Of humans? No, of course not.
So what is your point?
That a beating-heart corpse is alive in all the ways that count if you’re interested in just about anything except brain function, modulo whatever other damage the warm, breathing stiff came in with.
Legally dead means actually, dead, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it does not mean sort of technically dead according to the letter of the law, but not really, as Isilder’s post implied. The law errs very much on the side of caution in these things. A stopped heart you can sometimes be brought back from, so it is not sufficient for legal death; a stopped brain, no, it’s over. Experimenting on someone who is brain dead is not vivisection. They are not alive.
Why should it matter if a mechanical pump, which is what the heart is, is still working if the person it once kept alive is not there any more? If the brain has stopped functioning, they are not feeling anything anymore. In the unlikely event that their heart keeps beating after that it is really of no significance to the person, because there ain’t no person there anymore. To suggest otherwise is nothing sentimental claptrap, perhaps bolstered by biological ignorance.
Are we defining “vivisection” strictly as “strap to a table and cut apart,” or are we stretching it to all human experimentation—e.g. “raising a baby in a Skinner Box”?
The human brain is rather unique, especially the “high level” regions such as the frontal and prefrontal cortex. It is not exactly medical research, but our knowledge of the brain would progress much faster if we had access to invasive techniques such as brain electrodes in humans.
Currently, MRI, EEG and the rare cases of electrode implantation in humans for medical reasons provide only limited information.
(note: I am not a mad scientist and I wouldn’t do that).
I think people vastly overestimate the quality of imaging studies (x-rays, MRI, CT, PET, ultrasound) in general. The best MRI in the world misses a lot of blood clots in the pelvis, and many of them in the legs, because it can’t show the flow of blood well. And that’s when they’re specifically *looking *for blood clots. Transvaginal ultrasound misses more than a third of ovarian cysts. Imaging is helpful, but it’s not the same as being able to actually poke around in there and see what’s up.
Still, that’s more on an individual patient basis, not For Science!. I think that outside of the brain, we have a pretty good understanding of the gross mechanics of anatomy and physiology, so there’s not a whole lot to be learned by vivisection at this point. Now it’s more about understanding the complex biochemistry and interaction of systems on the micro, not macro.
You meant to specify “human vivisection,” I assume. And it’s worth noting that experimental surgeries are done even on humans under various levels of oversight.
When you say “individual patient level,” you are acknowledging that the everything in first graf is entirely possible w/o vivisection? Or am I missing something?
I’m saying that there’s a difference between us being able to find something we’re specifically looking for in Leo Bloom’s belly - for which imaging isn’t always useful, and sometimes you need to just get a scalpel and have a direct look see - and learning “medical knowledge” from vivisection that would further the field of medical science.
“Vivisection” in the form of exploratory surgery is still very much needed at times so we can learn about you and what’s wrong with you and how *your *body deviates from “normal and healthy”. But we have a very good idea of what “normal and healthy” already looks like. I don’t think there are a lot of general medical secrets still lurking on the scale of a scalpel and naked eye - except in the brain, as already mentioned. We’ve pretty much vivisected every other square inch during surgical procedures (including patching up trauma and war wounds) already.
But mostly I wanted to point out that MRIs et al aren’t the clear picture perfect pictures that most people think they are. There’s still a lot of detail lost. We don’t need vivisection because we’ve got imaging, but rather we don’t need vivisection because it’s essentially already been done.
Hot off the press [brought to you by SD SerendipityTM]:
Structural and molecular interrogation of intact biological systems
Kwanghun Chung, Jenelle Wallace, Sung-Yon Kim, Sandhiya Kalyanasundaram, Aaron S. Andalman, Thomas J. Davidson, Julie J. Mirzabekov, Kelly A. Zalocusky, Joanna Mattis, Aleksandra K. Denisin, Sally Pak, Hannah Bernstein, Charu Ramakrishnan, Logan Grosenick, Viviana Gradinaru & Karl Deisseroth
Nature (2013) doi:10.1038/nature12107
Received 01 September 2012 Accepted 20 March 2013 Published online 10 April 2013
Abstract
Obtaining high-resolution information from a complex system, while maintaining the global perspective needed to understand system function, represents a key challenge in biology. Here we address this challenge with a method (termed CLARITY) for the transformation of intact tissue into a nanoporous hydrogel-hybridized form (crosslinked to a three-dimensional network of hydrophilic polymers) that is fully assembled but optically transparent and macromolecule-permeable. Using mouse brains, we show intact-tissue imaging of long-range projections, local circuit wiring, cellular relationships, subcellular structures, protein complexes, nucleic acids and neurotransmitters. CLARITY also enables intact-tissue in situ hybridization, immunohistochemistry with multiple rounds of staining and de-staining in non-sectioned tissue, and antibody labelling throughout the intact adult mouse brain. Finally, we show that CLARITY enables fine structural analysis of clinical samples, including non-sectioned human tissue from a neuropsychiatric-disease setting, establishing a path for the transmutation of human tissue into a stable, intact and accessible form suitable for probing structural and molecular underpinnings of physiological function and disease.
Source article The Transparent Brain with links to a vid and details on the Brain Project