6 ms·

I can say with confidence that this sort of thing would never occur in a modern research laboratory. Note that standards for ethical experimentation on animals

I can say with confidence that this sort of thing would never occur in a modern research laboratory. Note that standards for ethical experimentation on animals (including humans) hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s. A couple of points here: Any type of animal experimentation must be accompanied by an IACUC protocol that is approved by a committee, typically at least 3 people, and usually including a veterinarian, research scientists, and layperson. The protocol justifies why using animals is necessary for the research and exactly how the animals will be cared for during the experiments. Performing surgery on live animals - You have to be trained in the procedure by practicing on dead animals first. Any surgery that happens must be done under anesthesia using approved chemicals. For example, in fishes and amphibians, this is an anesthetic dose of MS-222. Sacrificing animals - Typical standards require that the experimenter sacrifice the animal quickly & humanely, using at least 2 methods (chemical and physical) to ensure that the animal is not suffering due to a sublethal dose of your chemical. Again for fishes, this is a lethal dose of MS-222 followed by either pithing or freezing. For rodents this is usually anesthesia followed by cervical dislocation. Experimental endpoints - You will not get your IACUC approved if you don't have a way of dealing with your live animals after your experiment is over. Simply killing them because you don't have money to keep them around is absolutely forbidden. For fishes, they get released back into the ocean or kept around for aquarium outreach purposes. The issue of animal rights is an important one. For example I personally think that the IACUC protocols don't go far enough. Nonvertebrate animals are typically not covered by IACUC at all so this means that it is legally above the board to vivisect slugs without anesthesia. Of course you might not think that slugs deserve rights but this is a debate that needs to happen. In particular many countries do not cover cephalopods (octopuses, squids, etc) under their animal use laws..

