> A 54-g metal (tungsten) bolt was used to deliver an impact to the dorsal aspect of the skull, resulting in a rotational acceleration of the head through the Kimwipe. Mice underwent seven repetitive less-than-mild injuries (rlmTBI, 24-inch height; W/5 mm flat) OR repetitive mild injuries (rmTBI, 36-inch height; W/5 mm flat) in 9 days.
This seems very cruel, even in the face of progress. The price that animals pay for human survival is unimaginable.
Science does not hide the suffering it causes, unlike, for example, food production or pest control. Hence, people often react with shock when confronted with the reality of animal experiments needed for medical progress.
”The mice were anesthetized for 5 min using 4% isoflurane in a 70:30 mixture of air:oxygen”
The regulations around animal testing are strict. You need to reduce all suffering to the maximum extebt possible.
You can apply for research where suffering occurs, if justified by the research (say anesthetic or analgesics interfere) but good luck getting it approved. You’ll be told “come back with a better approach”.
Can you explain why it's not? Are you seriously proposing that if you were in a trolley problem choosing between saving the life of a random human you know nothing about and a random mouse you know nothing about, you would have difficulty making the decision?
If the trolley problem involved 1 human and like 50 cats I'd probably save the cats.
Not to say animals are more important than humans but I imagine for most people it'd depend on the scale. Same reason most people are uncomfortable with the suffering of millions of animals for the sake of cosmetics.
Why not? Because without animals you wouldn't be here today.
We're only here today because animals have given us the resources to survive. From cavemen hunting for meat to bees, insects pollinating plants.
The only resource we can provide is limited breast milk, sperm and meat. But human meat is deemed socially unacceptable, sperm only exists within biological males and the biological women has a limited timespan in their life where only if the conditions are right they lactate. So no, we have no importance.
Without any feasible resources that the homo sapien race can provide, of which could provide cultivation, that in return makes humans unimportant. QED
> Humans are not important, we are a fault to this world.
No other plant or animal is important either. Nature doesn't give a shit about any of us. The ability to actually care about abstract concepts like the suffering of others is a rare trait in the animal kingdom. Humans have it. Maybe some primates and cetaceans have it. Otherwise animals are quite content to rip each other apart in the most cruel ways possible for food. I assure you, a lion does not lose any sleep over the suffering of the gazelle.
> Humans are not important, we are a fault to this world.
> This alone makes human a little special, no?
No, not really. We build militant armies only to send them off to fight so we can cause brutality to the same race for all but nothing other than evil and greed.
At least animals are mauling in for survival. You could say power too but at least they eat the remains.
You and several others in this thread are disturbingly nihilistic misanthropes. You should not be allowed to vote nor breed, though what self respecting person would ever couple with you in the first place.
ANTS go to global war. Murdering a significant amount of your rivals over territory is a completely normal animal thing. The fact that we are very good at it and invented explosives to do it "better" is just another feather in our cap that we have made ourselves "different". Hell, dolphins murder porpoises and launch them 50 ft into the air for shits and giggles and rape other dolphins when they are bored.
Philosophy is an invention of humans. Laws are an invention of humans. ETHICS are an invention of humans. Nature thinks our laughable attempts at "being ethical" are adorable. Nature is perfectly happy for us to brutally torture each other.
It's weird how the unironic use of “QED” in internet debates almost guarantees it's being applied to the most undeserving and undemonstrated of arguments.
There is actually no completely objective way in which it’s possible to determine the relative importance or sacredness of an individual’s life between one species and another.
There is no particularly good objective reason for me to value my neighbours life more than a fish.
However I choose to be an unabashed specieist and value any individual human life above any individual other life.
Well the inconvenient thing is that objectively we aren't more important than other species. What you're actually doing is just overriding that objective fact with a subjective one.
Well so objectively no life is worth protecting or what do you want to say?
Edit: or do you see cross-species minimization of pain as an objective objective (ha)?
Or maximization of pleasure?
There is no "objective" answer to ethics.
But yes, if we want to base it on empathy, it would mean XY... so many philosophical arguments have been made about this. But it stands there is no "objective" ethics, at least to my knowledge.
Without even involving animals, there's not even a definite way how to answer the trolley problem without violating my subjective ethical values.
Human life as an ulterior value seems to be the best bet for explaining rational ethics.
It's plainly axiomatic. Humans do this because it is valuable to treat other humans as if their pain, injury, or death is important. The other humans extend reciprocity. We will, for instance, chase your murderer down, because if the situation is reversed, we're pretty sure you'll chase our murderer down. We get a deterrent effect for practically nothing... that's a bargain.
