Kasseev

I demand more liberal use of "bitch"....bitch!

This is one of the more interesting AMAs I have seen around here, much respect for what you are trying to achieve. I have a couple questions:

After your year in the field is done, how do you plan to protect and expand the progress you manage to achieve?

What is the education level of the Pygmies you are working to free? What do you need to provide for them to become self sufficient?

And finally: How can the rest of us help?

People still do it because of institutional ossification and because they are too lazy to change up all their protocols and approaches to problems.

Don't try and force her into supporting your strawman; scientists do things they way they have been for decades, with the same disregard for the animal suffering they cause, because that has been the status quo. I work in a mouse lab, and let me tell you - no one enjoys having to kill mice, but they do it anyway because that is the way the system is rigged. If it can be changed successfully, and efficiently, I am sure all my colleagues would be willing to listen, unlike you apparently.

As for her arguments in that paper, it is nothing that frontline researchers haven't been saying for decades. Mouse and other models have their uses, but to claim that they are instrumental for curing serious disease, especially at the scale in which they are used today, is sheer propaganda. Already in my field funding and focus is shifting to in vitro human models and human tissue samples. The major factor that forces us to use mice is the regulatory checkpoints that require phase I animal trials that often don't translate to human results for many studies. There was a disruptive PNAS article on this just this year, if you want I can cite it for you - but basically, a large number of treatments that are successful in mice fail miserably in humans, and vice versa. We know this, yet we continue to go through the motions with millions of suffering mice ever year because we haven't decided/are too lazy to change it up. If this lady can help lobby and inform about better alternatives more power to her.

Which brings me to your ignorant little character attack at the end there. Who would be better qualified than an animal welfare PhD to comment on whether the suffering we inflict is justified? I know for sure that most bench scientists don't have the first idea about animal welfare; they know some of the anatomy, some of the physiology, but welfare is almost entirely ignored - and it really shouldn't be in 2013.

As a scientist, she is better qualified to speak on animal welfare than most bench scientists - who are unaware of what the animals they use undergo. On this issue she is an authority, so stop trying to twist this into a character attack denigrating her scientific credentials.

There is an obvious culture of disregard for animal welfare in research centers today, that is only marginally curtailed by tightening ethics boards and self-reporting policies (which are almost never adhered to, may I add). It makes sense that an outside perspective could be useful in such a case.

I volunteer my own samples for some of my research, so I am familiar with the challenges. My comment was just pointing out that your argument hurts animal testing more than it does human testing. Controlling genetics is great and all, but when we are talking about cosmetics we don't need a hyperengineered mouse model the way we do in cancer research, we just need to know if it fucks with the skin and other contact organs.

Alternative models exist, and often are more reliable and efficient than bruteforcing your hypotheses through hundreds of hapless test animals. Calling them "bullshit" and then contradicting your main premise is problematic.