In very intelligent and intricate ways, scientists can be a bit dumb sometimes.
Imagine a golden retriever as a stand-in for Brad Pitt. They’re both mammals, they’re both beautiful, and they both eat food. We can’t possibly see anything wrong with this situation.
Not too far from this absurd example is how the scientific community has thought about animal testing. Sure, mice and humans are both mammals, and both are beautiful (to their mother) but inside and out, there are some pretty big differences.
Did you know mice can’t spew? Apparently, their diaphragms are a bit wimpy and their stomachs are too bulbous. If we were mice, we’d be offended!
Anyhoo, that probably explains why vomiting didn’t crop up as a side effect during animal tests of drugs like Rolipram; a drug showing promising results in the fight against depression until human trials resulted in non-stop vomiting. Years of research and millions of dollars were literally flushed down the toilet because researchers ass-u-me’d that humans were the same as mice.
Another thing mice can’t do is have a stroke. They’re robust little critters, aren’t they, what with their plaque-free blood vessels? Unfortunately, this meant 114 potential stroke therapies initially tested on animals failed in human trials.
But that’s how it goes with science: 10% of the time you win, the other 90% you find nothing and keep scratching your head.
This doesn’t explain, however, why scientific research is so goddamn sexist. Regardless of pronouns and gender identity, biologically speaking, males and females are different. Research from more recent years shows that even on a cellular and genetic level, biological sex matters. Let’s hear that again… “on a cellular and genetic level, biological sex matters”!
And yet, many studies that we still reference for medical interventions today don’t take this into consideration.
Since 1923, if not earlier, scientists have excluded female animals in trials, even when studying effects on issues that only affect women. The argument was “fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable”.
But wait, what about the male mice who, when housed together, establish a dominance hierarchy boosting testosterone levels of the alphas to 5 times that of the betas? But that’s not hormonal, right? That’s just dudes being dudes. Clearly, science hasn’t removed itself from the patriarchy.
So if sexism runs rampant in animal testing labs too, what are we going to do about it?
Thankfully, major funders of scientific research including the US National Institutes of Health, which handles 80,000 grants a year, now have a requirement that the research they fund take into account sex as a biological variable (or at least have a very good reason why not).
So, from genetically modified lab rats to simulations and AI, accompany us down the rabbit hole into some of the less well-publicised tales from the world of animals as proxy people, and join in a collective facepalm at the pervasiveness of sexism.
SOURCES:
The Atlantic - Medicine has a rate problem (It’s stranger than you think)
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics - The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation
Nature - Males still dominate animal studies
The Guardian - Use of male mice skews drug research against women, study finds (by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent @hannahdev)
CNN - Lab rats are overwhelmingly male, and that’s a problem (by Katie Hunt)
NPR - Drugs That Work In Mice Often Fail When Tried In People
The Conversation - Of mice and men: why animal trial results don’t always translate to humans
European Animal Research Association - Animal research saves lives. So why do opponents say it is ineffective?
Vox - Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade. Have we learned anything?
Previous Episode mentioned:
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Rod 00:00
There are many arguments about the pros and cons of using animals in research. Did you know that?
Will 00:06
I do. I've heard. I've thought of those poor little mice and those dogs and monkeys, and the children.
Rod 00:16
This isn't about the
Rod 00:18
There's an easy Pro, and easy pro argument is if the research is actually like Veterinary Research for animals.
Will 00:25
Okay, if it's for that. Yeah. So you will forget that one, you put one dog down, and this this allows another 1,000 dogs to live. Sure. We'll experiment with what happens with a car crash with this dog so that we know that other dogs can survive
Rod 00:39
get in cars,
Rod 00:40
another pro if we're in a real hurry, like you know for pandemic vaccines, because you know, some animals, their life cycles are very swift. We can watch generational change, we can develop things that will keep us going will get us better or keep us alive faster. So that's a pro. One con, animal suffering. Obviously,
Will 00:59
that is a con
Rod 00:59
There's a bit of that. Another con animals can't provide or withhold consent
Will 01:04
would you? You'd be surprised.
Rod 01:07
I'm often surprised. But look, social and ethical debates like about you know, is it right or wrong to experiment on animals and honestly, comparatively few protests like given how much work goes on. You've got this untrammelled ticking along of consistent animal research for a very long time. Science has basically being using animals like rats and mice is fuzzy little test tubes for what, a billion years?
Will 01:30
Fuzzy little test tubes. T shirts slogan there. They're just fuzzy a little test tubes. I wouldn't put it in a T shirt that you would wear outside the lab
Rod 01:40
I would
Will 01:44
do a drawing of a test tube that sort of got mouse ears and a mouse tail
Rod 01:48
and hot internal organs
Will 01:49
and cute little whiskers
Rod 01:51
and bleeds
Will 01:53
Did you have to go that far?
Will 01:54
Yes, yes. That lower on the pyramid of life.
Rod 01:54
I did. I did. It's what I do. But of course, now and then people do protest. You get a few hippie types. You get a bit squeamish and they go this ain't great. You know, screw you don't do things with animals. But it seems it's pretty easy to brush it aside with saving lives. Yeah, so improving quality of life. You know, people kind of go okay, cool, cool, cool. We'll leave it alone. Anyway, at the heart of the problem, quite often, the majority of the justifications tend to be we can legally do stuff to animals, which we would never do to people because they're so different from us.
Rod 02:00
Yeah, this is a pro. This is sold as a pro.
Will 02:28
Yeah. Okay.
Rod 02:29
But it's also exactly the reason why it's a con. Because if they're so different for us, yeah, and what fucking way are they decent proxy for us in the research? And so you can go down this rabbit hole, pun intended or have all the research problems animals. The more you dig in, the more your brain gets dented. And you know this, we know this, we've been through this sort of stuff before, but today, I figured if you're going to bother getting dented at all, why not cave it the fuck in. So today I'm going to wander through some of the less well publicised Tales from the world of animals is proxy people. But before I go into it, and before we play a delicious theme tune, two spoilers, one, not a conversation that gets deep ethics of you know, should you or shouldn't you experiment on animals? Because, look, we take it as given. There's a big brawl about that. One, it'll come up, but that's an old one. You know, whatever, Trevor, we know this one. Number two, holy shit. Is there anything that isn't sexist?