Mice do not extend reciprocity. They will not chase your murderer down, or avoid injury to you.
If you're searching for more than that, you've turned it into a religion. This is a practical matter.
It's unlikely that you have developmental issues that makes this impossible for you to understand intuitively. I suspect that you were miseducated.
Because I enjoy eating the flesh of slaughtered animals. Whenever I do so I feel nothing but absolute pleasure of the taste of cooked flesh. I feel zero guilt. And so does the majority of the human race.
If I were to do the same to a human that would be a big problem.
Why is it like this? I don't know but that's just the way it is. Don't try to rationalize it, it's not supposed to be rational. Our evolutionary quirks and moral instincts are the product of biological evolution not rational thought.
It's not rational, but it is self evident, to everyone. Including you. Your appeal is more of a request to ask for the rationality behind it and hoping that when people see how irrational it is they will side with you.
People aren't rational. There beliefs are based off of instinctual desires and they construct scaffolds of rational logic around their preconceived beliefs.
For example: how do you justify the slaughter and killing of all the plants that cows rip through without a second thought? Are plants less important then animals? It's mind blowing how many plants are literally executed every time those cows chew.
This what I do is a service to justice. I eat the flesh of slaughtered cows to punish plant killers. I balance the scales of justice every time I devour a steak.
This same logic justifies cannibalism of all vegetarians too but I'm unwilling to eat vegans. You'll have to get back to me on that. It takes time to fully rationalize all my instinctual behaviors.
It seems like this is mostly written to offend vegans, of which I am not, so I don't find most of it interesting honestly.
Only thing I have to say is
> People aren't rational. ~~There~~ Their beliefs are based off of instinctual desires and they construct scaffolds of rational logic around their preconceived beliefs.
A huge pet peeve of mine is when people tell me what I believe. Believe what you want, but I absolutely anchor my beliefs in my rational understanding. Sometimes I don't have a rational understanding, and no belief on the matter (not having an opinion is actually possible). That's why I asked.
What an insane person you are. Animals are far more cruel than Humans could ever hope to be. The mere fact that we care about this fact at all is evidence of our superiority. The human capacity for suffering, love, creativity, etc far outstrip anything in the animal kingdom and its not close.
I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to mean. There's a faulty premise or something. You might as well say "the greed of universal constants is so high and that's exactly why there are so many chlorine atoms in the ocean".
I'm minimally interested in reducing the level of human pain that exists in the world. I'm absolutely uninterested in reducing the level of non-human pain in the world unless there are practical benefits for that effort.
I don't even know what "suffering" means. Is "suffering" pain, just a synonym? If so, why say "suffering and pain"? Is it some sort of fallacy to try to add emotional weight to your statement? Is suffering distinct from pain? Can you measure suffering? Detect it with some instrument? Do you even have a definition for suffering?
"Suffering" is as mystical and meaningless as when the religious talk about souls. When people use that word, I suspect very strongly that they're incapable of consistently remaining rational.
And the alternative is even more cruel: "Yeah we could have a nice drug for you that can cure your mushed brain. But sorry. We couldn't run tests on mice. Good luck with never beeing able to hold down a job again."
No, but if I were a TBI sufferer, I’d take quality of life improvements even with these costs.
If you want to ‘have it all,’ we’ll need to invest heavily in creating more advanced biomedical research models. This requires strong societal and political willpower.
Well, to be clear, the animals didn't volunteer. We made the choice for them. Some of these mice in this experiment were wild-type, others were actually specifically bred to have a certain genotype (the P17 knockout) that made them relevant to this experiment. We created them for this particular chance to understand something about the brain and how to help it, and we kill them after we learn what we wanted.
This is a complex, nuanced topic, and yes, you're right, it is cruel to the mice (although, if you read the paper, they took steps to _minimize_ the mouse's suffering -- the mice were anaesthetized during the concussion, and they were euthanized after the experiment). In order to perform an experiment in animals in a research setting, you have you propose your experiment to a ~5-person committee called an IACUC (every institution doing research on invertebrates has to have one), and they review your experiment to ensure that it meets their standards of being ethical, humane, and of sound experimental design.
Because of this system, we are able to work with animal models (often mice) that teach us a lot about how our own body works, how proposed drugs could be used to treat illnesses and injuries. We do this because we really don't have a better system of learning about bodies.
We do have many _worse_ systems of learning about bodies. Centuries of experiments (many in recent memory) of experiments on humans. People experimenting with convicts, impoverished people, and people who someone decided are sub-human and are therefore ok to experiment on. That's not to say that it's ok to cause suffering to animals because we also caused suffering to humans. I bring it up because I actually derive some hope from it, that we are more aware of suffering and take more steps to reduce the suffering we cause in pursuit of knowledge. I sincerely hope that that trend will continue.