Red_Tarsius 11y ago
Thank you for spelling it out. As much as I empathize with the author, these articles are often misused by ignorant activists. In my country, years of research have been ruined thanks to the clueless. http://www.nature.com/news/animal-rights-activists-wreak-havoc-in-milan-laboratory-1.12847?wafflebotCursorId=1366791238000000:0:0 http://www.nature.com/news/animal-rights-activists-wreak-hav...
- stinos 11y ago
  One of the activists' pet peeves is also that there are viable alternatives for everything. Like MRI in humans for fields like neuroscience. Which is, at least partly, complete nonsense because of the lack of a decent temporal resolution. Yet this argument gets been repeated over and over again and as such believed in by many. One thing though: as far as I know (from people having worked in the US, with primates), the IACUC rules for housing like cage volume etc are still not really sufficient.
EmlynC 11y ago
I can confirm that this largely rings true for the UK. The Home Office is the body that deals with the certification of a specified procedure and provides the oversight that animal experimentation is done in the most humane manner that is practical for a given experiment. I recently completed my doctorate in Pharmacology and I have a Home Office license to perform specific surgical procedures on animals. I have training in surgery, anaesthesia and euthanasia which is routinely assessed to maintain my Home Office license. The details of the experimental protocol that the poster lists - deprive resource, validate behaviour and reward - are probably correct, sensationalised, but correct. I say that, because this reads like the sort of pain protocols I have been involved with in the past. The simple fact is that to explore whether a pain medication works, you must inflict pain, see whether your drug modifies pain behaviour and repeat to sufficient statistical power. The details of the experimenter dispatching (killing, euthanising ...) the animals with chloroform, en masse, in a plastic bag is a violation of his license and his colleagues license, it is not a listed method on Schedule 1 Method of Euthanasia. It is one of the facets of animal experimentation regulation that I am proud of, the humane killing of animals ensures minimal distress. The euthanasia regulation for animal experimentation are stricter than those in the food industry and far more stricter than the exemptions that religious faiths have when preparing meat. Non-vertebrates animals are covered by the ASPA 1986 guidelines in the UK for euthanasia and commonly you must present an anaesthetic regime for all uses of laboratory animals. Octopuses are explicitly named as they are one of the oldest laboratory animals in use — they were pivotal in understanding the role of ions and ion channel pumps in nervous transmission.
marincounty 11y ago
"Any surgery that happens must be done under anesthesia using approved chemicals." I had a girlfriend who was working on a some kind of graduate neuroscience degree in the late 90's. She used to tell me stories about students, and researchers killing/maiming animals in order to carry out their experiments. Her lab job was to kill rats in the lab(adults, and babies). She would slam their heads into a piece of granite. Some times multiple times. (btw--she had horrid dexterity) I asked her why they didn't administer some type of anesthetic--or kill the animals humanely. She told me they couldn't because chemicals might affect the brain, or body chemistry when analyzing the tissues. She told me endless stories about needless experiments on animals by students and faculty. They were not doing cutting edge research. She even admitted a lot of it was validating Current studies--so students could finish their studies in order to get that advance degree. I finally told her enough. She wasn't a bad person, just looking for the respect a advance degree in neurobiology would bring her. She wanted respect, and felt the degree would provide that. She dropped out of the program for personal reasons(she couldn't keep up with the studies mainly) and spent the next 10 years taking party drugs in San Francisco. She is now a vegetarian. I don't think anyone is regulating the treatment on campuses in the United States? My nephew is taking a biology class at a little college in Los Angeles. I asked them if they are still pithing frogs in order to basically show the students the heart will beat once severed from the frog. He said they are still doing this in freshman biology. So, there are no regulations in the United States on the treatment rodents and amphibians in schools and labs. I can state that with a fair amount of confidence! (The school he dropped out of was a private liberal arts school that accepted any kid who could come up with the tuition) We need to, at the least, stop killing animals on campuses in order to teach art student majors--biology and anatomy. Years ago some Researcher put a plywood cover on his truck. He then filled the truck with live piglets. He then went four wheel driving. He claimed to be studying orthopedic injuries.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Your story doesn't stand up to scrutiny. They were studying animal brain tissue, to the point that chemical sensitivity was important, but giant blunt force trauma wasn't? Why not use carbon dioxide or nitrogen asphyxiation (both are painless, the latter is 'mental traumaless') which wouldn't damage the animal at all, and which I know for a fact are the preferred methods at my old university (a fellow Ph D student was performing macular-degeneration drug treatment experiments on rabbits). Your final anecdote is also suspect: (1) no sources. But (2), let's grant it as true: the extreme actions of one individual have never been considered adequate justification for carte blanch restriction of anything.
vacri 11y ago
Note that standards for ethical experimentation ... hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s I used to joke "... and then in the 60s, Ethics was invented" regarding biology experiments...
stdbrouw 11y ago
Whether using animals is necessary for the research is one thing. I'd also quite like to know whether the research is necessary to start with. I assume that the research design when animals are involved is generally of a higher quality than it would've been otherwise, but still, so much drivel and nonsense gets published (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8124111 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8124111) that I can't help but wonder how many animals suffer because of a lack of scientific imagination and professionalism rather than because it's truly, absolutely needed to help discover life-saving drugs and treatments.
- EmlynC 11y ago
  Unfortunately, science isn't the sort of endeavour where anything can resolutely be considered necessary to start with. Arguably there should be some doubt about whether your research will lead to something important else you can't be doing anything novel. There is nonsense in any endeavour and that is why there are layers of ethics committees, reviews and audits within animal research that limits wanton nonsense. The price of any endeavour is that there will be waste — humans cannot help it — it is unfortunate that the waste is at the expense of animal life. The first article you link to is about the abuse of frequentist statistics, it is not a piece of nonsense primary research (1182327). The article is correct and an interesting read, but not in support of poor use of animal experiments. The second article (8124111) is about clinical research, not pre-clinical animal research although the arguments raised in the article are applicable to pre-clinical research. It is very difficult to find and expose nonsense research!
dnautics 11y ago
I am fairly certain that there is an ongoing experiment at the NIMH in Bethesda where they are creating lesions (scooping out sections of their brain) in Rhesus Monkey brains and observing behavioral effects. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15509386 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15509386 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18410164 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18410164 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/11902612_Effects_of_selective_neonatal_temporal_lobe_lesions_on_socioemotional_behavior_in_infant_rhesus_monkeys_%28Macaca_mulatta%29 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/11902612_Effects_of_... I personally am about to embark on a scientific project that ultimately leads to animal experimentation. It's the development of a chemotherapeutic. Perhaps it's a self-serving thing to say, but I think that's one of the few places where animal experimentation makes sense; even the next-generation anticancer drugs, which recruit the immune system, don't make sense to be tested in mice, because in order to transplant the cancer cells, you have to start with immune-system-less mice (otherwise the cancer gets depleted by the mouse's own immune system).
- EmlynC 11y ago
  Your point is quite right, I don't think it's self serving at all. Complex physiological diseases like cancer can be observed as tumours grafted to a scaffold in vitro, but you cannot observe the effect of drugs, it's relationship to the whole organism, without using a whole organism. Monkeys have immune responses that are as similar to humans as we can hope for. Further, Mice while they have some conservation of immune related genes there are many divergent expression of immune related genes including alterations in master-gene (cis) and innate immune gene (CD4) expression [1] which may explain why they don't translate very well into humans. We have an awful time trying to get decent responses to allergic stimuli with mice and guinea pigs! Rodents have very robust immune systems in my experience. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581886/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581886/
nhangen 11y ago
In 2005, I was finishing my senior year as a Psychology major at Wright State University in Ohio. We were forced to anesthetize and perform surgery on female mice without any formal training. This process often resulted in mutiliation at best, and death at worst. In fact, the mice often died during the injection, as we were not properly trained on how to administer injections. In fact, we were never trained by medical personnel at all, but instead by our teacher, who also had a lab full of large rodents undergoing brain experimentation. And this is only what they allowed us to see...

