even if they raise, care for, and kill the animal themselves, is fundamentally satisfying only their own body. The scientist, meanwhile, is aiming to build the understanding needed to eradicate illnesses and treat or reverse injuries, both in animals and in humans. They're even interested in building the understanding needed to replace animal meat with, e.g. vat grown meat or plant-based nutritional and culinary equivalents. The popular image of the scientist is that they are driven chiefly by curiosity. And certainly this is true of many scientists, more in some fields than in others. But there are a lot of scientists who see wrongness in what happens in the universe, and who will push at it until the universe disgorges a way to right it. Many of them are attracted to biology and medicine specifically because that's where the suffering is most obvious. A think a person like that deserves better than to be compared to a self-interested meat eater.