animal research
Timothy Fay
>...
>So just because one group has already put "formaldyhyde" on some rabbits'
>eyes DOES NOT MEAN IT IS NO LONGER NECESSARY to "put formaldyhyde" on OTHER
>rabbits eyes AGAIN (within a context of a totally different experiment)!!
Perhaps. As long as it is in the name of Science, and not a new line
Mary Kay Cosmetics.
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drew smith
>More practical I think, would be the use of computerized record-keeping for
>some kind of national or even international database to record the results
>of specific animal tests, so that tests, especially tests that cause pain to
>animals, need not be unnecessarily repeated. Why should a hundred different
>research institutions, for instance, have to independently find out what
>happens when a rabbit has formaldehyde squirted in its eye? Granted, for
>animal rights partisans even once is too much, but surely more than once is
>even worse!
>
>Unlike computer modeling which would require both compute power and basic
>information that we just don't have available to us yet, this could be done
>NOW.
That is precisely what the scientific literature is for. For
better or worse there are no rewards in science for repeating
others experiments. Therefore no *competent* scientist will waste
his/her time doing what's been done before. The problem is that
the size of the literature is just too big for anyone to keep up
with. There do exist computerized databases, such as Dialog, that
will direct users to the relevant publications; these are fast,
but expensive. Every university library also has a set of ISI
scientific indexes and biological abstracts that will do the
same thing for free, but can be tedious and time-consuming.
Still, it is always faster to find someone else's results
than to do the experiment yourself. Given the cost of animal
experimentation, it is also vastly cheaper.
-Drew Smith, Dept. of Biology, Indiana Univ.
Philip Resnik
>That is precisely what the scientific literature is for. For
>better or worse there are no rewards in science for repeating
>others experiments. Therefore no *competent* scientist will waste
>his/her time doing what's been done before.
I find this rather disturbing.
I just happen to have finished _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman_, by
Nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman, and he had some extremely
relevant points to make on this topic. His feeling was that it is
*absolutely necessary* to replicate experiments, not only because
replications confirm results, but also because experimenters have
their own goals in mind, and this tends to influence the experiment.
(My paraphrase is awful -- read the book!)
I am all for making maximal use of the scientific literature; I'm the
first person you'll find doing keyword searches in electronic databases,
tracing through bibliographies, and querying the appropriate sci.group
to find smart people who already know the answers. *But* the replication
of experimental results is absolutely critical -- if more "competent"
scientists took the time replicating experiments, I believe science in
general would benefit. Certainly students should learn this is a worthwhile
thing to do. (Unfortunately, most everyone these days seems to be after
high-payoff, short-term results and high visibility -- a problem that probably
deserves serious discussion in this newsgroup.)
Now, this completely ignores the original issue, which was minimizing
cruelty to animals by not re-doing experiments unnecessarily. This is
a very worthwhile goal. As always, though, there's a tradeoff involved:
on the one hand, reducing the number of animal experiments, and, on
the other hand, maintaining good scientific standards by replicating
results. Alternatives like using tissue rather than entire animals
seem to me to be a win in both cases, but I don't know much about that
area.
Comments?
Philip Resnik
pre...@bbn.com
All views expressed above are mine, all mine!
drew smith
>...it is
>*absolutely necessary* to replicate experiments, not only because
>replications confirm results, but also because experimenters have
>their own goals in mind, and this tends to influence the experiment.
>of experimental results is absolutely critical -- if more "competent"
>scientists took the time replicating experiments, I believe science in
>general would benefit.
Scientific knowledge is based upon a chain of inferences. If one or
more of those inferences is incorrect it will, sooner or later, lead
to the formulation of an experimentally testable hypothesis whose
predictions will be disproved. It is at this stage that it is most
worthwhile to the average competent scientist to repeat someone else's
experiment, in order to see if his/her reasoning, or the assumptions
it was based on was incorrect. This, to me, seems the most efficient
way of validating reported results. If a result is truly important, it
will lead to further experimentation, which will necessarily test its
accuracy. A result which does not stimulate further experimentation
will soon be deservedly forgotten, without any additional waste of
time and money.
- Drew Smith Dept. of Biology, Indiana University
Gedankenleere
or reputation in it? Great if your an established big name somebody who
can get funding or positions on just your reputation, but most researchers,
young scientits-in-training are not in this position.
And you know, the search for funding and reputations is just a great a force,
if not more, in scientific research as is the search for knowledge or thrill
of discovery. Even purely theoretical research is not immune to this.
And so, this is why EXACT repetition of experimental results are consigned to
students and post docs for the most part (as excerices). [And if they should
find something worthwhile or even earth-shattering in the process, the head
scientist(s) or profs may just take full credit for it.]
Look, scientits are human like the rest of us, and they do not behave the
way of the caricatures that the people in the humanities or mass media often
portray them as behaving.
How many scientists in the universities, research centers, etc. look or act
like those buffoon Nerds, so much of the public, and our school children
know them as??