[mattkrause]

I’m sorry but I’m having trouble believing the second part. Every university I’ve worked at has extensive training and monitoring for animal research, and there’s no way any of them would have approved what you’re describing. Screwing around with something like this could get the entire university’s federal funding cut off, and so they take compliance very seriously. Secondly, the brains are often collected as part of the experiment, and these samples would absolutely be destroyed by someone “coming up with something on the spot.”

I was so annoyed about 2nd part that I almost forgot to mention that the first part is untrue too. There’s no mention of predator sounds whatsoever in the paper. The standard forced swim test model just looks at how long the mouse actively tries to escape vs just floating too; there’s no drowning involved.

tl;dr: Lies

[meowface]

I understand the parent is wrong and that correcting them was needed, but I find all this hand-wringing about ethics in animal experiments kind of absurd, since it's so obviously fundamentally unethical in the first place (or at least I know of none that aren't unethical). I suspect it's mostly just a defense mechanism to shield the human mind from the trauma of continuously inflicting mass suffering and death, much like how the Nazis established gas chambers as a less traumatic way of perpetrating genocide compared to firing squad units going village to village and potentially developing symptoms of PTSD.

In both cases, zero or less value is attributed to the lives and minds that are being assaulted and extinguished on a loop (though the value is below zero in the Nazi case and sits roughly at zero in the animal experiment case). This isn't entirely fair, since I'm sure most researchers do attempt to prevent animal suffering from being the most utterly barbaric it can be due to ethical rather than selfish reasons, but I think anything that's moderately barbaric or below is still considered justifiable in their minds and I think attempts to "soften" it do mostly fall into the selfish defense mechanism category.

I understand the great benefit to scientific progress afforded by such experiments, but there was some long-term benefit from human experimentation during WWII, as well, and there probably could've been much more future benefit if those regimes had won.

[mattkrause]

Nonsense.

I don’t know any researcher that likes sacrificing animals though every single one is painfully aware of the moral weight. They also go out of their way to minimize suffering, for ethical reasons, for selfish reasons, and even to improve the quality of the data. The reason I jumped down the parent's throat is because it reinforces the mistaken idea that scientists are okay with “moderately barbaric” things and indifferent to suffering. We aren’t!

And what’s the alternative to animal research? Computational modeling isn’t there yet and in vitro experiments have pretty stark limitations too. In any case, both would need animal data to determine if they’re correct. Waiting for another Nazi regime[0], as you proposed(!), doesn’t seem like a viable—-or ethical—-option.

[0] Incidentally, I have read that most of that “data” was scientifically useless, not just because of its moral provenance, but also because the stuff that was done was more akin to torture than controlled research.

[krageon]

I'll grant that most of them don't like it, but there's a far too high fraction that uses animals even though they do not need to. This is a constant and ongoing point of contention between animal rights groups and large biologically-focused universities. Generally it comes down to budgeting concerns (ie it is cheaper to use animals) or time concerns (ie it is faster to use animals).

Whether or not one of those two arguments is compelling to you is another story.

[mattkrause]

Can you give some examples?

My impression is that animal work is literally never the cheap or fast option. It's slow, it's labor-intensive, and it's expensive, while career incentives favor doing things that are quick and cheap.

It's certainly true that someone could have run a version of this study where patients with depression were "prescribed" different doses of caffeine and asked to fill out rating scales to quantify its effects on their symptoms. This experiment could reveal its effect on symptoms, the headline of this article, but it wouldn't suffice for understanding the pharmacological mechanisms (see Table 4). I don't think there are PET ligands available for any of those metabolites, and even if there were (and ignoring the animal work needed to develop them), injecting people with radioactive tracers also raises ethical questions.

[meowface]

> The reason I jumped down the parent's throat is because it reinforces the mistaken idea that scientists are okay with “moderately barbaric” things and indifferent to suffering. We aren’t!

I never said they were okay with it. Merely that they're still participating in it regularly, and need a way to justify it.