In my day job, I'm a wildlife photographer. I spend a lot of time watching animals. I see animals kill and eat eachother. I see animals get injured and sick, I see many animals die prolonged, painful deaths. Causing animal suffering is not an exclusively human ___domain -- much of this also happens right next to our houses, just out of our sight or awareness. I guarantee, wherever you live, that many animals are killed and eaten in your house every day, mostly without your knowledge.
Of course, we cause our share of that suffering, as well, more through neglect than intent. I see countless animals dying, entangled in plastic or with guts full of plastic chunks. I see tens of thousands of fish in my city's rivers impaired or dying from chemicals in my city's runoff. I watch otters and bald eagles happily eat those animals -- they're easy to catch, after all. It's harder to be angry at the people who caused this suffering, because, well, we don't know who they are, and often _they_ don't know who they are. They just chucked a plastic bag into the road, or made a mistake on a jobsite, or were just passive participants in a very flawed system.
Sometimes, we cause that suffering through intent. Victor, the mousetrap company, has sold over a billion mousetraps, which we use because we find mice in our homes and cities to be a nuisance, or gross, or whatever the imagined offense is. Take a walk through the pest control aisle at your local big box and take a moment to imagine the unmitigated suffering that each of those chemicals cause when it reaches its intended, or unintended, target.
I also volunteer in a wildlife rehab in my state -- whenever a wild animal is found injured, it ends up in this particular building (I live in a small state). Each year, we get thousands of animals, often unintentionally but painfully injured by people. Possums that get into the rat poison and show up bleeding from their face and hands. Waterfowl that show up with lead poisoning from eating lost fishing weights. More animals hit by cars than I can count. Some animals are intentionally injured by people -- lots of bloody birds peppered with bullets, often airsoft or other non-lethal bullets that someone just shot because they were bored. We treat these animals. Many get better, many don't.
We euthanize the animals that don't using the same method the scientists use in this paper -- isoflurane to anaesthetize and a second method to ensure that the animal has died painlessly. I feel fine about this practice -- the goal of a rehab is to reduce harm in the wild population and to return healthy animals to the wild. Not all injured animals get better, and the cold calculation is that it's kinder to kill the animal humanely and painlessly than to keep it alive in a state of suffering and stress.
My point is, the scale of animal suffering right outside your door is vast. It's a noble effort to want to reduce that amount of suffering. However, _most_ of the suffering that's around us in cities is pointless, un-intended suffering, and nobody gains anything from it -- the mouse in the glue trap or the fish stuck in a plastic bag. It's true that these scientists are causing animal suffering, but it's also true that there is a point to it. They are doing these experiments to understand and reduce future suffering, in people as well as animals (basically all the drugs we use in the wildlife rehab, for example, are the exact same drugs we use in human hospitals). The suffering the scientists are causing is a drop in the bucket compared to what is happening each day, unseen, in the square block around your house. It's easy to criticize their work because they are being honest about their methods -- that's part of what being a scientist means -- but in my opinion, if your goal is to reduce animal suffering, you're missing the forest for the trees. Scientists are not the target you're looking for, both in terms of the scale of animals or the magnitude of suffering.
I will say, we have made dramatic improvements in how we understand medicine's effect on the body. Computational chemistry and drug discovery has made giant strides in the past several decades, and that lets us learn by computation what we could previously only learn from animal trials. Perhaps in the future we will be able to better understand complex mechanisms in the body and represent them in software, letting us try some or all of these ideas for fixing problems painlessly, in software, rather than in meatspace. Maybe you'll help create that future.
I'll end with what I feel is a touching piece of art -- in Siberia, there is a statue called the Monument to the Laboratory Mouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...). It stands tribute to the countless mice who gave their lives in pursuit of knowledge, and the statue, if you look at it, is a blend of a mouse and a scientist, recognizing the link between their lives and the knowledge that comes from both those lives. It's a complex piece of art that acknowledges a complex topic, I appreciate it, and maybe you will, too.
I used to work at a hospital that did radiation research. Their animal of choice was dogs. Few things sounded worse than hearing the dogs start to wail (as a group) multiple times a day. They would basically irradiate dogs to give them cancer and then study them as they died.
I stick to tardigrades, but even then I feel bad if I accidentally kill one or many.
What if I would sacrifice a billion human lives to save my child? That's hardly the basis by which to decide which lives are valuable and which are valueless.
Said the human, apparently blithely unaware and certainly dismissive of any possible bias.
