Stanford University, Department of Comparative Medicine, Stanford, California, USA.
Stanford University (by courtesy) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, Stanford, California, USA.
Lab Anim (NY). 2017 Mar 22;46(4):103-113. doi: 10.1038/laban.1224.
This focus issue of Lab Animal coincides with a tipping point in biomedical research. For the first time, the scale of the reproducibility and translatability crisis is widely understood beyond the small cadre of researchers who have been studying it and the pharmaceutical and biotech companies who have been living it. Here we argue that an emerging literature, including the papers in this focus issue, has begun to congeal around a set of recurring themes, which themselves represent a paradigm shift. This paradigm shift can be characterized at the micro level as a shift from asking "what have we controlled for in this model?" to asking "what have we chosen to ignore in this model, and at what cost?" At the macro level, it is a shift from viewing animals as tools (the furry test tube), to viewing them as patients in an equivalent human medical study. We feel that we are witnessing the birth of a new discipline, which we term Therioepistemology, or the study of how knowledge is gained from animal research. In this paper, we outline six questions that serve as a heuristic for critically evaluating animal-based biomedical research from a therioepistemological perspective. These six questions sketch out the broad reaches of this new discipline, though they may change or be added to as this field evolves. Ultimately, by formalizing therioepistemology as a discipline, we can begin to discuss best practices that will improve the reproducibility and translatability of animal-based research, with concomitant benefits in terms of human health and animal well-being.
本期《实验动物》特刊恰逢生物医学研究的一个转折点。首次，可重复性和转化性危机的规模已超出了一直在研究这一问题的小部分研究人员以及正在经历这一问题的制药和生物技术公司的理解范围，广泛为人们所了解。在这里，我们认为，一个新的文献正在形成，包括本期特刊中的论文，这些文献开始围绕一系列反复出现的主题凝聚在一起，而这些主题本身代表着一种范式转变。这种范式转变可以从微观层面上描述为，从“在这个模型中我们已经控制了哪些因素？”转变为“在这个模型中我们选择忽略了哪些因素，以及付出了什么代价？”从宏观层面上，它是从将动物视为工具（毛茸茸的试管）转变为将它们视为与人类医学研究等效的患者。我们觉得我们正在见证一个新学科的诞生，我们称之为动物认识论，即从动物研究中获取知识的研究。在本文中，我们概述了六个问题，这些问题为从动物认识论的角度批判性地评估基于动物的生物医学研究提供了一个启发式方法。这六个问题勾勒出了这个新学科的广泛领域，尽管随着该领域的发展，这些问题可能会改变或增加。最终，通过将动物认识论正式化为一门学科，我们可以开始讨论提高基于动物的研究的可重复性和可转化性的最佳实践，同时在人类健康和动物福利方面也会带来相应的好处。
