India To Cut Out Animal Dissection 145
ananyo writes "Squeamish science students in India might not have to grapple with cutting up rats or frogs for much longer. The University Grants Commission (UGC), the national body in New Delhi that funds and governs Indian universities, announced new rules earlier this month that would phase out almost all animal dissection and replace it with teaching using computer simulations and models."
Well, let's ask (Score:5, Insightful)
Biologists: Have computer simulations and models advanced to a point where they can replace physical cadavers for studies and training?
Re:Mechanics next (Score:4, Insightful)
Not every "automobile student" wants to make a living as a greasemonkey. I took automotive classes just because I wanted to understand how they worked.
My favorite part turned out to be physics and chemistry, and today I'm an engineer with little need for coveralls or gojo.
Stop and think (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, before responding with an idiotic "But how will my doctor know what they are doing?!?!", think about this for more than 2 seconds. The vast majority of students in undergraduate biology classes will never in their lives have to cut open and dissect another animal of any kind, and the knowledge they gain from it could easily be gained by simulation. For the very small minority of students who will require surgical or dissection skills (doctors at vets), there is ample time to get them that specialized experience in their respective graduate programs. This is a good change to focus resources where they will be the most useful.
Re:Oh just great (Score:3, Insightful)
Acknowledging that you can't understand someone through a thick accent doesn't make you a racist. I'd say the same thing about the staff at call centers in the Southeastern US - Can't understand a damned word they say. Nothing "racist" about it, purely a practical matter.
That said, this FP does have an interesting hint of racism inherent in it - We have a bunch of Americans cheering the end of a "barbaric" practice, just after having filled their bellies with the charred but otherwise neatly-dissected corpses of a variety of animals. Sublime.
Real vs. Virtual (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a medical school student, I'd say it depends on what you want to study and train the student to do afterwards.
If you are teaching the student using virtual methods, and then measure the student's performance using models and drawings afterwards -- you will probably find that the student's performance is actually higher than that of using real-life cadavers (not surprisingly, because you are training in the same manner as you are testing).
Their ability to regurgitate names for everything everything will probably be better, too. Because all the pieces are nice and discrete. Easy to memorize.
Now, real world bodies are different. In a preserved cadaver, everything is rendered in a few shades of brown/yellow/gray that blur together, (one exception: the gallbladder is a beautiful shade of green). If dissecting something not preserved and alive (or recently alive), smear red over everything (That's how you get stories about surgeons leaving sponges and stuff in bodies. Stuff ends up looking like red blobs sitting among a collection of red blobs).
It's very difficult to learn from a cadaver; A bunch of different structures in the book might just look like one big chunk in the body (cause maybe they're all enveloped and held together by connective tissue). Unlike a piece of designed equipment that needed to be assembled, everything space is stuffed and crammed with something or another, because it probably grew there. Except when it didn't grow there, it grew somewhere else and migrated. And because it was grown and not made, often it's not quite the shape or location that the book says.
As a result, learning to navigate around a body and recognize it's components is a special skill that goes far beyond memorizing those components themselves. There's a lot of reasoning and tracing connections and relationships. You don't just learn things from a cadaver, you learn skills.
Re:Oh just great (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, most every stereotype comes about due to a good bit of truth pervasive to those involved with the stereotype.
It is hardly racist to be observant.
Re:Oh just great (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, a lot of it is also due...to in past years, having medical schools actively seeking and bringing in foreign and female students, to fill quotas.
For a good while there, they would bring in a female or minority over a white male even if the white male was the clear winner with respect to qualifications. For a while, it got fairly difficult for a white male to get into med school, and hence...you have a lot of doctors today that are female, but also many foreign ones that you have difficulty understanding.
To counter this...med schools are now actively seeking white males to balance things out again.
This was happening a lot a bit over a decade ago...
Re:Technical skill? (Score:4, Insightful)
Every science student, and certainly every biology student, needs to dissect animals. They should do it in high school. Or sooner.
One of the main skills of a scientist is looking at nature. It's not the same as reading about it in a book (which is what you get in a computer). The lesson is that you're looking at the actual real world. Science teaches you how to look at the real world.
If your book says it should be one way, and your specimen is another way, then your book has a lot of explaining to do.
The other thing is you get a lot of "Oh, now I understand" moments.
For example, I dissected a cow's eye (a popular lab). The thing that impressed me about it was how thin the retina was -- it looked like an oil slick. Now I can appreciate how difficult it is to do retinal surgery, and I can appreciate the tricks eye surgeons figured to be able to do it. I read a lot of anatomy books (Netter has great drawings of the eye) but real life was different.
I can't explain how it was different. You'll just have to dissect an eye and see for yourself.