Will 03:32
Welcome to the wholesome show, podcast that delights in waggling a disapproving finger at the whole of science. Are we do do or don't. I love to waggle my disapproving finger
Rod 03:45
clutch our pearls at science. eat scones in Scotland, grease up our little noses. Yeah.
Will 03:51
The wholesome show is me Will Grant
Rod 03:53
and me Roderick G Lambert's. Okay I'll set the scene. So there's a feature written by the European or in the European animal research Association's February bulletin blog, whatever website 2022 February, animal research saves lives. So why do opponents say it's ineffective? It goes like this one of the most common statistics used by activists to justify why animal research should be phased out or banned, is the frequently quoted claim that 90% of animal tests are ineffective. So this is written by science people and this this thing it goes on to say the 90% failure rate claim is not actually disputed by the biomedical community
Will 04:32
course not because
Rod 04:34
because Yeah, it's true. Yes. However, yeah, the gains that you make with the 10% are so awesome that it's worth it. That's the gist.
Will 04:41
They're basically what the people that don't like it are saying, look, a lot of the experiments that that particular rat or that particular mouse go nowhere. Nothing happened with that one. This is the thing, a whole bulk of science goes nowhere. You're like this is the point of science, particularly in the experiment.
Rod 04:57
That's why we science, to go nowhere
Will 04:59
slowly but repetitively over and over again so that one day we might get somewhere. Yeah, there you go. There's another t shirt slogan so that one day we might get somewhere. But so much of science will involve, you know, saying if I mix thing a with thing B, what happens to you alright was thing I would think C thing I thing d, or whatever it is you got to do a lot of stuff that doesn't get anywhere. Sadly, for those poor little mice, it means they might have died for not getting anywhere.
Rod 05:27
Look, even if they died for getting anywhere. They didn't get anywhere.
Will 05:30
They didn't get anywhere. None of them did.
Rod 05:32
But I do like the fact that they say look, 10% is still excellent. So it's like, I want to argue with the activist they're right? 10% is still frickin excellent life saving treatments, etc, etc. For people. Yeah. So another another scene set for this. What about failure to replicate studies and results?
Will 05:48
Okay, well, that's a big one.
Rod 05:49
There's a bit of that. So here's one piece that was written by a cancer research manager person from Monash uni. Talk about a few things. One of them is a 2006 review looked at studies where medical interventions were tested on animals, and whether the results were replicated in human trials.
Will 06:05
Okay, so going from animal to human, yeah, let's see how we've got a mouse that says, the heart
Rod 06:10
We've got a rat who never dies. Let's see if the humans never die. Okay. So it showed that the most cited animal studies in prestigious journals like Nature and sell, only 37% were replicated in subsequent human randomised trials. 37% worked in people.
Will 06:26
That's not terrible.
Rod 06:27
Yeah. And another 18% were completely contradicted. Okay, so we're heading what, 14,
Will 06:32
as you said before, we are a little bit different from animals, and we are a little bit animals might be a good place to start. But they're not human, human human.
Rod 06:39
Oh, no, it's, I'm going to tell you how they are. So that's in top tier journals sell in nature. So there's they're going to speculate that lower tier journals going to be worse. They speculated that. they dropped the mic and wandered off. also talked about another view that found the treatment effect either beneficial or harmful and effect at all. From six medical interventions that carried were carried out on humans and animals were similar for only half. So the same effects 50 50, whether good or bad at both useful in research, knowing if it's good or bad. And so basically, they go on to emphasise the results of animal and human trials disagreed half of the time. You're like, yes, okay. It's true. Yeah. So replication is
Will 07:20
again this is the point of science
Rod 07:21
little bit. Yeah, to get it right half the time.
Will 07:24
Well, to find out which time you got it right.
Rod 07:26
That half, top half, I got the top half, right. Yeah, bottom half. But to be fair, I mean, other sciences have had their replication issues. Sykes got a dick kicked in a lot in the last few years with not being able to replicate heaps of being studied. 2016 survey by nature 1500 over 1500, researchers did a little survey on reproducibility. More than 70% of them have tried and failed to reproduce other scientist experimental results. Okay. That's including a huge number of chemists, biologists, physicists, engineers, medical researchers, and earth and environmental scientists, the lowest of those 62% tried and failed to reproduce. So it goes up from there, tried and failed, and more than half failed to reproduce their own experiment.
Will 08:18
Okay. once, that's enough, there's plenty of recipes I've done once very well. And you think you think I've got it nailed now and you don't read the recipe next time.
Will 08:28
So you can look into it. And it's not just good.
Rod 08:30
I'd like to think these guys did read the recipe, probably. But I don't know for sure. Maybe they were just like you like that cake was perfect. And by cake, I mean bridge. Yeah, I'm gonna build it. What was it? What was it there for animals? That was the one in nature and cell replication 37% In humans, and 18% contradicted but this was also just looking for replication problems beyond biology and stuff. And there's, there's a lot so everybody, they got the problems, okay, a lot of science. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that's out there about kicking the shit out of Social Sciences and psychology, because, you know, obviously, we're a bunch of hippies. And none of our stuff is real. Yeah. I don't agree with them. But none of this stuff that I've spoken about on the whole, except for the biology requires death as an endpoint.
Will 09:11
Yeah. Okay.
Rod 09:12
For example, on the staple of most medical research, rats and mice. So there's a bunch of interviews that I'm not going to read out all the different sources because some of them actually went to like actual journals. It was a weird week for me. But they're in there in the show notes. So it's an interview with a guy a guy called Todd Preuss. He's an anthropologist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre at Emory University.
Will 09:35
Got monkeys there though
Rod 09:36
Yep, they got monkeys that's that's their slogan. We got monkeys should run with that. So he says basically, look, scientists when they first started using animals in research over 100 years ago, they were not being regarded particularly rats, as human standards that are actually studying rats because I wanted to understand rats. I never thought of that.
Will 10:04
I have worked on the idea that animals in research is all like, Okay, this is this is a proxy for us. Yes, yes. They don't have all of our heart, lungs and brain. But you know, we got to get something. I'm just here for the rat, dude,
Rod 10:20
I never thought of that. Oh, no, that's surprising, because I read that and thought, Oh, my God kind of makes sense.
Will 10:26
And it must have been revelation when they go, you know, you know, we could try some things that happen to humans in these rats and what have you serious
Rod 10:35
kind of the way it went?
Will 10:36
Oh, wow. Oh, wow. God, I gotta say, scientists can be dumb sometimes.