The infinite animals, on the other end, made no such genocidal claims. In fact, on the whole, they were about 100% less fond of ethnic cleansing than the hairless apes.
Not satisfied with continuing their perverse murder of the biosphere, the apes regularly turned on their own also, inventing ever-more horrifying methods of doing so. This didn't seem to register on the human who proclaimed such inherent value in human life in the slightest.
In fact, at that current moment multiple genocides were happening, some of them with the full-throated support of that human's voted-for government. Some 40% of citizens and 90+% of politicians and media figures were not only ignoring said mass murder, but in fact paying for it.
You might find this hard to belive, Xanthrax, but these humans are so thoroughly convinced of their superiority by an effect they themselves have identified and named: the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Most animals would genocide the entire planet if they could. If there are too many of a certain species, they are entirely capable of extinguishing entire populations of the animals and plants they eat. Some of them, like cats, wipe out the animal population of an entire area out of boredom.
It can be depending on the context (cultural genocide, for instance, often involves mass rape of native populations), but it isn't in this context - it's just mass slaughter.
I'd take it further, in my opinion, it is essentially unjustifiable in a deeply karmic way.
I genuinely think that I would be able to work on a weapons guidance system and even know that it has been used to target a military vehicle without feeling much guilt but performing the kind of work you have quoted on animals would make me stop and think. And just stop. It is not worth the progress. Not worth the credits, the money. Not worth graduating.
I did this myself for many years, and honestly, I believe the world would be a better place if the people designing weapons were exposed to the suffering they cause to the same degree we are.
A friend in biology spent many work days doing little else than putting mice into a guillotine. Chopping off their little heads to get a snapshot of their brain chemistry after a dose of something.
It definitely messed her up, and she was quite aware of the toll it was taking.
All sin is essentially just desire. Anything you desire, you will get, in this life or the next. The trouble is most people's desires are unconscious, programmed in or are otherwise unoriginal, which leads to all sorts of trouble and misery. Simply put, to desire is to suffer and make others suffer.
It is extremely unlikely that a drug could prevent damage from repeat concussions. Blunt force trauma to the brain causes a plethora of cascading cellular injuries and responses. A single drug might limit damage from one of those pathways, but it's certainly not going to render a concussion harmless. Just like a single drug isn't going to be a cure for a gunshot.
Seeing people perform in high risk competition is something that goes back to antiquity. I don't know why we can't be more honest with ourselves on this point. I don't watch UFC but I do know that in the past 20 years the NFL becoming more "safe" and prioritizing high scoring games has taken a certain amount of soul out of the game
Presumably you only mean sports. I'm tall. My first big concussion was so stupid. I had a box of stuff in the floor near the wall under a heavy wall-mounted shelf. Stood up after picking something out of the box and smashed my head.
Since then I've had several minor ones, but as stated elsewhere, you become more easily susceptible to the effects of a concussion from even relatively small impacts after a big one. The others include helping someone move something in their garage and hitting my head on a ceiling mounted HVAC unit, stepping out of the shower (I've got terrible eyesight) and hitting the top of the door frame, those sorts of things.
You could have those happen and be fine but it seems because they happened after the bigger concussion, I'll have symptoms again, especially sensitivity to low refresh rate screens or PWM.
I try to avoid it, but I'm not going to avoid living my life. And I'm not going to stop being tall.
So if medicine can help protect my brain, I'm interested in it.
Same, I’m regrettably at an average of one concussion per year. Some described as mild or moderate TBI.
I would be very cautious after a concussion. I had one in one month (odd to pass out and not fall down) then another the following month (slip and fall) then became disabled for about a year.
I’ve read that supplementing with high dose creatine and exercise can help post concussion or with migraines which I regularly get now.
As far as I know there aren’t any sports which are completely safe and without side effects. Sport can ruin your joints (eg. running), spine (eg. weightlifting) and cause plethora of other health issues (anecdotally I know many people who got serious injuries from while leisurely playing team games).
Usually there’s net gain from those activities, and what sport one practices vastly depends on preference and I’d rather encourage people to get hit in the head in controlled environment versus growing roots in the chair.
As a fan of practicing fighting sports I find such drug a great addition to all the other protection amateur can have.
Cycling is better for the joints than running. Unfortunately, bicycles are so damned effective that you have to cycle for a lot longer to burn the same amount of calories as when running...
Isnt it fairly common for cyclist to get seriously injured in other ways though? Most serious cyclists I know have had at least 1 seemingly major accident with a car. And I live in a city that has a pretty significant bike lanes/routes distribution.
It might also be we'll greenlight sports that have more head impact. There is definetly an audience for it, and now it will be just as (un)safe as before.
