If only there was a place where humans who have a tendency to get tattoos are in cages for an exrended period of time with a relatively consistent, trackable food intake, and constantly tracked behaviour. Humans who might even be motivated by privileges to volunteer for such studies.
Comment on Tattoo Ink Moves Through the Body, Killing Immune Cells and Weakening Vaccine Response
Horsey@lemmy.world 1 week agoHuman subjects are crazy to work with for a few reasons
- People don’t follow instructions perfectly
- Research subjects often don’t take the research project very seriously.
- It’s not uncommon to have dropouts, thus you either have to find more subjects or have less data.
- It’s impossible to know what the subjects are doing to cause data variability (diet, vices, etc)
- You can’t lock subjects in a room and force them to eat and drink the same food every day.
Laboratory mice literally live 5 to a cage with almost no diet variability, in a controlled environment. Yes shit does happen with research mice, but it’s something that is easy to control overall.
_lilith@lemmy.world 1 week ago
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
And yet, we manage to have hundreds of thousands of studies written about humans with human subjects. This sounds like a boatload of excuses that could be summed up as “science is hard”. Sure, it’s hard, but it’s better than putting out a flawed study that can’t scale properly.
olafurp@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Sure, the study would be best if we did a randomised double blind study on a sample of 100 people that all are going to get a tattoo anyway but that doesn’t make the mouse study irrelevant.
Mice and humans, although very different in appearance have biomechanics that are very similar. For every human study you could make a 20 mouse studies with the same funding so you could do a lot more exploration.
This study found something, notably that ink in the blood affected the immune system. This just means that future studies are needed like injecting people with tattoo ink and blood samples diagnosis after tattoo to see how much ink is in the blood. If confirmed this will push tattoo ink manufacturers to develop a new ink that eliminates the effect and we can all enjoy safer more effective tattooing.
This study is not flawed, it’s pushing human knowledge forward like it always does.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
It’s the size of the animal that’s important here. I’m aware that mice can sometimes have useful biomechanical similarities to humans, but this is the wrong animal to use in this case. Pigs would have been much much better.
Tattooing is a delicate operation that requires precision, even using different pressures between male and female human skin, and that does not scale well at all for an animal that is 100x smaller than a human.
bonenode@piefed.social 1 week ago
You don’t need to sum it up as science is hard but also as science is expensive. They might simply not have gotten funding for something as that.