Rod 10:42
Yeah. But in very intelligent, intricate ways
Will 10:44
I'm enthusiastic for the understanding about rats. That is, that is not a problem. I'm happy with that. But the idea that hang on, you know, this could be a stand in.
Rod 10:55
So this anthropologist goes on, As the process went on, people stopped seeing them as specialised animals. So rats for themselves, and started to see them more and more as prototypical mammals. So wait a minute, you're not just a rat, you are mammals? No.
Will 11:11
Okay. Fair enough. This goes with the idea, you know, goes with the shift in in evolutionary thinking with that whole. I'm related to a monkey. Therefore, I'm related to chimpanzee. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We got monkeys. Now. Okay. Okay. I am I am accepting that people thought different.
Rod 11:27
Yeah, because us being mammals, so are they, they're us if it suits us. But so the question then becomes, is the rat really a generic mammal? And the emphatic answer is Fuck, no.
Will 11:38
All right,
Will 11:39
no generics just a cycle on your washing machine. That's like a Whoopi Goldberg thing. Normal is just a cycle on your on your washing machine.
Rod 11:46
That's true, but generic as well. You got a fancy washing machine, you got one of those German ones, it's been fully translated. So the rat is emphatically not a generic mammal and even rats have the same strain but purchased from different suppliers will give you different test results, same strain, but different suppliers. So an example there was a study that I talked about the responses to 12 Different behavioural measures of pain sensitivity, which are important for spinal cord injury, how they react to pain, and where, and how strongly etc.
Rod 12:18
12 different markers varied among 11 strains of mice with no clear cut patterns to allow them to predict shit. Again, a drug that might be shown to help one strain of the mouse didn't help any of the others.
Will 12:31
Oh my god.
Rod 12:32
So despite decades of animal models are caught, at least in 2015, not a single neuroprotective agent that ameliorated spinal cord injury and animal tests has proven useful in clinical trials. This is in 2015, maybe it's all changed
Will 12:47
Not a single Okay, yeah,
Rod 12:48
so rats and mice, for starters, yeah, they're not proxy humans. And they're not even the same. So they're not even good test tubes, because they're different sizes and made out of different materials. Some may react more with the materials you put in and and others
Will 13:00
fuzzy, slightly random test tubes
Rod 13:02
more than slightly. But let's let's run with a hypothetical. What if the rodents were generic? So let's imagine they were the same and they were like, good test tube. So each mouse or rat has the same, labs aren't. So now we have things like this the common features of a biomedical lab, artificial lights, human produced noises, restricted housing environments, they can cause specific kinds of behaviours.
Will 13:25
Mice and rats love all of this. I do love waiting their whole life.
Rod 13:29
That's why they volunteer
Will 13:30
Yeah, to get into artificial lighting.
Rod 13:33
routine procedures such as catching an animal taking them out of their cage in order to do something can cause him to freak out and you can measure the stress markers going up. You also get what they call contagious anxiety for example, blood pressure and heart rates elevated in rats watching other rats being decapitated. Who would have thought?
Will 13:52
You don't have to be the rat whisperer to say maybe maybe they shouldn't see that. Maybe maybe just don't let them see
Rod 14:02
if you're gonna kill Roddy rat. Take him behind the pillar.
Will 14:06
I ain't no species Biologist person but I don't know if you have to be the highest order of species to notice one of your friends and colleagues getting killed gruesomely and going, huh, I'll just keep going exactly what I'm doing. I mean, frickin ants know when an ad is dead. Yeah. Yeah, they react to the smells and they go okay, shits going down. Let's let's, I think, you know, the head chopping machine getting gradually close to you and chopping all of your colleagues heads. I don't know why that would make you stressed at all.
Rod 14:44
It has an effect.
Will 14:45
I mean, if I was at work, and I saw a game coming down the hall, the head chopping machine chopping off all the heads of my colleagues, I wouldn't go doesn't apply to me. I'm different from them. I would worry
Rod 14:57
no fuck would cut my head off. That's what you're thinking because why would they? You've never done anything wrong. Stress related changes in physiological parameters caused by these things can have significant effects on test results. And weirdly, weirdly, so for example, he's just one stressed rats that they develop chronic inflammatory conditions, and intestinal leakage if they really freaked out, and that can, of course confound any biochemical research you're doing because they're chronically inflamed and they're leaking intestinally. I mean, even go as far as genetic and neurochemical changes.
Rod 15:31
So there's another here's an example. A bunch of mice with genetically altered develop aortic defects in the heart. Okay, some mice were put in larger cages and that wasn't part of the experiment, just because the effects basically disappeared.
Will 15:45
You're kidding.
Will 15:47
So.
Rod 15:48
So you've got the mice, you've engineered aorters to be Poopoo?
Will 15:52
How the hell and then you just put them in a bigger cage and goes away?
Rod 15:56
Yeah, them's got better. It then goes as far as this. The type of flooring on which you test an animal for spinal cord injury experiments can affect how how much benefit the drug reveals.
Will 16:07
oh, my god
Rod 16:08
type of flooring.
Will 16:09
I've just got to say like that, that it does sound, you know, to take the side of the scientists here. incredibly hard work with all of this variable. But but just to acknowledge for a second, the idea that we can have a strand of mice or rat that has been genetically engineered to have a particular heart defect that then we can test some drugs on. That is a wild thing to say, to you know, go 150 years, go back and you say, look, in the future, we're gonna have specific rats that have specific genetic problems that we can test, but you have to keep them in the same cage size, it's weird. Weird. I know. I know,
Rod 16:49
Mice also respond quite differently, and specifically to different human handlers. So handler and shift a is different to handle on shift B. So they react and perform differently, which could also mean their biochemistry changes. Yeah. And there's a behavioural scientist guy called Joseph gun. He was at Stanford uni Medical Centre, they tried to run experiments that were identical in six different mouse facilities scattered across centres throughout Europe. They use genetically identical mice of the same age and the results varied all over the place.
Will 16:51
Oh, wow. Wow.
Rod 16:51
So that's pretty cool.
Will 16:51
Science is hard.
Rod 16:52
Yeah. And no one's denying this like this is not to say you guys are dickheads. Because there's so many parameters to control, it's more go. Let's think about what we derived from these experiments. Let's think about what we don't think about Yeah. This is why we're not talking about whether you should experiment on at all or not because there's so much going on. Here's my fav though this is actually what got me into this whole story. So years of experiments with rats and mice repeatedly shown for something like 30 years, a drug called rolipram, could boost a molecule in the brain of the rodent that people with depression seem to have really low levels of people don't have enough of this. You put it in a rat. It boosts those. let's give it to the peeps it'll boost it for them. They'll feel better
Will 18:11
maybe.
