The study in question found microplastic in 80% of test subjects. The presence of these particles is likely not new, just that it's been difficult to detect them until now. Buckle up, we're not likely to find out that they give us superhuman abilities.
I'm sorry - I'm refering to the experiment. I personally know that there are microplastics in our blood - I'm saying that this experiment is redundant, as your link arguably supports.
I'm obviously not arguing that microplastics aren't an issue - I'm saying we didn't have to force feed mice plastic to get actionable data to solve the issue.
I have not idea what you are arguing anymore, and frankly, it's just a lot of noise at this point. The way we figure out stuff is with experiments, sometimes experiments on animals. You're out here "no need for experiments, this is a waste of money, blah blah blah unethical, I could have told you that, everyone's embezzling money from the government, those rich scientists huminah huminah." I mean, I could argue these points, or you could just stop trolling.
I think there is too little oversight on animal testing and that this experiment is a flagrant example of that. While I understand that some experiment "require" animal testing, I don't see how this one arguably does.
That's not been argued, we're arguing the salaries of the scientists instead - not certain why.
I haven't talked abount embezzeling anything or that experiments are useless - just that I can't see why this one was done, and it makes me weary of most experiments on animals, even more than I normaly am, as they seem much more arbitrary than I would have liked to think.
We can do that as well, and I am confident some studies are in the works. But we still need to understand what is happening, which require controlled environments and simplified situations where we can study the effect of each parameter one after another.
I see. I think I'm arguing that we should be more critical of animal studies, as I'm having problems seeing what usable data was extracted from these mice that wouldn't have been found some other way.
Definitely! That is completely legitimate and suffering must be avoided as much as possible.
But sometimes such experiments are necessary and cannot be easily avoided. The alternatives are not understanding what is happening (which is ok if the thing is harmless; I don’t think that this is the default hypothesis for nano-plastics), or doing the analytical experiments in humans.
> I'm having problems seeing what usable data was extracted from these mice that wouldn't have been found some other way
Off the top of my head, in this setting we control exactly the amount of particles and their size, which is important to assess the mechanisms by which they penetrate the tissues.
Looking at dead humans has a huge sampling bias (people giving their body are not representative of the population as a whole), and we have no idea about the kind of particles they were exposed to, or of any other factor that could affect what we want to quantify. Maybe some kinds of substances can increase or decrease penetration rates (things that affect blood pressure, for example). In a controlled setting, we know that all mice were exposed to exactly the same conditions.
No no I'm the one who was supposed to rebut with "In MICE!"
You're right about the cadavers! Maybe such a study exists and we could skip ahead to agreeing its a problem or perhaps we enter the next phase: "are we sure these plastics in my brain are akshuuuaallly a problem, perhaps they are making me less stupid and more healthy MR SCIENTISTS"
I'm not a scientist, but couldn't we check cadavers for microplastics? Wouldn't that be more concluent?