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The University of Colorado Boulder has an article up about a paper [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3] [DX] published Monday in Nature Human Behavior which finds that U.S. adults:
who hold the most extreme views opposing genetically modified (GM) foods think they know most about GM food science, but actually know the least
The paper's key finding is that:
the more strongly people report being opposed to GM foods, the more knowledgeable they think they are on the topic, but the lower they score on an actual knowledge test.
Interestingly the authors found similar results applied to gene therapy, but were unable prove a similar conclusion when they tested against climate change denialism. This leads them to hypothesize that:
the climate change debate has become so politically polarized that people's attitudes depend more on which group they affiliate with than how much they know about the issue.
It might be instructive to run similar studies in a number of areas such as
Vaccinations
Nuclear Power
Homeopathy
...
Where would you like to see this study done next?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 16 2019, @01:06PM (1 child)
Oh no, not at all. Note that I said that the work benefits lots of people.
What I did there involved baby piglets. We would source the piglets from the local Oscar Meyer farm, so - when born into that farm a piglet has a 99.99% chance of becoming bacon, among other things, and a 0.01% chance of taking a quick trip to the lab, getting a shot of ketamine and never waking up again, but in their final hours after the ketamine shot contributing in a small way to human knowledge of physiology and potentially improving future methods of CPR. Of course, our anaesthesiologist no longer practiced on humans - possibly because he had an attention span problem - and I did witness one horrible day when a piglet "went light" on the pentobarbitol (pain killer) while still dosed with pancuronium (paralytic) so you've got an animal on the table with open chest surgical preparations in extreme pain, unable to move due to the paralytic, but physiological signs like heart rate and blood gasses going completely bonkers due to the pain response.
The lab also had a pair of ferrets who had a relatively happy life, except when the new EMTs would come in for intubation training - the ferrets had been intubated thousands of times by inexperienced EMTs learning how to properly get the airway tube going to the lungs, not the esophagus. Not fun for the ferrets on training day, though they did get a chance to bite the EMTs - also a training lesson, humans can do that too... but... when an EMT shows up at your door and you need to be intubated, do you want their first live intubation experience to be on you? Even with the training, intubation errors are still common, and a real problem for the incorrectly intubated patients, but without live training performance is even worse.
The whole place floats on drug research, and they have made several major improvements in the drugs over their decades of operation as a result of the research - that's the driving reason why the place continues to operate. Not fun for the disease model animals which have been specifically bred to have the disease under treatment, but this is how we learn.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @07:32PM
The attitude of: well these piglets would be dead anyway, is a bit naive. I'm guessing Oscar Mayer, just ramped up production to meet their demands. It sounds like you work at one of the more purposeful labs. Animal testing has a purpose, and it sounds like your department is a necessary evil. However, Singer's book suggests that this is not the norm.