Rod 18:12
Yeah, and even worked on guinea pigs and chipmunks because who doesn't want to experiment on a chipmunk. anyway, so this was going and so that the basically the researchers went this is fucking gold. This is this is a game changer. A treatment that might work at doses 10 to 100 times lower than contemporary antidepressants, and it worked faster. So low dose fast working
Will 18:31
Sure, but still taking a pill, like just a smaller pill. Telling people it's just a smaller pill. If you have to eat a kilo of medicine, I feel like that would be a challenging thing to swallow. And I would prefer one one gramme of it. Yes, of course, of course. But in general, if it's if it's like, mostly a sugar pill, yeah, and it goes from you know, 10 milligrammes down to like micro micro gramme. Yeah, yeah. So whatever, I don't care, you're taking that. Yes. If I have to take a kilo of the medicine I don't want to
Rod 19:08
take less of it and works better. That's, that's, that's what I was showing so far. So smart thing to do. And this is smart, good science, human trials. So it turns out no one could take a dose high enough without getting as they put it serious gastrointestinal distress. So as they put it in, you know, obviously one of my favourite sources as always, as the Atlantic years of hard work was literally getting flushed down the tubes. And it turns out, rolipram wasn't the only drug that found this out. Over the years, millions of dollars have been lost because vomiting cropped up as a side effect. And the real problem is, mice and rats can't throw up.
Will 19:49
Oh my God.
Rod 19:50
And the quote that I like the best to describe this, their diaphragm is a bit wimpy. Their stomach is too bulbous, their oesophagus too long and spindly.
Will 20:01
Their stomach has to bulbous. Does that mean the it just can sort of expand and no matter what shit it can just handle it in there. their diaphragm is not strong enough to force it out. Yep.
Rod 20:12
And the oesophagus too long and spindly so even if you could just kind of get stuck in the in the garden hose, and they seem to lack the neural circuits that you need to trigger vomiting anyway.
Will 20:22
Well, I'm sure. Why would you have them?
Will 20:24
Why would you have?
Rod 20:25
Yeah, yeah.
Rod 20:26
It's like I have neuro circuits for wings, but no wings. So it's a waste.
Will 20:30
I mean, it's just a body's way of getting stuff out of the feed Hall. Yeah. And you can either go up or down, and maybe they just go all the ways go down.
Rod 20:37
Well, the reckon quite a lot, they have extremely well developed senses of smell and memory for reverse things. So if they do something horrible once they don't do it again, they do things like eat clay and stuff to try and calm it all down. Apparently. But yeah, so rats and mice can't fucking puke. That kind of matters. And when you think about this example, just delighted me I mean, not for the rats or mice. Sounds terrible, but I thought I'd never thought of something so basic, like, the scientists doesn't go okay, this is gonna be good proxies can they spew?
Rod 21:08
beyond rats and mice, okay. Let's talk about strokes. So if you want to reproduce the preexisting conditions of a stroke that you would see in humans, it's really hard to do in animals. Okay, because most of them don't develop atherosclerosis, artery gunk in the heart, and in the gunk in the artery around the heart feeding to the heart. They don't get artery gunk in the same way we do
Will 21:36
Not at all? What if they eat junk food? Smoke dairies
Rod 21:42
Anyway, it's very hard to generate that in an animal so that's a bit of a problem. So what they'll do to do that, put little clamps and things on to mimic the restriction in arteries, which is not the same thing because you got all these other conditions that come into play as well. Yep. So that doesn't work very well. And it means so far, then if you can't, if you can't introduce the predispositions within these animals, then the therapies tend to fail. One source I read said 114 potential therapies initially tested in animals just for strokes failed. Wow. Because he just can't set it up that way. Yeah. Wow. They ain't like us. It's certainly there's some animal that has a stroke.
Will 22:18
Probably dolphin.
Rod 22:20
Yeah, you need a big brain animal. Sloths have strokes but you can't tell. I'll give you another one. This is a good one in NHP's, non human primate. So there's a drug that we're hoping would help with leukaemia and other such stuff and immunomodulatory drug. It's got a name TGN 1412 You know, the one anyway, they tested this drug this this hopeful drug fingers crossed rabbits, mice, rats, and certain non human primates.
Will 22:46
this is for leukaemia type thing.
Rod 22:47
Yeah. One source didn't mentioned leukaemia and other sources. That's okay, me I'm okay. I'll go with leukaemia because the other one just said it's an immunomodulatory drug, which apparently we need. so they were given the nonhuman primates.
Will 23:09
that's not a bad name for a band
Rod 23:11
non human primates.
Rod 23:12
you're right. non human primate, specifically, the sino morgase. And rhesus monkeys. So they were given 500 times a human dose for four weeks or more consecutively to see what would happen.
Will 23:12
Yeah,
Will 23:25
Sure, but 500 times seems a lot
Rod 23:27
it is a lot.
Will 23:28
And they seem roughly the same size as us.
Rod 23:30
No way smaller. rhesus monkeys you could fit him in your pocket. They're adorable. We're not quite they those ones big fucking pocket. Yeah. Backpack. Yeah, backpack. And they were chosen because they have particular receptors that really grab on to that drug like humans do. Very similar receptor.
Will 23:44
Yeah, but still, we went with 500 times.
Rod 23:46
Fuck yeah. And that went fine. So 500 times the dose no side effect. Oh, cool. Oh, cool. And so do the immune system. Remember the immune system but also leukaemia is a big part of it. Okay. Human trial time.
Will 23:57
You're going to tell me it works perfectly perfect.
Rod 23:59
Perfect. We have cured cancer here. or in this case. So six volunteers are injected with the drug 2006 within minutes all of them had a cytokine storm. Oh shit, severe adverse reactions. Catastrophic. Systemic organ failure.
Will 24:23
Gee, oh, all Oh my God.