I prefer joint damage from running or back pain rather than expose those around me to the effects of brain damage.
Also, there are ways to run and weight lift (mostly just doing overdo it) that result in zero or near zero damage, whereas there are no ways to have your brain impact your skull with zero damage.
> The traditional view that swimmers naturally gravitate toward swimming because of preexisting respiratory disorders has been challenged
Lolwut. Anybody who could believe that has never been a swimmer. Of course aspirating drops of pool water, and the chlorinated air lingering above pools, is going to be a lung problem. Why in the world would anybody with preexisting respiratory issues gravitate towards swimming? That's ludicrous.
> The traditional explanation for this higher prevalence rate is one of selection bias. The suggestion that swimming is a more suitable activity compared to both cycling and running in asthmatics5 is not surprising. For example, the hydrostatic compression effect of water can reduce the effort required to generate expiratory flow,
Perhaps, but many sports (such as football and American football) are far too popular to end anytime soon.
Additionally, it may be given as a precaution after a first concussion (car wreck, for example), even if that person is unlikely to be "banged on the head everyday"
Sorry, no one is gonna prefer to watch flag football over full contact tackling. This is an absurd article. And the fact that the Olympics are holding a flag football event is a joke.
Roman gladiatorial combat rarely went to the death. Fighters were valuable media personalities, much like pro athletes today, supposedly including product endorsements and billboard advertising! Battles and fighters were focused on spectacle. It was basically just the WWE
Really, no one? Flag participation is already higher for 6 to 12-year-olds than tackle. Lots of girls participate in flag. I suspect they'll be interested in watching the sport they grew up playing. It might never be more popular than tackle, but to say no one will prefer watching it is silly.
You don't have to end the sport, just opt not to play it yourself. The GP's suggestion is valid; if you're getting hit in the head a lit you should stop doing that.
While American Football won't end anytime soon -- depending on your definition of soon. It's worth noting that youth participation rates are falling dramatically, and there are big regional differences. It will take a while, but football will eventually end up as a niche regional sport. Unless a drug like this or some revolutionary piece of safety equipment came along. Then I could see the sport staying on top long term.
Any stats on this? Sports (that cause these injuries) are a choice/entertainment and people should pay for playing (like you should pay if you are obese, smoke or drink), but how much of this are actual accidents (cars, normal bike riding, work, army)?
I’m sorry, what? There are two ways I can interpret what you wrote. “Should pay” as in the people who play sports should buy their own concussion medicine. Which is okay I guess? But nobody talked about financing.
Which makes me think you mean “should pay” as in people who choose to partake in sports should suffer harm (as in pay the metaphorical “price”). Is that how you mean it? Because that sounds extremely cruel and twisted morality. There is nothing “should” about that. That makes it sound as if these people deserve the harm even if we could prevent it.
No that's not how I mean it, sorry. I mean if you put yourself in danger, society shouldn't necessarily pay. Sports is healthy if it's not a sport that endangers your body and that should be rewarded; sports that are proven to give you multiple injuries (concussions etc) are not very different from bad addictions. It's your choice/responsibility, not 'ours'.
But no I definitely didn't mean the tail end. Sorry if you read that into it; I would never say that.
In fact a former colleague's husband fell into that bucket. He was a breacher for the local PD, and too much of that (the compression wave bounces your brain around inside the skull) caused him to have all sorts of issues that took years to stabilize.
i'm not sure if know this but a concussion increases a risk of another concussion. your brain loses ability to balance the body movements and it's a death spiral that a lot of people can't get out of. unless you mean someone who plays sports known for the risk.
Studies seem to confirm that concussion increases the risk of subsequent concussion, and I guess it might be true that the brain loses the ability to balance the body leading to more concussions. But the brain itself seems more susceptible to concussion after having one; I don't think it's exclusively a matter of balance or body movements. Especially when you consider athletes (esp. American football) where their concussions are not usually the result of a slip-and-fall type incident like an elderly person.
> Also, it is now known that, after a concussion, there is greater susceptibility to sustaining another concussion and that subsequent concussions occur with less force and take longer to resolve.
> Our study suggests that players with a history of previous concussions are more likely to have future concussive injuries than those with no history; 1 in 15 players with a concussion may have additional concussions in the same playing season; and previous concussions may be associated with slower recovery of neurological function.
> Additionally, our study suggests that a history of concussion is associated with prolonged recovery following subsequent concussions. The increased risk of future injury, as well as slower recovery, may be indicative of increased neuronal vulnerability following recurrent concussive injuries.
This seems very cruel, even in the face of progress. The price that animals pay for human survival is unimaginable.