Red_Tarsius 11y ago

Thank you for spelling it out. As much as I empathize with the author, these articles are often misused by ignorant activists. In my country, years of research have been ruined thanks to the clueless. http://www.nature.com/news/animal-rights-activists-wreak-havoc-in-milan-laboratory-1.12847?wafflebotCursorId=1366791238000000:0:0 http://www.nature.com/news/animal-rights-activists-wreak-hav...

stinos 11y ago
One of the activists' pet peeves is also that there are viable alternatives for everything. Like MRI in humans for fields like neuroscience. Which is, at least partly, complete nonsense because of the lack of a decent temporal resolution. Yet this argument gets been repeated over and over again and as such believed in by many. One thing though: as far as I know (from people having worked in the US, with primates), the IACUC rules for housing like cage volume etc are still not really sufficient.

EmlynC 11y ago

I can confirm that this largely rings true for the UK. The Home Office is the body that deals with the certification of a specified procedure and provides the oversight that animal experimentation is done in the most humane manner that is practical for a given experiment. I recently completed my doctorate in Pharmacology and I have a Home Office license to perform specific surgical procedures on animals. I have training in surgery, anaesthesia and euthanasia which is routinely assessed to maintain my Home Office license. The details of the experimental protocol that the poster lists - deprive resource, validate behaviour and reward - are probably correct, sensationalised, but correct. I say that, because this reads like the sort of pain protocols I have been involved with in the past. The simple fact is that to explore whether a pain medication works, you must inflict pain, see whether your drug modifies pain behaviour and repeat to sufficient statistical power. The details of the experimenter dispatching (killing, euthanising ...) the animals with chloroform, en masse, in a plastic bag is a violation of his license and his colleagues license, it is not a listed method on Schedule 1 Method of Euthanasia. It is one of the facets of animal experimentation regulation that I am proud of, the humane killing of animals ensures minimal distress. The euthanasia regulation for animal experimentation are stricter than those in the food industry and far more stricter than the exemptions that religious faiths have when preparing meat. Non-vertebrates animals are covered by the ASPA 1986 guidelines in the UK for euthanasia and commonly you must present an anaesthetic regime for all uses of laboratory animals. Octopuses are explicitly named as they are one of the oldest laboratory animals in use — they were pivotal in understanding the role of ions and ion channel pumps in nervous transmission.

marincounty 11y ago

"Any surgery that happens must be done under anesthesia using approved chemicals." I had a girlfriend who was working on a some kind of graduate neuroscience degree in the late 90's. She used to tell me stories about students, and researchers killing/maiming animals in order to carry out their experiments. Her lab job was to kill rats in the lab(adults, and babies). She would slam their heads into a piece of granite. Some times multiple times. (btw--she had horrid dexterity) I asked her why they didn't administer some type of anesthetic--or kill the animals humanely. She told me they couldn't because chemicals might affect the brain, or body chemistry when analyzing the tissues. She told me endless stories about needless experiments on animals by students and faculty. They were not doing cutting edge research. She even admitted a lot of it was validating Current studies--so students could finish their studies in order to get that advance degree. I finally told her enough. She wasn't a bad person, just looking for the respect a advance degree in neurobiology would bring her. She wanted respect, and felt the degree would provide that. She dropped out of the program for personal reasons(she couldn't keep up with the studies mainly) and spent the next 10 years taking party drugs in San Francisco. She is now a vegetarian. I don't think anyone is regulating the treatment on campuses in the United States? My nephew is taking a biology class at a little college in Los Angeles. I asked them if they are still pithing frogs in order to basically show the students the heart will beat once severed from the frog. He said they are still doing this in freshman biology. So, there are no regulations in the United States on the treatment rodents and amphibians in schools and labs. I can state that with a fair amount of confidence! (The school he dropped out of was a private liberal arts school that accepted any kid who could come up with the tuition) We need to, at the least, stop killing animals on campuses in order to teach art student majors--biology and anatomy. Years ago some Researcher put a plywood cover on his truck. He then filled the truck with live piglets. He then went four wheel driving. He claimed to be studying orthopedic injuries.

