Slashdot Mirror
India To Cut Out Animal Dissection
ananyo writes "Squeamish science students in India might not have to grapple with cutting up rats or frogs for much longer. The University Grants Commission (UGC), the national body in New Delhi that funds and governs Indian universities, announced new rules earlier this month that would phase out almost all animal dissection and replace it with teaching using computer simulations and models."
Bad enough my doctor's English is for shit, now the last words I get to hear before the anesthesia kicks in is "What the hell is THAT?!?" in a thick accent.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
IMHO, it's no substitution for the technical skill involved in dissections. Do these programs account for the variability in tissues among species? I know that birds have thinner skin than mammals, for example.
Biologists: Have computer simulations and models advanced to a point where they can replace physical cadavers for studies and training?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Once an animal is no longer useful, there is no one interested in breeding them and our failure at protecting their natural environments eventually leaves them extinct
Automobile students, squeamish about getting grease on their fingers, are clamoring to have their hands-on experience replaced by computer simulations. Heaven help us when the airplane industry does the same.
... will give their virtual doctors virtual experience to cure virtual diseases and preform virtual operations.
Hope no one gets a non-virtual disease or has some strange organ issue that doesn't fit the models...
Check your premises.
donate the body of Congress for vivisection study!
The people from India probably have better insight but I bet this stems from their religion that reveres life, Eating meat is a Vice - A huge percentage are vegetarian etc.
If you're ever going to be a surgeon, there's no replacing dissection. Sorry. They are living on some cloud nine. This is a big snafu in the making. My bet is that the people who made this decision were not practicing surgeons, or perhaps they were some very poor ones better fit for a bureaucratic job rather than an OR job.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
...is to weed out the squeamish.
Where will that leave us? A bunch of queasy folks standing around waiting for someone with a stronger disposition to step up?
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
True "pros" of various kinds can practice on naturally-decease humans cadavers. At lower levels of study, no need to waste life.
Please, before responding with an idiotic "But how will my doctor know what they are doing?!?!", think about this for more than 2 seconds. The vast majority of students in undergraduate biology classes will never in their lives have to cut open and dissect another animal of any kind, and the knowledge they gain from it could easily be gained by simulation. For the very small minority of students who will require surgical or dissection skills (doctors at vets), there is ample time to get them that specialized experience in their respective graduate programs. This is a good change to focus resources where they will be the most useful.
My other sig is clever.
I find it amazing that on Slashdot of all places so many people are questioning the very premise of computer simulated training and whether it's a viable analogue of the physical world.
While I do believe that some careers should probably dissect animals (surgeons, veterinarians) I don't see the point in requiring this for everyone. I am just fine with my pharmacist not having cut open dead animals.
This is about research. The less experience biology students have in dissecting animals, the more problems they'll have during their PhD and the more problems biotechs and phara companies will have in getting the skills they need to do proper animal experiments and trials with new therapies. So this is a bad move IMO.
Back in my day, we had to dissect each other while running uphill to campus in ten feet of snow and manage to sew ourselves back up before roll call. Of course, back then you could buy bread for a nickel and still have five cents left over for malt shakes, and dancing was all proper-like, none of this "flopping" or "dunking" you kids do now, and when I got back from the war I... *snore*
http://www.biodigitalhuman.com/ and others could eliminate the first few years of hacking up a body. But in the end, the only way to learn what it looks like is on a cadaver.
I don't want my surgeon to be freaked out by the squishy parts, the smell, and to have difficulty with veins and other things that are not in the exact same spot in all patients.
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i am an indian and i presently attend college. at school, when i was in 8th class, i was extremely eager to go to 9th class because they had all sorts of frog and cockroach dissection and i was very interested. the fuckers (idiotic peta type people) abolished dissection in middle/high school from that very year :( i never got my chance to do interesting dissections and lost all interest in biology. now i am studying electronics :(
looks like they will make even medical school bland and uninteresting.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Most students who take an anatomy class at the level that requires animal dissection fall into two categories: those who are interested in an allied health profession (e.g., nursing, physical therapy) and those who are either interested in becoming professional biologists or medical doctors. I think you could make a pretty good case that in both cases, real dissections are an essential part of the students' training. Your average college student is not masochistic enough to take what is typically a course much tougher than a garden variety general education class. I don't know how the education system works in India, but I think the vast majority of biology departments in the US would not be willing to use models exclusive of real dissection. That being said, we do use models to supplement instruction, but these are physical models, not computer-based. Unless 3D displays become radically better and give tactile feedback, I don't see computer dissecting simulations displacing physical models either.
NO CARRIER
Speaking as a medical school student, I'd say it depends on what you want to study and train the student to do afterwards.
If you are teaching the student using virtual methods, and then measure the student's performance using models and drawings afterwards -- you will probably find that the student's performance is actually higher than that of using real-life cadavers (not surprisingly, because you are training in the same manner as you are testing).
Their ability to regurgitate names for everything everything will probably be better, too. Because all the pieces are nice and discrete. Easy to memorize.
