Lectures and seminars Webinar: "Therioepistemology and the future of preclinical models"
The aim of these CPD webinars (Continuing professional development) is to follow the legal requirements for maintenance and demonstration of competence in laboratory animal science, and to facilitate the implementations of the 3R’s in routine animal work.
"Therioepistemology and the future of preclinical models"
Abstract
For the first time, the scale of the reproducibility and translatability crisis is widely understood beyond the small number of researchers who have been studying it and the pharmaceutical and biotech companies who have been living it. This talk will make the case that this is not a time for despair, but a time of intellectual excitement and hope. The emerging literature on these issues contains recurring themes which represent a paradigm shift, and thus potentially the birth of a new discipline (which we have proposed be termed “therioepistemology”).
At the micro level this is 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 or reagents, to viewing them as patients in an equivalent human medical study. Thanks to the groundwork laid over the last 15 years by a variety of authors, we not only understand many of the causes of poor reproducibility and translatability, but we also know the features of animal work that lead to reproducible work with a good chance of translation.
Accordingly, now is a time for action where we manifest change in the status quo of how animal research is done. This talk will outline six questions that serve as a heuristic for critically evaluating animal-based biomedical research for opportunities to make this shift in perspective.
Refer to the article “Introducing Therioepistemology: the study of how knowledge is gained from animal research available” by Garner et al. at: https://www.nature.com/articles/laban.1224.
Speaker
Dr. Joseph Garner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Medicine, a Courtesy Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and a member of the Child Health Research Institute at Stanford University. Joe oversees a variety of 3Rs support services for researchers at Stanford, including colony management, biostatistics, and behavioral management.
Joe is an internationally recognized expert in the behavior and welfare of laboratory mice, including awards from the National Center for the 3Rs (UK), the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science, the Swiss Laboratory Animal Science Association, and the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare.
Registration
Register here (by June 1).
Contact
E-mail: las-edu@km.ki.se