Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body

Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by p1esk on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @04:38PM (#16925862)

What is the alternative? Let thousands of cancer victims die each year because we don’t want to test experimental cancer treatments on pigs?

If your loved one was dying from cancer, and the only way to speed up the development of a cure would be testing it on animals, what would you do?

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by colanderman on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @04:41PM (#16925894)

Test on human volunteers.

And your hypothetical makes no sense. Discovering "a cure for cancer" takes much longer than the life expectancy of someone who is "dying from cancer".

Beside, my loved ones agree with me. My selfishness for companionship doesn't outweigh their moral stance.

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by p1esk on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @05:04PM (#16926151)

And your hypothetical makes no sense. Discovering "a cure for cancer" takes much longer than the life expectancy of someone who is "dying from cancer".

The breakthrough can happen at any point in the future, tomorrow, or in 2 years, or 20 years. We don't know. What we know is that by allowing animal testing we most likely speed up that discovery process.

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by return1 on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @04:57PM (#16926069)

We re talking about killing ~15 million people every year in the USA alone. That's one hell of a way to eradicate cancer, of course.

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by colanderman on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @05:01PM (#16926105)

Experimentation does not necessarily mean killing. (Though lab animals are usually euthanized once they are no longer "useful".)

But we're not talking about experimenting on 15 million volunteer humans. We're talking about experimenting on 15 million animals incapable of consent. That figure should be equally morally repugnant to you.

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by return1 on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @05:16PM (#16926256)

it is problematic. but 1) we 're mostly talking about mice - higher animals are a lot more regulated and 2) the best we can do is to improve experiment registration and reporting in order to avoid all the redundant work and improve progress , saving those animals. The discussion about replicability, study size and chasing p-values is relevant.

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by p1esk on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @04:45PM (#16925931)

What if there are no human volunteers? Or no human volunteers with this specific condition?

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by colanderman on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @04:49PM (#16925989)

"What if there were no animals? Or no animals with the specific condition?"

Two can play at the hypothetical game. It's stupid. The same reasoning leads to moral acceptance of human organ harvesting. ("There's no willing donors, and those prisoners don't need an extra kidney anyway, and I do!")

(Though the concern that so-called animal "models" don't reliably predict the effect of treatments on human is very real.)

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by p1esk on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @04:59PM (#16926091)

This is not a "hypothetical game". There are plenty of animals that we can use for testing, and we can create any necessary conditions in them to test our experimental treatments. Yes, this is cruel and sad, but if the alternative is to let humans die, I'll choose animals any day.

This is not the same as human organ harvesting, because that would result in death of humans, and we are trying to prevent that.

The concern that animal test results don't necessarily apply to humans is real, but it's much better than no tests at all.

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by colanderman on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @05:03PM (#16926134)

Um, you don't have to kill someone to remove an organ. Many people donate them voluntarily while alive. But if there's no match or no-one willing to donate, we don't extract them from, say, prisoners against their will. (Though some countries do.)

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by p1esk on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @05:14PM (#16926234)

It seems like the fundamental difference in our worldviews is that you give equal significance to humans and animals, and I don't. That's why for me human organ harvesting is not the same as pig organ harvesting, and that's why experimentation on pigs is acceptable for me if it results in fewer human deaths.

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by colanderman on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @08:28PM (#16927769)

Yes, that's my original point. I don't see the difference between humans and animals, especially intelligent social beings such as pigs, as so great as to justify actions which would be considered grossly immoral against a human, and I don't understand how others can.

A human and a fly? Sure, I see how one can apply vastly different moral judgements (I certainly do). A human and a pig? No, it's a matter of degrees.

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Re:Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body by armandososa on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @05:26PM (#16926339)

You should read the "Never Let Me Go" book.

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