• Question: do you harm any animal in your work???

    Asked by nicenadia to Alessandro, Angela, Claudia, Marina, Phil on 9 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Claudia Krehl

      Claudia Krehl answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      All of us work with technology so we don’t work with animals at all, which means we don’t harm them either. In the work I do I carry out studies with people. We obviously don’t mean to harm people either, so all scientists have to fill in an ethics proposal. This means you have to write a report of what you want to do in any upcoming studies or experiments and what the potential risks are. This report is then reviewed by an ethics committee who can choose to approve you proposal. But they can also tell you to make some changes in order to protect people and they may even not allow you to carry out your study if it is unethical. This is not usually an issue at all in my area, but some colleagues of mine work with children and it is very important then that studies are ethically correct, for instance that studies cannot be carried out with a child without the consent of parents and somebodies presence. I believe any study that uses animals would go through a similar process.

    • Photo: Marina De Vos

      Marina De Vos answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      My work so far has not involved any animals or humans. But some of my colleagues have work with either humans or animals. As Claudia already mentioned, there are guidelines when your experiments involve humans or animals. This is to make sure, that among other things, no unnecessary distress is caused.

    • Photo: Alessandro Guazzi

      Alessandro Guazzi answered on 10 Mar 2013:

      In my work we sometimes carry out experiments on animals before we carry them out on humans. So far all the experiments I have been involved in were completely harmless, since I’m working on the most harmless way of checking how well people are, and I think they’re always going to be that way for me at least.
      In experiments in which animals are harmed, for example if you want to test a new type of surgery before you test it on a human patient, a lot of conditions need to be met, particularly to ensure that the animal will never feel any pain at all, and the ethics proposal Claudia talks about needs to be approved to make sure that there is a real benefit from that experiment.

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