
In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages? - MindGods
https://undark.org/2020/07/02/future-lab-mice-computer-chips/
======
bedobi
Yeah, no.

Programs and algorithms can only encode models (which are themselves
imperfect) of what we already know. There's countless things we know that we
don't know, and yet more that we don't know that we don't know.

As bad as animal (and human) studies and trials can be, the beauty of them is
we don't really have to know how or why things work, we can just do the thing
and if the results are good, we have a new treatment. Lots of super common
drugs, even paracetamol, are like this.

Of course, knowing and accurately modelling the action is great, but it's not
_necessary_.

~~~
chrisco255
I would argue we can't even model those things. Non-linear, dynamic systems
are not predictable beyond a certain point even if you have a perfect model.
Uncertainty with models of dynamic systems like biological ones, increases
exponentially as a function of time. And they are highly sensitive to initial
conditions, so if your input is off from reality by even the tiniest amount,
reality will veer off dramatically from your expected results, even if you
have the perfect model. Chaos theory is a thing. We can use models to learn
about systems and how they might work, or how we might think they work, but we
can't use them to model reality effectively enough to determine treatments.

~~~
chr1
While individual trajectories of non-linear systems are not predictable, they
all end up on an attractor and usually all we are interested in, is the
attractor.

That is when performing a test on a mouse we are not measuring what a
particular mouse would do, but what the mice do on average. So as long as
model behaves like a mouse it can be useful, even though it would not behave
like any particular mouse.

Also it's important to remember that the question is not about all or nothing,
when we get a model most likely instead of 100 experiments on real mice we
will be doing millions on virtual mice, and then 10 on real mice to verify the
results.

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hn_throwaway_99
This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Yes, computational models do have a place
in science and drug discovery, but I don't know anyone in the field who
seriously thinks they will reduce the number of animals used in medical
research.

If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, where when you
increase the efficiency of something (in this case, animals used in medical
research), usage actually goes _up_.

~~~
autoexec
> If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox,

Thank you for that. I think it might help explain why no matter how large my
hard drives get I seem to have no problems filling them as the sizes and
number of files seemed to increase to keep me constantly upgrading.

As for the lab mice, if we ever do reach the point where models are enough to
replace the need for live animals it does open the door for even the most
casual experimentation that might be considered too cruel and inhumane to be
performed on living creatures. I'm not sure what kind of useful results could
come from that kind of research, but at least then it could be explored
without moral considerations or causing trauma to the researchers who would
otherwise have to become torturers.

~~~
newsbinator
That's probably what the beings who are simulating us were thinking.

------
cellis
Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how
this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate
the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the
torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the
living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is
incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is thus in an inadequate
replica. Also agree with other comments that this is and will remain
computationally infeasible at least until production quantum computers arrive.

~~~
ars
You can ask the reverse question - if the Robot version of a mouse is
sufficiently similar to a mouse, maybe the mouse also doesn't actually feel
pain, and is really a kind of biological robot.

Maybe so are you.

Dualism holds that living entities are special, and can never be replicated
artificially. So your question can actually be turned into dualism vs monism
(which is not a question with a settled answer).

~~~
dTal
This comment doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the existence of a robot
copy imply a lack of pain? How can you argue that whether humans feel pain is
an unsolved question? Shall we experiment on you instead?

~~~
wizzwizz4
Many philosophers are confused. Free will is a solved problem (we have free
will regardless of the metaphysical premise, unless you're using a weird
definition of free will, and even _I_ can prove it for any given metaphysical
premise), yet they're still working on it.

If somebody links "free will" to "determinism", they're very confused about
what free will is.

There are a lot of philosophers doing genuinely useful work, but so much of
the field is pre-occupied with trivial (and non-trivial) variations of the "if
a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?" koan.

