Intensely fucked up.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
106 points (87.3% liked)
Technology
59091 readers
4107 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Ya I do have trouble with experimentation like this.
Sure, you made his skin glow green, but maybe it burns like fire 24/7 and you'll never know since it can't tell you.
If it burns it probably creates a sensation called pain.
As it's a baby it very likely would be very vocal about pain.
We'd be able to know by studying the monkey. Not even for a long time either.
ITT: people not reading a single line of the article
In every thread.
Everywhere. This is not unique to any social media platform.
It’s great that peak scientific minds are trying to create green, glowing monkeys. It’s not like humanity is bothered by plethora of problems. Let’s chill and torture some monkeys instead.
Yeah they just doing this for no reason /s.
Did you even read the article?
Did you? It says that it at one point MIGHT be useful to chimerize the monkeys to research neurodegenrative diseases. Making it glowing was just to make shit easier for them, not for any scientific purposes.
And yeah, I get it, scientific breakthrough comes with a cost, but there’s reason why primates are not generally getting chimerized…
You probably fail to understand that the end goal is not to make green glowing monkeys for shits and giggles.
He's going to break the Sarcasm-O-Meter, please be careful. It never stood a chance at life :/
No shit. I thought they wanted to have a mobile lantern.
Ya but how many asses does it have?
Sadly, less than eight.
When will we learn not to play God half-assed
Why not link to the original article that piece quotes https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/chimeric-monkey-china-birth-cell-b2445058.html
I link to articles I’ve actually read. I didn’t read that one because I read this one, so I didn’t link to it. That’s why.
Fair enough. The original is a bit more informative than the re-write, I think.
I would love a cultural norm of always posting the actual study alongside write-ups
Why was the monkey euthanized, though?
Besides killing it being a waste of life, wouldn't keeping the monkey alive be a good way to study the long term effects of this experiment?
the article states that the primate was not healthy when it was born, so it needed to be euthanized.
They can't live for very long. It's why I kinda think this work is somewhat unethical - even if it brings about breakthroughs that could help millions.
This tends to be an unpopular opinion, but I completely agree. I believe it's unethical to do experiments like this on animals that cannot consent, but have a clear capacity for suffering, including on a conscious level.
Even lab rats show a capacity for empathy [1], and they will stop pulling a lever to feed themselves if they see the rat in the subsequent cage is electrocuted. [2]
Monkeys (and other animals) can understand the concept inequality. [3] Inequality is a moral concept, indicating that the animal has a capacity for complex social relationships and understanding.
Monkeys were taught the concept of currency (in the form of silver discs) and soon after, they unexpectedly developed prostitution on their own. [4]
Monkeys like this are the primates of lower intelligence, mind you. I'm not even saying I condone these studies even, as I'm not convinced the ends justify the cruel means with which the experiments were conducted.
I think we should be more respectful of life, rather than subjecting it to such mass exploitation and suffering. I can admit I will value my loved ones over other animals and humans on a selfish level, but when I separate emotion from my reasoning, I don't believe it is justified for humans to exploit animals as we do for our own gains.
It's important to note the extremely unnecessary suffering of frivolous experiments on a widespread scale. One example is the LD 50 (or median lethal dose), in which animals are essentially force-fed a product (cosmetics, cleaners, medicines, etc.) until half of the test subjects die, to determine the lethal dose. [5]
Much of the time, their death isn't because of the substance itself; it's due to the quantity force-fed (stomach/organs rupturing, whatnot). This test is used on clearly nonessential products like cosmetics, and the results are often unreliable. [5]
I am not interested in debating this subject. I just wanted to share my thoughts. Things to watch out for in objection to animal rights arguments are common fallacies like the appeal to nature, appeal to tradition, and just blatant speciesism.
This is like how in Boku no Hero Academia where the first quirk was a baby that was born emitting light
Boku no Hero Macaque
Wonder who that Gene Hackman is?
The published study in question. I don’t mind an article write up, but this is a write up of a write up of a write up.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A chimera, as the report explains, is an animal with more than two sets of DNA; in this case, the long-tailed macaque was created by combining two genetically distinct embryos of the same species.
As the Independent notes, scientists often use chimeric mice and rats in lab settings as a means of studying embryonic development, as well as examining disease progression in living organs and tissues.
"Mice don't reproduce many aspects of human disease for their physiology being too different from ours," senior study author Zhen Liu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CNN.
As ScienceAlert notes, in past attempts to create chimeric primates, the donor DNA was deeply underrepresented in the offspring's body tissues.
As study coauthor Miguel Esteban, principal investigator at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CNN, this finding suggests that chimeric macaques could one day be useful for "modeling neurodegenerative diseases."
When the scientists combined the embryos, they added a green fluorescent protein to the donor cells — that way, they could more easily track where some of that DNA was disseminating.
The original article contains 577 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"Mice don't reproduce many aspects of human disease for their physiology being too different from ours," senior study author Zhen Liu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CNN.
But we test all our new stuff on them and write articles about Cancer cures without adding "in mice" to the title, and that gives people hope.
Edit: I understand the importance of this research but the gleeful tone feels like it was cynically added by the author (or, I don't know, an llm told to "humorify by 12%") to differentiate from the original source and just feels gross.
New medicines are usually tested first in human tissue, then on mice, and finally on humans. To oversimplify a bit, the first checks if it will do the job, while the second checks if it could have side-effects in other organs. As to why monkeys are not used instead of mice, (1) they take longer to grow up, (2) they are more expensive to maintain, and (3) experimenting on monkeys is considered more of a bad thing than experimenting on mice.
I was kind of joking, kind of not, but thank you for this info.
Unethical as fuck and entirely purposeless.
As usual.
Fuck these guys
Gene Hack-Monk as Lex Lemur
That really reminded me of that southpark episode, where the scientist guy was creating monkeys with many asses :D
Gene hack me to have fur and a tail, please. Hold the green glow.