Now, real world bodies are different. In a preserved cadaver, everything is rendered in a few shades of brown/yellow/gray that blur together, (one exception: the gallbladder is a beautiful shade of green). If dissecting something not preserved and alive (or recently alive), smear red over everything (That's how you get stories about surgeons leaving sponges and stuff in bodies. Stuff ends up looking like red blobs sitting among a collection of red blobs).
It's very difficult to learn from a cadaver; A bunch of different structures in the book might just look like one big chunk in the body (cause maybe they're all enveloped and held together by connective tissue). Unlike a piece of designed equipment that needed to be assembled, everything space is stuffed and crammed with something or another, because it probably grew there. Except when it didn't grow there, it grew somewhere else and migrated. And because it was grown and not made, often it's not quite the shape or location that the book says.
As a result, learning to navigate around a body and recognize it's components is a special skill that goes far beyond memorizing those components themselves. There's a lot of reasoning and tracing connections and relationships. You don't just learn things from a cadaver, you learn skills.
Please, before responding with an idiotic "But how will my doctor know what they are doing?!?!", think about this for more than 2 seconds
Let me use an analogy suitable for Slashdot.
You can learn a lot of about female anatomy from pictures, descriptions, and virtual models. And I'm sure many on this site have studied just materials at great length.
However, such materials are likely to leave you with misconceptions and an incomplete set of knowledge. A real specimen provides features such as 3D viewing and tactile feedback -- all these things will teach you things you would otherwise might not understand (Protip: They do not feel like bags of sand).
The vast majority of students in undergraduate biology classes will never in their lives have to cut open and dissect another animal of any kind, and the knowledge they gain from it could easily be gained by simulation.
So, to continue my Slashdot analogy. Um, Yeah...
This is not correct...I am a Computer Science major, and will be spending my time dissecting the innards of computer servers, not animals. Yet, for my science requirement, I had to do two biology classes - and I've had to dissect both a pig and a frog in one of the labs. This is not long in the past, it was earlier this year, here in the USA. In addition, our labs are rather rushed - the first half is a mini-lecture, and then we have to rush to dissect the animal in the last half, so there's very little I learned that I don't see every Thanksgiving when carving a turkey up.
Insofar as an essential part of my training, I would have been far better served learning what an expressed sequence tag, or some other type of bioinformatics, as opposed to cutting up an animal. All I really learned is when I cut an animal open, I do it a little too hard with the knive and mess up the specimen a little since the lab is rushed. How does this help my knowledge of science? I might not ever even use bioinformatics but at least it is something I might wind up using. Instead I'm cutting up pigs and memorizing dozens of different of fungi species.
It really makes little sense to me to have dissection in high school or college Bio 1xx classes. There are plenty of 200 level, 300 level and grad school classes that can start people who will be majoring (or even minoring) in Biology to do that. This story about it being essential to me sounds like a sales pitchman's banter.
It seems like other countries are always advancing technologically and socially ahead of the U.S. because conservatives and corporate America hare holding us behind.
Animals aren't people. Animal testing doesn't work. Ask any medical researcher about Phase 1 trials, the first human trials for a new treatment after animal testing.
Moving toward computer modeling is progress for both people and animals.
Since breeding and experimenting on lab animals is big business, the U.S. as with many things will hold onto this outdated practice last.
I'm in 6th grade right now, and before we dissected a squid last week, we dissected one virtually on this computer program called "Froguts". It was okay, and it was easier to see some of the organs, but dissecting it for real was a MUCH better learning experience. Instead of just pressing buttons and reading prompts, I got to do things that the Froguts simulation completely ignored. While it definitely prepared me for dissecting the real thing, computer simulations of dissections cannot replace the real thing!
High school doesn't teach you a profession, it just shows you all the things you can learn and do. It's better for a student to realize they can't stand dissection in high school than in medical school when they have already chosen to be a doctor.
Farnsworth: Well, as a man enters his 18th decade, he thinks back on the mistakes he's made in life.
Amy: Like the heaps of dead monkeys?
Farnsworth: Science cannot move forward without heaps!
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
So does this mean the Indians have developed holographic technology? :P
Where does the line start for buying those devices that emit photons and forcefields? It'll sure be fun to cut up holographic frogs!
Apart from so much racism resenting the fact that Indians are far superior to UK and USA, animal dissections are pretty useless. No one gives a fuck to how much some member appreciates a cow's retina. Animals don't need to die.
The article never says anything about cadavers. But Slashdoters assume shit up and FUD around.
The only place animal dissection is ok is in a vet school.
During my travels, I came upon a culture with an interesting custom: Each time a doctor's patient died, they were required to hang a plaque with the patient's name on it. As it happens, I took ill and went in search of a physician. I passed up a doctor's office that had 35 plaques out front, and another with 40 until I spotted one with only 10.
The waiting room was crowded with fellow foreigners but eventually the physician was able to see me. When I asked him how business was, the harried man said, "Great! I've only been open two days and I can barely keep up!"
The Motto: Don't be the first patient of a 'doctor' that has spent most of their training using computers.
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///