~~~
lachlan-sneff
I must be quite confused then, but how is free will _not_ linked to
determinism?

~~~
wizzwizz4
There's a _proper_ proof, which is too long to fit in this margin (i.e. I'm
too lazy to find a link), but I can do a much shorter one:

1\. Non-determinism is equivalent to determinism plus extra, random input.

2\. The addition of random noise does not bestow free will upon something that
didn't have it without the random noise.

3\. 1 and 2 imply no non-determinstic systems can possess free will if
deterministic systems cannot possess free will.

4\. 3 implies free will is independent of determinism.

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causality0
This is less of a "we will replace natural meat with lab-grown meat" claim and
more of a "we will eventually be able to travel to the moon using only a
megajoule of energy" claim. It would take a vast change in our basic
understanding of physics to effect such an innovation. The crux of the matter
is that mouse bodies don't simulate mouse bodies, they _are_ mouse bodies. The
idea you could have something the size of a mouse body that could fully
simulate a mouse body is ridiculous. Biology is computationally efficient.

The University of Nevada used a 360 TFLOP supercomputer to simulate a mouse
brain. They managed to simulate the neurons firing once every ten seconds. In
reality neurons fire an average of 200 times per second. Even if their model
was fully accurate, that means you need 720PFLOPS to simulate just the brain
of a _single mouse_.

Barring computers based on completely different principles or a revolution in
the way we understand physics, a installation at a single facility will never
be able to fully simulate hundreds of experimental mice.

~~~
bserge
It's absolutely amazing to me how efficient and powerful brains are. Just the
simple action of say, moving from one side of a yard to another involves
realtime sensor information, motor control and feedback, threat assessment and
decision making, previous experience recall and more. In mere miliseconds even
in mice.

It gets insanely more complicated for humans. If you decide to drill a hole in
a piece of wood, your brain will process a ridiculous amount of information
just for that single purpose, plus it's always running primitive functions
like any other animal. Realtime.

I don't see any computer doing that anytime soon.

------
lordnacho
Sounds like map-vs-territory confusion to me. A model of a mouse in a computer
isn't a mouse, the point of doing the experiment is to uncover whether what
you thought the model predicted was in fact what happened, because it's
possible you didn't incorporate some aspect of the real mouse.

Simulations are useful for making calculations. Say I'm convinced that
buildings work a certain way and I have a finite element model of one. I don't
know what the predictions are for a new building of a certain shape, so I
shove it in a computer to tell me. The computer tells me what I should predict
assuming that my finite elements ideas were correct. What it won't tell me is
whether there's some aspect of that model that doesn't correspond to what the
building is actually gonna be made of.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
Doing drug development without animal testing is like trying to modify a huge,
messy, legacy code base without integration tests.

Our computer models are like unit tests. They are relatively self-contained
and quick to run. However, they cannot test all the interactions and stuff we
do t know about, so we have animal testing as a kind of integration test to
make sure stuff works like expected.

And a phase 3 clinical trial is like pre-prod. When you think everything
works, you expose test it in the real world with very careful monitoring and
plan to keep it from going out into prod if problems are found.

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S0und
Why do they want to model mice, when they the whole medical industry don't
know shit about the mice they use for experiments?

They use mice to experiment with, BUT through breeding the current lab mice
are more resilient then humans. Which can imply that certain drugs getting
passed for human testing because they did well with mice. Today's lab mice are
more resilient, but the same drug can damage humans.

Bret Weinstein talks about this on JRE:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=9597s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=9597s)

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adrianN
Given the current state of our nematode simulation tech
([http://openworm.org/](http://openworm.org/)), "the future" might take a
while to arrive.

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rjmo
As a fellow animal researcher: this article is pretty much devoid of informed
or carefully considered thought about the issue.

Many commenters have noted that biological systems are mind-numbingly complex,
and we're not even close modeling these systems in a way that's useful for
testing novel hypotheses of biology researchers.

The field in which I work, neuroscience, frequently does employ computational
modeling, but this modeling is primarily used to provide a mechanistic link
between inputs and outputs observed in an in vivo experiment. Present a
sensory signal to an animal, observe something about neural dynamics in a
brain region, THEN use simplified biologically-inspired elements to provide a
plausible mechanism between the two. Even the state-of-the-art in silico model
is always child's play compared to the real thing. We definitely don’t know
enough about that real thing to build a model that would circumvent its need.
This author also works in a neuroscience lab – they should know better.

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teekert
This completely bypasses the revolution that will take place long before this:
Organs on a chip. With the development of organoids [0] we made the first
step. Things like the lung-on-a-chip [1] are steps towards a sort of mini body
that mimics many functions and simulates the body not only in the molecular
biological way but in the very important physical way (which, it turns out can
not be decoupled from the molecular biology).

Why would we put mice in computer chips if we can have pseudo human bodies in
the real world?