XorNot 11y ago
Your story doesn't stand up to scrutiny. They were studying animal brain tissue, to the point that chemical sensitivity was important, but giant blunt force trauma wasn't? Why not use carbon dioxide or nitrogen asphyxiation (both are painless, the latter is 'mental traumaless') which wouldn't damage the animal at all, and which I know for a fact are the preferred methods at my old university (a fellow Ph D student was performing macular-degeneration drug treatment experiments on rabbits). Your final anecdote is also suspect: (1) no sources. But (2), let's grant it as true: the extreme actions of one individual have never been considered adequate justification for carte blanch restriction of anything.

vacri 11y ago

Note that standards for ethical experimentation ... hadn't really appeared until the 70s and 80s I used to joke "... and then in the 60s, Ethics was invented" regarding biology experiments...

stdbrouw 11y ago

Whether using animals is necessary for the research is one thing. I'd also quite like to know whether the research is necessary to start with. I assume that the research design when animals are involved is generally of a higher quality than it would've been otherwise, but still, so much drivel and nonsense gets published (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8124111 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8124111) that I can't help but wonder how many animals suffer because of a lack of scientific imagination and professionalism rather than because it's truly, absolutely needed to help discover life-saving drugs and treatments.

EmlynC 11y ago
Unfortunately, science isn't the sort of endeavour where anything can resolutely be considered necessary to start with. Arguably there should be some doubt about whether your research will lead to something important else you can't be doing anything novel. There is nonsense in any endeavour and that is why there are layers of ethics committees, reviews and audits within animal research that limits wanton nonsense. The price of any endeavour is that there will be waste — humans cannot help it — it is unfortunate that the waste is at the expense of animal life. The first article you link to is about the abuse of frequentist statistics, it is not a piece of nonsense primary research (1182327). The article is correct and an interesting read, but not in support of poor use of animal experiments. The second article (8124111) is about clinical research, not pre-clinical animal research although the arguments raised in the article are applicable to pre-clinical research. It is very difficult to find and expose nonsense research!

dnautics 11y ago

I am fairly certain that there is an ongoing experiment at the NIMH in Bethesda where they are creating lesions (scooping out sections of their brain) in Rhesus Monkey brains and observing behavioral effects. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15509386 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15509386 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18410164 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18410164 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/11902612_Effects_of_selective_neonatal_temporal_lobe_lesions_on_socioemotional_behavior_in_infant_rhesus_monkeys_%28Macaca_mulatta%29 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/11902612_Effects_of_... I personally am about to embark on a scientific project that ultimately leads to animal experimentation. It's the development of a chemotherapeutic. Perhaps it's a self-serving thing to say, but I think that's one of the few places where animal experimentation makes sense; even the next-generation anticancer drugs, which recruit the immune system, don't make sense to be tested in mice, because in order to transplant the cancer cells, you have to start with immune-system-less mice (otherwise the cancer gets depleted by the mouse's own immune system).

EmlynC 11y ago
Your point is quite right, I don't think it's self serving at all. Complex physiological diseases like cancer can be observed as tumours grafted to a scaffold in vitro, but you cannot observe the effect of drugs, it's relationship to the whole organism, without using a whole organism. Monkeys have immune responses that are as similar to humans as we can hope for. Further, Mice while they have some conservation of immune related genes there are many divergent expression of immune related genes including alterations in master-gene (cis) and innate immune gene (CD4) expression [1] which may explain why they don't translate very well into humans. We have an awful time trying to get decent responses to allergic stimuli with mice and guinea pigs! Rodents have very robust immune systems in my experience. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581886/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581886/

nhangen 11y ago

In 2005, I was finishing my senior year as a Psychology major at Wright State University in Ohio. We were forced to anesthetize and perform surgery on female mice without any formal training. This process often resulted in mutiliation at best, and death at worst. In fact, the mice often died during the injection, as we were not properly trained on how to administer injections. In fact, we were never trained by medical personnel at all, but instead by our teacher, who also had a lab full of large rodents undergoing brain experimentation. And this is only what they allowed us to see...