Rod 24:25
They were kept alive but with dramatic intervention, Jesus. So it turns out the one that was supposed to damp it was supposed to dampen the immune system, but in humans, it had the opposite effect. So the cytokine storm was one of the things we heard a lot about and COVID
Rod 24:36
was certain
Will 24:37
that's really wild. Okay, this is one dampens. No, no, no, not dampens.There's a drug that's quite useful in early parenting. it's not for the adults. It's for the kids. No, but it's a it's an antihistamine and
Rod 24:58
phenergan
Will 24:59
Yes. It's quite good for anything that's really itchy or something like that. But it's also a lot of a lot of parents will talk about it as a great way to do a long haul flight. It will calm calm, basically knocks them out but it calms the body down for a long time knocks them out. But 10% of kids go go the opposite they go open the door. And and and all stories are make sure you test in advance. not on the plane that you do the funnel
Rod 25:28
or even a bus. I just remember that because I love the name. We're gonna call it phenergan
Will 25:32
phenergan is great. All respect to phenergan. It's also like first gen anti histamine. It's like now we're going we're going old school we're going straight through to the brain.
Rod 25:46
I love that. I'm a fan.
Will 25:48
Yeah, but I can actually go Yeah, six people? Did they want to slow down a little bit and do like one person? Well, scientifically, that's abominable. Well, it's not really you could do one today, one tomorrow on the next day, if I can all at once.
Rod 26:04
Anyway, the gist of all this is, animals and humans often differ. And often in ways that will be crucial to you know, medical research, medical outputs, et cetera. And often ways we haven't realised until it's too late, like cytokine storms. But also, you know, you probably didn't know this, but humans differ in ways it might be infinity crucial.
Will 26:28
No, no, no, no, we are all generic. generic human.
Rod 26:34
And what I like about it, too, is one of the most critical differences usually, you don't need fancy tests, complex procedures to tell. So basically, go get another cocktail, get yourself comfy, it's time to get sexist.
Will 26:48
It is not time to get sexist. That's not how we roll.
Rod 26:51
Let's do this.
Will 26:52
No, no, we we might explore and and try to defeat sexism as only two mediocre white males can do. We might try that.
Rod 27:03
But God I aspire to be mediocre one day. I like when people say I did a 35 hour week and I'm thinking how do you find that much to do? kicking goals aspiring hard.
Will 27:16
Working full time man.
Rod 27:18
males versus females humans first. Alright. Animals in a tick. Oh, no. So women are more likely to be misdiagnosed when it comes to things like heart attacks and ADHD than men, whites heart attacks in particular often because they don't show as many symptoms and or
Will 27:36
because all of the symptomatology that we've described has been men's heart attacks or men's ADHD, or men's autism or men's whatever.
Rod 27:48
impossible because science is unbiased and clear. Some drugs are more effective in men than women, including things like ibuprofen naproxen.
Will 27:58
Are you serious? No wonder I'm a big fan of ibuprofen. And many women in my life and not so big.
Rod 28:04
Who have mine, I can't use it.
Rod 28:06
So basically, non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs NS aids are apparently, on average, stronger men and women are more effective.
Will 28:15
Is that is that just quirk of the drug or because we've just been choosing drugs that tend to be more effective in men? Bit of column A bit of column B.
Rod 28:23
Yeah. And there's probably a column C as well. it goes the other way, as well as a drug that's at least in America called Alosetron. Which sounds like a bad name
Will 28:35
Let me guess it does effect whatever it wants to effect but also has significant side effects of impending sense of doom,
Will 28:44
What is it?
Rod 28:44
guess what it's for?
Rod 28:46
Irritable Bowel Syndrome. But it's only approved at least in the US for treatment in women because it's basically ineffective in men. Really? Yeah, they've different their bowels irritated for different reasons. Which I can well imagine.
Rod 29:00
Well, I
Will 29:01
guess.
Will 29:03
Is it the patriarchy irritating one's bowel. like I can imagine, if the patriarchy was able, it would irritate a bowel.
Rod 29:10
And let's be clear, I'm talking about biological sex here. Were not like the male female distinction among his biological sex, like actual biology here, not identification, etc. because fuck knows how complex that could get as well. And I don't have information on that. So Rebecca Sharansky, so she's a neuroscientist at Northwestern in Boston. So did an interview with The Guardian. She says he looked, she's concerned about the approach taken by in this case, neuroscience teams in the US, which incorporate both sexes and experiments, both biological sexes, but the way they do that is they work out what's going on in males, and then they check in females. And basically, the gist is, male brains are normal and let's see how female brains deviate.
Will 29:52
Yeah.
Will 29:53
Again, this is this is the generic washing machine.
Rod 29:55
Yeah, it is and the generic washing machine has a dingdong and testes. a washing machine that has a vagina,
Will 30:06
that is not the generic washing Oh my god. Thank you science.
Rod 30:10
So what do we do with more than half of this population? but it goes cellular, it goes to the cellular level the differences potentially. So there was a researcher 2016. She's an associate professor in Department of Bioengineering in vascular kinetics laboratory, Elisa client, she was studying pulmonary hypertension. So lung hypertension, it's blood pressure that affects arteries in the lungs, in particular, and using human cells that she cultured in the lab. So cells, little bits of human, not even tissue, so to speak. So she's doing the experiments going something weird going on here. I don't get it. I don't get what's going on. So they said fuck there's a huge aerobars. Why don't we just graph it male versus female? Yeah, cellular level, blood vessels in the lungs of people take up more. If they've got this pulmonary hypertension, they take up more glucose, they suck up more sugars, okay, with this type of sugar. She found the female cells metabolise the glucose in a way that changed a protein that was critical to the functioning of the blood vessel,
Will 31:14
Jesus, Jesus. So
Rod 31:16
boys didn't, girls did. So sex of the cells mattered.
Will 31:24
I didn't think cells had sex.
Rod 31:27
Nope, they do. How do you get baby cells?
Will 31:29
No, I knew that. Well, well, no. Even then, I didn't think that sperms are actually boys. No, I thought they were a thing produced by men. I didn't assign a sex or agenda at the cell level.
Rod 31:40
Yeah. I know, chromosomes, I guess. Yeah.
Will 31:43
Well, look, yeah, you learn something every day.
Rod 31:46
Do you? I forget something every day. Is that the same? One in, one out. Um, so basically the researcher goes on to say, because we're grouping our sexes together, we were missing the difference, and we're getting huge wacky deviations. And as she said, she was shocked to see the difference at the cellular level was sex based.
Will 32:07
Yeah, that's wild
Rod 32:09
But it gets genetic, too. Let's go smaller. Okay. So study in science in 2020. Over 13,000 genes are expressed differently between male and female biologicals. They also identified sex based patterns of gene regulation linked to over 50 bodily traits and functions. So genetic differences. So people differ,
Will 32:31
is the difference between these populations bigger than the diversity within the population?