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SG5ivm6jkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SG5ivm6jkw)

[1] [https://wyss.harvard.edu/media-post/lung-on-a-
chip/](https://wyss.harvard.edu/media-post/lung-on-a-chip/)

~~~
gridlockd
> Why would we put mice in computer chips if we can have pseudo human bodies
> in the real world?

Because a lot of the existing data was gathered on mice.

------
olodus
One can look at it like how us developers look at testing. You have multiple
steps on the way from code to delivery. There are unit test, more realistic
test frameworks, test environments and then finally tests at a customer /
usage by a customer.

In the same vain I could see (and even hope) some mice tests could be
decreased or removed as better models and simulations gets created. That would
be quicker and more cost efficient for everyone. But in the end you want a
real world test before giving it to a human. And maybe we could find better
things than mice for that as well, but right now I think that is the best we
have got. I am not a medical researcher though so I don't know if there are
alternatives out there.

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jfoutz
A friend of mine works on simulating mouse organs. We had some pretty great
talks over beer about modeling and cross model validation. Eventually he'd
rant about all models are wrong but some models are useful.

If I remember correctly, they had some success in rejecting animal studies.
Things like, we don't know what this will do overall, but we're pretty sure
the kidneys or liver will fail like X, so don't bother with the wet lab. Or
possibly try the wet lab at small scale so they can validate the model.

We're far far away from full simulation. But we know a whole lot about mice. I
internalized those conversations as, my friend writes type checkers for drugs
against mouse hardware.

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ganzuul
This is apparently different from the lab-on-a-chip research which seems to
seek to miniaturize organs into a microfluidic environment. I'm not actually
sure if they are using organ cells on a scaffold or if they can discard the
scaffold for microfluidics and cells alone even after reading a few papers on
the subject.

Personally I think living 2D animals in a petri dish would be metal as fuck.

------
byteface
I worked with a guys who said 'one of the reasons' he quit medical research
was because of the amount of mice he had to kill on a daily basis. He said,
"the quick way is to snap their necks with the back of your pencil." as he
demonstrated on the desk the technique of how to hold the pencil a certain
way.

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Gatsky
This isn't the right point to make. There are a lot of unnecessary animal
experiments because the way in which experiments are planned is very
unprincipled. in silico approaches have great potential to improve the
efficiency of animal experiments.

------
paulchap
I guess now would be a good time to recommend 'Permutation City' by Greg
Egan... Great book!

------
zalkota
The brain is not an algorithm and can’t be described as such.

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foobar_
Its pointless to use animals in research, it makes no logical sense. Even if
the research is successful after 10 years of animal cruelty ... you still have
to test it on humans.

~~~
sk0g
What about all the chemicals that never get to human testing due to harmful
effects coming up in animal testing? Is that not a net positive from a human
perspective?

~~~
foobar_
Are there absolutely no alternatives to test that ?

~~~
sk0g
Not as far as our brightest scientists in the relevant fields have been able
to figure out. What do you propose?

~~~
foobar_
Test with synthetic proteins ?

[https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-
experimentation...](https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-
experimentation/alternatives-animal-testing/)

~~~
hobofan
Yes, those techniques are what we are moving towards and we are slowly getting
there, but for the time being they can't be universally applied.

~~~
foobar_
You do understand you are just defending big pharma and cosmetics. I really
doubt any new ground breaking discovery has come from animal testing.

~~~
hobofan
Animal testing is all over biochemistry and biology, is not just used for
pharmaceutical and cosmetics testing. Many ground braking discoveries have
been (and are still being made) via animal testing. There are whole
subdisciplines that are based around animal testing like developmental or
behavioural biology.

Though you can avoid it if you really want to, if you study biochemistry, you
will learn how to do animal testing and are taught about all the ethics
involved, how to do the testing in the most humane way, and how to avoid (or
minimize) doing it in the first place if possible.

I've been going through the list of recent Nobel Prizes and the research for
these involved animal testing: Nobel Prize for medicine 2018 (mice), 2017
(flys), 2014 (rats), 2012 (frogs, mice). Older research made before we had
good tools to work with cell cultures, etc. will probably skew even more
towards animal testing.

~~~
foobar_
Citation needed. What specific things were discovered ? Are they useful to
humans ? Could they be done without testing ?

All that I read are pointless science articles about aging in mice as if that
applied to humans.

~~~
hobofan
> Are they useful to humans?

No, probably not. I'm sure they are just giving Nobel Prizes for Medicine out
for funny discoveries rather than for findings that form the basis of most of
our current and future medicine.

> Could they be done without testing?

Sure they could! But scientists just love to make animals suffer!

~~~
foobar_
> Nobel Prizes for Medicine out for funny discoveries

Yes, just like they give oscars to pointless movies. Even roman numerals had
its fervent defenders.

