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Notes -
I have a mild anecdotal counterpoint. It's old at this point, since I haven't worked in science in over a decade, but when I did, I was on my organization's institutional animal care and use committee, and despite the bureaucratic jargon and process, we actually did do something to curb some of the more pointless uses of research animals. The group wasn't particularly adversarial and worked with researchers on questions like whether the statistical power was going to be sufficient (we don't want to kill animals if the study won't even give a result), whether it could be done with fewer animals (same, but reversed), and whether the protocol used all reasonable practices to reduce pain and suffering of the animals (e.g. if the end point is death from an infection, can we just do infection instead, since the animal will tend to die painfully?).
I'm sure many groups feel that they're doing something constructive despite just being an annoying bureaucracy, and I'm sure that the review process we were doing was both imperfect and tedious, but I do want to offer that gentle pushback against it being literally useless.
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