Rod 32:36
That's a good question. And yes, and no. The answer is possibly.
Will 32:46
Why? No, it's just it. Yeah. So like, I get if if she legitimate scientist is horrified, then it suggests something is going on. But you know, you can you can pull populations apart. And still, there is so much diversity within that we know, you know, in all categorizations of humans there is there is a lot of diversity between even if we categorise
Rod 33:04
Yeah. So basically, this is the takeaway if you don't listen to the end, but you shouldn't it's awesome. Diversity Matters in a way at a genetic and cellular level. but we need to be careful because sometimes people get carried away with leaping to conclusions. So this is a good one. 2013 So Ambien, right? You've heard of Ambien and American TV shows. It's a sleep drug. Yeah, take an Ambien, have a snooze come down. 2013. They discovered it lingers longer in the blood of women than men. So more drowsiness, there's cognitive impairment, more traffic accidents, and such. in 2013. They halved the recommended dose for women compared to men. subsequent study, the FDA went hang on a minute. It's body weight, not sex as you just said.
Rod 33:59
But at least until 2019, reputable sources like I was reading a Guardian article. I was still talking about it being a male female.
Will 34:05
Yeah. Wow. Okay. Okay. I can understand people getting confused. You know, it will be impossible to ask that question. Impossible to trying to work out how much of a dose to give people of different sizes. Yeah, you couldn't do that. It'd be impossible. You cannot tell size science does not work to how to measure size or mass yet? No, not at all. But one day that will come there is a Nobel Prize humans on Mars, and maths, they will work it out. Yeah.
Rod 34:30
So what's the best way to go about this? So there was a CNN interview with a chyron. I think he pronounced the name Hunter, associate director of basic Translational Research at the National Institutes of Health Office for research on women's health. So very thinking about this. And she says basically, look, we're saying we're saying here that not all researchers need to study sex differences, but all researchers really should consider how biological sex can impact the questions they're studying. They're not being dickheads about it. They're not you know, for our white angry right wing commentators, they're not being angry women saying it's all the problem. They're saying, pay attention to this. It matters.
Will 35:08
Maybe we could pay attention to a lot of things. I think there might be some scope to just pay attention. Yeah.
Rod 35:16
So we can all agree ladies and chaps differ. Humans. What about sexism in lab animals, the default lab rat is male. That's the default. When they say, give us 400 Rats. The brackets unknown says out loud quite commonly is boy rats.
Will 35:34
Oh my god. Why? Why wouldn't Why wouldn't it be 400 And you would go evenly divided or I get it you controlling your variables and that's a variable.
Rod 35:45
Yeah. And often it's unclear what six the cells used in the labs on the cells themselves. We talked about that. And the degree to which female cells are underrepresented, the default lab rat it's very clear is male. So cells might be confusing, but at the rat level. so as a study 2011 neuroscience research male animals were used six times more often than females. A follow up in 2017 marginal improvement.
Rod 36:14
Differences in behaviour. So greater awareness of sex and research as a variable is not just about whether it's female lab rats, it's about not taking the behaviour of a male rat as a baseline for all research. So Schinsky the woman I spoke about earlier again, she's been looking into this stuff. She's been studying fear behaviour in mice. Typical fear response in mice is long for it to be freeze.
Will 36:37
Yeah, I mean if you're seeing all of your friends getting decapitated, you freeze. look in fairness. If I'm about to get my head chopped off you're gonna do I don't want to be that panicking person that it's going to take five cuts because you're writhing around like get out the blunt sword for this guy I have always thought if you're about to get your head cut off, go for clean. I end up occasionally on on bad Wikipedia pages. Yeah, you know I like a bit of mediaeval torture and and there's a little bit of the executions gone wrong. he could have been a sir Giles. It I feel like they were all Sir Giles, and yes, it was definitely took multiple multiple chops to do it. And I think he said something in the middle.
Will 37:33
Like it was something like, you could just if you can just be like,
Rod 37:37
surely, as far as I'm concerned, if they do the first cut and it doesn't work, you're free. God has set you free
Will 37:44
you get one chop. God said no, you're cool. Like that is that is definitely God speaking. I feel I feel like one chop into the neck and it doesn't go through. I'm not sure I want it. I'm of the belief that I will do this myself. Could I please just finish this off?
Rod 38:01
Give me the butter knife. I'll do it.
Will 38:02
And Did you know Did you know that many executions still fuck up and shouldn't be done at all? Like, oh, there's like nine other episodes? Yeah, absolutely.
Rod 38:13
Nature. The magazine sorry, August journal 2010 authors surveyed nearly 2000 animal studies from the year before. They found male bison eight out of 10 biological disciplines in some way huge neuroscience five and a half males to one female that was the ratio, pharmacology five to one, physiology three, nearly four to one. And 75% of studies in three of the highest most highly cited immunology journals did not specify if it was male or female animals.
Rod 38:13
So Shansky. fear responses, like a typical fear response in mice was freezing. Turns out female mice different often. They do an escape thing. They try to escape boxes they run though they're showing it differently. So you're looking for drugs to treat things like PTSD and you're looking for fear responses and changes in that. That's not what you should necessarily be looking for. Yeah, of course. So basically, if you base your interpretations in the behaviour of male mice, misinterpret female mice. I'm not done.
Will 39:29
Look. Could have been could have been lots of women. Surely it was exactly what we wanted to be male or female.
Will 39:37
Go Yeah, it's it's what was correct the correct response. I'm not telling you what we did
Rod 39:43
that does come up.
Rod 39:45
Another check the Web of Science, which is you know, big deal in science research 2009. How many studies used female mammals compared to the prevalence of the disease in women in the real world? So proportionally, how much does this affect actual women. went really well. By really well, I mean terrible. So diagnoses for anxiety and depression, so they're more than twice as common in women than men, less than 45% of animal studies used females.
Will 40:18
There might be a reason non biological reason that anxiety and depression
Rod 40:22
it might be, but let's not test it. One thing's for sure, if we're not sure, definitely don't test. Women have more strokes, and they have poor functional outcomes. 38% of animal studies into strokes, us women, some thyroid diseases, seven to 10 times more likely in women. Just over half of the animal models were female.They found rodent studies into the effects of drugs on behaviour use males and almost exclusively, despite there being well established differences in the way men and women absorb and excrete drugs. So what the fuck I mean, I first heard about just this a few years ago, but when I literally first heard it, there was some kind of female condition. It was literally related to female biology and almost all the studies were done on male rats and I'm like, this is this is a hoax. Like I'm thinking this April the first like, fuck off. I'm like, come on for fuck. So anyway, so it's everywhere. So why?
