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."
In the US, child protection laws were modeled on previously created animal rights laws.
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.
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'".
(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.)
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.
My contact info is in my profile. I would love to know when this is up.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.