1 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
Do you think it’s possible to have “giant leap” advances in medicine anymore without human experimentation like the Minnesota Starvation study?
Comment by Chiperoni at 15/03/2023 at 18:11 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Yes, we've now entered the era of gene editing. We will be able to cure many monogenic diseases in the coming decades. Robotics are being integrated into more and more surgeries and improving outcomes. Functional imaging is becoming more precise and allowing for the development of theragnostics. AI will play a greater role in diagnosis and drug development. We're learning how to harvest human and humanized tissues and organs from animals for transplantation. Etcetera.
We will still do "human experimentation" with clinical trials and translational research but we don't need to be unethical about it
Comment by AgingLemon at 15/03/2023 at 23:13 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I work as a health researcher. Depends on what exactly qualifies as a giant leap to you and what aspect of that study you’re referring to (e.g. knowingly harming people) but I’ll say that we’ve been making leaps for decades without being unethical or cruel. Ethical research isn’t a crutch. Money, time, careful planning, and bureaucracy are.
Comment by Indemnity4 at 17/03/2023 at 04:00 UTC*
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
We experiment on humans all the time.
Deliberately, there are medical trials or stress trials. Kind of obvious how those work.
Unintentional knowledge comes from studying accidents, mental patients or tragedies.
For instance, a person with mental health issues may decide to overdose on some random chemical or a factory making something may accidentally shower a worker in it. Some car accident victim may have some unintended surgery that requires emergency correction and everyone deals with consequences later.
A current long term experiment is ongoing that generates controversy. There is a last-ditch life saving treatment where someones lungs are replaced with an external machine oxygenating their blood. However, about 75% put onto this machine die, about 10-20% come out with brain injuries. They almost certainly would have die without intervention, it mostly doesn't work and long-term everyone seems to be harmed by it. But we do it anyway because once that technology exists, the community now expects any and all live saving treatments to be done, regardless of what outcome means. Overall: we are learning a heck of a lot about lung injuries and blood oxygen levels, etc, really on the fly from using this unpredictable machine.