Will 41:21
Well, that's my question. I was gonna ask that did let me why.
Rod 41:25
Good question.
Will 41:27
Other than other than just the patriarchy.
Rod 41:29
So one, at least since 1923. if not earlier, scientists have typically justified excluding female animals because and this is even when studying effects on women women's things. The basis was fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable women are hormonal, they have the fluctuations are two hormones. You know how they are? Yeah. You know how the ladies get irrational all the time. And it's hormonal.
Will 41:53
Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then the animals will be exactly exactly the same. Okay, so but too wild, to what,
Rod 41:59
but female rodents so they have a four or five day reproductive cycle. So they get an increase in oestrogen and progesterone about fourfold in that cycle. But male mice house together very quickly establish a dominance hierarchy, which means circulating testosterone levels climb, on average, five times higher in the top guys. It's not a hormone. that's different. That's just dudes being dudes.
Will 42:25
Yeah, exactly. that's a generic like that is that is what women would do if they could.
Rod 42:31
That's what mammals do.
Will 42:34
Mm hmm. Just wild. Yeah. Just wild to me that you got fluctuations in hormones. And don't don't go and look at the men and go, Oh, maybe maybe those hormones might be fluctuating more.
Rod 42:45
Not chicks be crazy. Because hormones. So in their defence, it's not their fault. So they're being sensitive about it. Meta analysis 2005 female mice from many different strains were no more variable than males in the way they experienced pain.So they're basically saying we should reappraise every long held assumption, that oestrogen cycle that estrus leads to their ability and data, but I think the simpler answer from what I've read and seen and what I've experienced is exactly what you said, it's a world dominated by men in fucking everything. Why would science be different?
Will 43:20
Yeah, I think there's an element to which controlling the variables is a natural instinct in science. Of course, it should be exactly. But you know, if you're doing whatever experiment you've got, you want to keep everything the same, except the variable that you're comparing.
Rod 43:34
And that would be called science
Will 43:37
It really would. And so you can understand the instinct for as long as people have been doing animal models in science, they go, Okay, well, let's minimise those things, you know, whatever it might be, you don't get a bunch of mammals and say, Okay, let's let's try this drug on them. You know, some rats, some armadillos,
Will 43:56
answers.
Rod 43:57
panthers.
Rod 43:58
really, really bad.
Will 44:00
Fuck I love fuck.
Will 44:03
I'm gonna say animal animal rights people. You know what, I know that there's been a whole tradition. And I can tell you a good story about this one day of people sneaking in to document various animal conditions, either in factory farms or meat processing, or scientific labs have documented what's going on but but it would be good fun if you went the other way around and snuck in some Panthers, like in a cage there is the panther.
Rod 44:31
with Chuck a hippo. It's like the mouse, mouse, mouse.
Will 44:37
But I get that you don't just get random animals on and they're just going control every variable. It's just their scientific reasons for this that would be reinforced by patriarchal dominance.
Rod 44:47
There's so much of it and this is the thing I'm not I'm not here to deceive, scientists are fucking idiots because that's not fair. There's there's a lot of history now.
Will 44:55
They're smart idiots.
Rod 44:56
So how do we fix it? So 2021 At least the major funders in the US, like the US National Institutes of Health, they do 80,000 grants a year ish. They've required the research has to take account of sex as a biological variable. So you've got to, if you get the money, you got to address it. They've also required you got to include male and female animals or cells in the design of the research, or provide very strong justification for not doing. You've got to you've got to either bounce it out, or say, very compellingly, why not
Will 45:31
so so if you are looking at uterine cancer or anything, yeah, it's just shocking when when when you start looking systematically at a few things, and you go, like, like this thing here, we just, we had mice, and it's like, oh, well, you didn't report on male or female or didn't report on how many of them were used. It's, it's wild to me the things that you notice about otherwise good science that just misses bits
Rod 45:55
my PhD. One of the things I was doing a statistical test, and I hadn't used it before, and it said, you need a large n. And I said, Cool, I'm just gonna find it with a large n is, nowhere. So another one is suggestion journal should mandate that you state the biological sex of lab animals. Just fucking say it. interesting also, and this is my phrasing of this shansky who I've mentioned earlier being wary, ironically, of over wokeness in a sense, because in your research, at least the ways in which male and female brains differ is may have been under investigate, because there's a backlash against the idea that there could be male female differences in brain biology.
Will 46:40
I accept. That's tricky. I accept this as a totally tricky minefield. I don't I don't even have the language to be able to describe the trickiness there. That we in humans it's complicated. And then you go to lab animals. It's less complicated, but doesn't mean there isn't a bunch of our projections on here.
Rod 46:59
Yeah. And she brings up good points, like, you know, if you mentioned it at all, then it could be weaponizing, misogyny, and all this sort of thing, as you'd expect.
Will 47:06
maybe though, maybe though it is, it is potentially useful that you could abandon the male female label and instead go with it could be just saying just reporting on chromosome difference, or just reporting on some has, has uterus in the mouse or not, or
Rod 47:20
whatever it is. But I mean, with newer research, at least she's saying, look, there probably are, yeah, and shouldn't be terrible to find out as long as you're not treading on other bombs. As she puts it. There's nothing anti feminist about saying neurobiology and the female brain might be different. But of course, it's easy to pervert that
Will 47:39
you know, I don't know.
Rod 47:41
the thing.
Rod 47:42
When there's difference. There's difference. but the interpretation, the absorption, the reason how you got there the biases that came into play?
Will 47:51
Sure. I guess I guess it comes down to that difference is the differences between groups worth looking at? Or that there is more diversity inside that group?
Rod 48:02
And the answer is sometimes
Will 48:03
Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think just because it's complex, doesn't mean we can't do meaningful things. And maybe maybe one of the big things here is stop the idea of language proxies, you know, that we could just just describe what it is. And then we can infer what that means in difference.
Rod 48:21
And we're talking so many variables, as you said, so is it brain that has uterus attached so to speak?
Rod 48:26
Doesn't our God ones that has one or the other?
