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From: drsmith@silver.bacs.indiana.edu (drew smith)
Newsgroups: sci.research,talk.politics.misc,sci.bio
Subject: Re: animal research
Summary: no need to repeat expts
Message-ID: <3437@silver.bacs.indiana.edu>
Date: 12 Mar 89 23:53:34 GMT
References: <726@orbit.UUCP> <3254@ttrdc.UUCP>
Reply-To: drsmith@silver.UUCP (drew smith)
Distribution: na
Organization: Indiana University BACS, Bloomington
Lines: 29

In article <3254@ttrdc.UUCP> levy@ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes:
>More practical I think, would be the use of computerized record-keeping for
>some kind of national or even international database to record the results
>of specific animal tests, so that tests, especially tests that cause pain to
>animals, need not be unnecessarily repeated.  Why should a hundred different
>research institutions, for instance, have to independently find out what
>happens when a rabbit has formaldehyde squirted in its eye?  Granted, for
>animal rights partisans even once is too much, but surely more than once is
>even worse!
>
>Unlike computer modeling which would require both compute power and basic
>information that we just don't have available to us yet, this could be done
>NOW.

That is precisely what the scientific literature is for. For
better or worse there are no rewards in science for repeating
others experiments. Therefore no *competent* scientist will waste
his/her time doing what's been done before. The problem is that
the size of the literature is just too big for anyone to keep up
with. There do exist computerized databases, such as Dialog, that
will direct users to the relevant publications; these are fast,
but expensive. Every university library also has a set of ISI
scientific indexes and biological abstracts that will do the
same thing for free, but can be tedious and time-consuming.
Still, it is always faster to find someone else's results
than to do the experiment yourself. Given the cost of animal
experimentation, it is also vastly cheaper.

-Drew Smith, Dept. of Biology, Indiana Univ.