Comment by lamename | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lamename | Hacker News Reader

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I think a common misunderstanding in this thread, and something not explained in the article, is the difference between internal accounting of animals and publication-level. Labs track animal usage internally in the way you mention, and typically share that information with the university vet, IACUC, etc. but that is simply not useful information to publish.

Despite the possibility of differing opinions in this thread, I think the article has not done a good job of explaining the realities of the process, so anyone here who is not familiar with how animal work gets done is coming in with a purist misunderstanding. Everything is reported (in the US), but not in publications.

Looking at publications alone for animal accounting would be like if I looked at the checking accounts for everyone in a country and wondered where all the money went. Of course it's in savings, investments, cash under the bed... but I only looked in one place. I cannot conclude money is unaccounted for when my search was incomplete by design.

Yes. I did not mention this in my original comment, but internal accounting and oversight by IACUCs is pretty good. They know within a couple of cages how many rodents are on campus at any given time (module reproduction etc.). If we want the public record to be able to account for this then it would likely have to be in another venue, because animals whose data does not go directly into a paper could be "involved" in the exploratory work for tens of papers. How do you prevent double counting, how do you know which animal whose data was not used was reported in which paper? Mostly you don't. The IACUC has it, it is buried in lab notebooks, etc. and if someone needs to be disciplined for misuse it is on the IACUC.

This is different from the UK where the 3Rs are much more strongly enforced, to the point where I remember asking a question back in 2015 to the then head of UK animal research about reproducibility, and getting the answer that he wouldn't approve the use of animals just to replicate an already completed study. In the US in some fields animals will be used just to replicate a result because another lab needs to know for sure that it is real before expending even more animals for a potentially useless follow up study. The way the numbers play out in practice, we would be much better off doubling if not 10xing the number of animals used in initial publications to avoid the 10x replication studies that will be done inside other labs to make sure that the result is real. Of course if we did this then the publication rate in many fields would be cut in half, or decreased by an order of magnitude.

Yes - animals absolutely do not go missing within university tracking systems with IACUC oversight.

I disagree with the parents that the remaining animals are even primarily used for training purposes. There are countless ways that experiments may fail with uninteresting results, that do not count as null results.

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