Will 48:30
of course, chromosomes and it's not just for humans, I don't know what it is for mice. You know, it's not just X, Y, or X X. There's there's other chromosomal
Rod 48:40
mice, IV execute, you know, it's 1000.
Rod 48:43
Another solution that's been offered to genetically modified lab rats and stuff. Well, there's been a lot of enthusiasm, and it has happened. So you get transgenic mice, where you put a little bit of human flavour into a mouse. And that's great. It's great. It's great. And you see what happens. But of course, turns out when you do that, sometimes the human gene within a mouse body acts differently to the way it might act inside humans
Will 49:10
know, how could that be possible?
Rod 49:13
This a great example, a crucial protein controls blood sugar in humans is missing in mice. So You're whack it in there. And it has the opposite effects in mice
Will 49:26
There's often often psych neuroscience researchers who will say, you know, the brain is shockingly complex, like like shockingly complex and it really, it really does say that the biology that we invented as a science 150 years ago, We got better and better. And I feel like more and more, it's just not a thing, more complexity. It is just more and more like, you know, you steal that stuff on how many ways proteins can fold and it's like, I don't know if we have the capacity as a species or as a system to be able to understand some of this complexity,
Rod 50:04
and at the back of that sort of thinking seems to be sure there's a simple answer to my complex question. It's like maybe there isn't and accept that.
Will 50:11
Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't give me my permanent treatment for all male problems, and female problems like sadness.
Rod 50:22
Another one, why don't just use different animals. So how do you get around non puking rats? You use shrews? they're tiny, they're very mammalian. And they're very small. They're easy to grow, and they can throw up. Yeah, lucky, then. What can I use for you? That's great. You can imagine animals talking to each other. Yeah, I'm thinking I want to be as useful for humans. Don't be horrible. But don't be useful either. Yeah, just be meh.
Will 50:49
Or you could be like, useful in ways it's like, it's like, I am just like their hair. So I could be I could be there kind of lushly. Yeah, exactly. I can, I can test the hair. or I've got feet exactly like humans, I can test all of their cool shoes. But ya know, you don't want to you don't want to be like testing them.
Rod 51:10
You want to be not human like and you don't want to be anathema to humans, either. You want to be just meh. other ways to get around it. human cell cultures as long as you be careful,
Will 51:22
But by Be careful. What do we mean here?
Rod 51:25
Sex the cells?
Will 51:26
Well, yes. All right. But don't accidentally grow a human in a lab or dont accidentally cross the boundary of using the human brain cells that we've cultured in the lab.
Rod 51:37
I'm okay with it. People come up to me and they say, I wrote. So how do you feel about cloning a non higher functioning version of yourself to harvest your organs? And I'm like, Yes, please. Where do I sign?
Will 51:50
But you have to look it in the eye every time you harvest.
Rod 51:51
I'm okay with that.
Will 51:52
You have to go into that lounge. He's dressed wearing your clothes.
Rod 51:56
Okay. I get free organ with no rejection. It looks exactly like you doesn't have that. Yeah, exactly. That's fine.
Will 52:02
You can see inside that he's got no brain. They don't put them they don't put the lid on. But otherwise, he's got your glasses. He's got your you've got your shirt,
Rod 52:10
and My Sassy sense of style. I'm okay with that. Your heart is going to explode in a month. Or you can just cut into this dead lump of meat and get a new heart. I'm like, I'll take the new heart. Give me the scissors.
Will 52:23
Dying is the only good thing left.
Rod 52:26
Oh, that's terrible.
Will 52:27
Naa it's the last great adventure
Rod 52:28
What about retirement?
Will 52:30
That's the second last great adventure
Rod 52:31
podcast success before the last great adventure. A house in Byron Bay.
Will 52:35
Your fourth last Okay. Okay. There's other great adventures. I'm just saying. I'm just saying you know, we're not allowed to resist dying, unless it unless everyone can get it.
Rod 52:48
I'm not on that team. I'm completely selfish. And we're not gonna murder you to not die, or probably. Simulations are another suggestion of organs. There are all kinds of things that you can harvest in a simulated organ. No, you can't. But you can learn stuff about our quarry via simulated simulated rats. And of course, human volunteers, but there's a lot of problems with human volunteers like often you can't allow them to volunteer? for many ethical reasons. But it's a suggestion to fix the problem. But I think the bottom line is, we're going to call out and address the assumptions about why we use animals at all. And one of them is sunk costs. Because we have a huge inertia in using animals as human substitutes, and whether we think about it or not, and with the best of intentions, entire scientific communities are built around it. Entire parasite industries are built around supplying animals, looking after them. training lab techs, it's habit. Yeah, you have strong habit. Ah, we also have a times journals that would not accept studies, unless they were done on mice, for example, specifically, because Dothraki style it is known. That is what you should do. Yeah, of course. And there are times where journals and also some funding agencies actually expect it. So this can't be true. You didn't do an animal study. Okay. Okay. So this habit and this tradition, this is very strong.
Will 54:10
I mean, I would maybe on that one, I'm believing you. I'm believing you. There's a whole habit. There's an industry and there's journals surrounding this but you mentioned things like the simulation. Yeah. Where are we up to them?
Rod 54:23
Some apparently worked quite well. But you need so much data to feed into this
Will 54:27
shocking amounts of data. I mean, we're not we're not even talking like, you know, when we stopped nuclear testing. Yeah. I feel like the physics on that is far shockingly far simpler than then the molecular biology than our fingernail works. Yes, a fingernail and we're not even doing a fingernail. Yeah. You know of a mouse or a rat. Yeah. And and the use of a chemical in there. Shocking differences with simulation ability. I feel like we are not there.
Rod 54:56
We're not there yet. But there are there are some experiments and there are some areas in which that does happen.But bottom line, obviously, and you kind of flag this with a shocking amount of data. I just say we'll just use AI, It'll be fine. ChatGPT. I mean, there was a there was a pre ChatGPT model that was making inventing new proteins.
Will 55:16
Yes, yes. Maybe. I am so sceptical because we like the ways that chat GPT is happy to just go on and yeah, here's an answer.
Rod 55:25
This will work. Swallow a kilo of kerosene and eat your dog boom, no more cancer
Will 55:30
and I feel like where chatGPT is going to advise us to eat a kilo of ibuprofen and shoot yourself until he bleed out is going to be
Rod 55:37
next month. But in July, in July, it'll be better ChatGPT 17
