It should be easier for me to give mice brain tumors. | Hacker News Reader

It should be easier for me to give mice brain tumors.

hubski.com

21 pointspacohn20 comments

Perhaps if the bio community had been better about treating animals humanely when they weren't being watched, you wouldn't be subjected to so many rules now.

There are many inhumane things done to animals outside of the lab. Does that mean that we should work to reduce the cruelty of things like glue traps, or that we should increase the cruelty of animal research?

I'm sorry that you have to fill out a lot of paperwork if you want to inflict deliberate pain and suffering on a living creature.

The ethical questions raised by animal experimentation are a well-trodden debate, and I suspect that you have spent enough time listening to, perhaps even engaging in them, not to rehash them here.

We need medical advancements for humans, and sometimes that requires animal testing. That may be, but we also need to advance in our ethics and morals while we advance in our technology.

"You can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members."

"You can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members."

In the US, child protection laws were modeled on previously created animal rights laws.

If you think this is bad, try doing something involving humans. Want to have people go to a website and fill out a survey? If you're a university researcher, be prepared for 20 pages of paperwork and a 6 month delay while a research ethics committee considers your application.

Unless you find a way to hack the process, of course. In one case I know, the surveyees were signed on as co-investigators, in order to take advantage of a loophole allowing researchers to do research on themselves without ethics approval.

I wonder if their are any BioHackers out there that actually try to do this type of work. (Anyone?) I'm not one of them, but I've always had the impression they play more with bacteria than complex organisms. I think cost and accessibility are probably prohibitive to the garage biohacker, but would a very motivated biohacker have the advantage of not answering to an IRB?

I guess you could call me a "biohacker". I don't work on mice, I work on myself. I was diagnosed just under 10 years ago with "atypical cystic fibrosis" and, after a lifetime of being treated like a hypochondriac, promptly informed that "people like you don't get well". Having no other real choice, since doctors clearly had no plans to really help me get well, I began working on issues myself (and gradually began seeing results to a degree I never expected). My doctor expressed zero interest in how I was miraculously getting better. I get to "break" rules or make up rules as I see fit and that is, in fact, part of why I have made such astonishing progress.

FWIW:

Spent most of my life too sick to hold down a job and hid behind the label "homemaker and full time mom".

Spent about 3.5 months bedridden.

Diagnosed in May 2001 with "atypical cystic fibrosis".

Summer 2002: While attending GIS school in the smoggy LA area, got on boatloads of medication that doctors would not give me when I was bedridden and had no diagnosis. This helped save my life but left me a mess.

Spent the next several years getting off the drugs.

Antibiotic-free for something over 7 years (iirc).

Medication free since sometime in summer/fall of 2009.

Generally treated like a nutcase by the CF community which can't admit their real problem with me is they firmly believe the mantra "people like you don't get well" while simultaneously raising tens of thousands of dollars for the CF foundation and chanting "let CF stand for 'cure found'".

What you described is becoming much more common. I still have concerns, but I'm excited by the promise of websites like http://patientslikeme.com

(Disclaimer: I'm actually starting an HN-like website for rare disease people in a week or two; I had (or have) a rare type of cancer called Chordoma.)

I'm actually starting an HN-like website for rare disease people in a week or two

My contact info is in my profile. I would love to know when this is up.

It should be harder for you to post this on HN.

Why? Am I missing something?

I believe this is not relevant to most hackers, except if they happen to be bio researchers. Worse yet, while being mostly irrelevant, it's also a barely disguised flamebait piece designed to incite a fruitless ethics debate. This should be posted somewhere else.

And I don't care how many downvotes I get either; the guys who where complaining about the increasing lack of focus on HN earlier today were right.

They were also complaining about lack of civility, which is the reason your comment (which has a very snide tone) is getting downvoted.

I know why I'm being downvoted, it's always a risk when posting a comment with a certain tone. Though I don't normally post in this style, I just didn't care when I wrote it. I realize this thread may have prompted an inordinate amount of frustration in me which should probably have been directed towards worthier targets.

Really? I thought it was thought-provoking, even if I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the author. Certainly more intellectually stimulating than the usual "Company X did Thing Y" items.

But then, I've never really been clear on the topic of HN. Seems to me it's "stuff interesting to hackers", which this may well be, even if it isn't interesting to one individual hacker.

Thanks for the answer. Personally, I don't see it so much as flamebait as an interesting issue. Even so, as long as people remain civil, I think discussions of conflicting viewpoints can be very valuable.

I had the impression that HN was for broad content, as long as it was intellectually stimulating. However, based on this recent post about the decline of HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 I get the feeling that there are conflicting communities here.

Perhaps you are right. This is my second post. I am feeling conflicted, actually.

I'm obviously mistaken, otherwise the thread wouldn't have received so many positive votes. In fact, I apologize, it's me who apparently lost the plot. I bow to the majority opinion.

> I get the feeling that there are conflicting communities here.

Maybe, though that matter seems to be resolving itself on its own currently.

> Personally, I don't see it so much as flamebait as an interesting issue

Science research should be held to a higher standard, it shouldn't be compared to household rat catching. This shouldn't be thought-provoking at all. It's a case of apples and oranges. It's also borderline politics.

>> I get the feeling that there are conflicting communities here. >Maybe, though that matter seems to be resolving itself on its own currently.

Well I think HN grew due to the hacker community. After reading some in the post I linked. I am thinking that it might not be right that it be hijacked. I was a big Redditor and felt driven away somewhat recently. I guess this is all tangential, but no offense taken. Best.

Reading this article made me think "wow, not everything is lost, this is exactly the kind of stuff that HN used to have on it before the decline", so I definitely disagree with Udo

I feel bad hijacking the discussion like this. But I'd really like to know how a blog post on how the government should abolish ethics oversight in research is hacker news? Obviously, you have been here way longer, so what is that I'm not getting?

Very well. From the HN guidelines, what to submit can be summed up in one line: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

First of all, you view the article in a very narrow view. You just see someone complaining about ethics committees. I see an article that is well-written (on par with PG's essays), and is talking about stuff that I wouldn't usually notice on my regular path on the Internet. Mice brain tumors? Academic research?

Second of all, an average "CS hacker" out there, back in high school/college, could take multiple paths - physics, math, bio, acting (yes, acting), painting, music, etc. - in fact, many of them during really bad coding moments (such as when you need to refactor a 1000-line java method) wish many times over that they stuck to biology, or music, or acting, or anything else back in college.

This article appeals to both wanting to read something well-written, and also to gratifying someone's intellectual curiosity about something that they could've ended up doing, but didn't; and, it explains in great detail what problems they would've encountered if they had actually gone down that route.

HN needs more of exactly this kind of content.

The standard for an article's appropriateness is whether it's something "that good hackers would find interesting", not whether it's "relevant to most hackers."

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