A Blog Around The Clock

My favorite is when they tell me I can do all my experiments on computers. No need for cells, serum, antibodies, in vivo studies, nothing. Just computers and human experimentation, their idea of the future of bioscience.

Posted by: quitter | October 11, 2006 5:28 AM

As I wrote here:

We spend at least 6 months discussing every experiment that we may want to do (and may have already got NIH funding for beforehand) before we decide if it is worth doing and if we are certain that we have perfected the experimental design in a way that will maximize the usefulness of the experiment. The important guiding principle is that we want to minimize the number of animals we use, minimize the pain, and maximize the benefit we gain from doing the experiment.

Then, we spend a couple of months dealing with IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Commitee) over the details of all the proposed experiments before they are approved, although they had initially approved the experiments as described in our grant proposal (NIH requires the IACUC approval to be sent with the proposal). Often we have to modify the procedure, or even abandon an experiment, due to IACUC non-approval (IACUCs are semi-fascist organizations IMHO).

And here:

Since then, we in the field, myself included, have gradually moved away from this kind of research. Each experiment takes forever. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of animals. It sometimes requires invasive surgery. ------snip--------- Those experiments were faster and easier to do, required smaller numbers of animals and almost no invasive surgery - something that is more and more difficult to do these days both because of tightening IACUC rules and because it is hard for us to persuade ourselves that much of it is necessary any more. The approach was very fruitfull over the decades, but now it suffers from the effect of diminishing returns. It had to be done at the time when it revolutionized our understanding of circadian systems, less so now when it may just add new detail. Such experiments used to eliminate five out of ten alternative hypotheses, now more like one out of three - often not sufficiently important to actually decide to perform the study.

Posted by: coturnix | October 11, 2006 8:18 AM