In the long run, using mice to test human medicines will result in selection pressure for humans whose physiology more and more closely resembles mice.
they use a lot of other things… including living human cancer cells in a petri dish
I believe the vast majority of cultivated human cells are cancerous cells anyway.
when researching cancer drugs, yeah
So we will become cancer
Maybe the real cancer is the friends we made along the way
The reality is that even if there was a magic bullet for cancer, all cancer, it would only extend lives a few years.
How does that work?
well no, they kill cancer in petri dishes
It was a joke about selection pressure.
No! We will be crab! Everything becomes crab!
That’s not how evolution works though
Assuming that
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human phenotypic traits that correlate more closely with mouse traits have more-predictable outcomes with mouse-tested medicine, and
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more-predictable medical outcomes correlate with higher survival and reproductive rates,
can’t you plug that straight into the Price equation?
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Mice live 9 months in the wild, and have a resting heart rate of 500-700 bpm. That’s a lot of cardio.
Mice, notorious for having evolved to suit unclean conditions and being able to survive as carriers of disease and parasites will definitely have a different set of evolved resistances and immunities to us. It’s pretty ludacris science believes them to be a good point of comparison.
You know lab mice aren’t just grabbed out of the sewers, right?
Not when the sewer mice have turtles to protect them
Humans only discovered hygiene somewhere in the last couple of thousand of years. Evolutionary pressure for large animals works on time lines of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Before we got cleaner (and also after that) we also lived in unclean conditions, often are still covered in fleas and lice and we are still one of the greatest spreaders of disease. Humans and mice are extremely similar in many ways, just because we have a large brain doesn’t mean we are somehow no longer the animals we always were. We share much of our evolution with mice, our cells are extremely similar and we share 92% of our DNA.
Mice are an excellent point of comparison to humans. And because they are small, live short lives and grow fast, they are excellent to serve as a basis for testing. However it’s also worth remembering the mice aren’t the starting point, nor are they the end point. It’s just one of the steps in between and many other species and techniques are used. In a lot of cases, mice aren’t used at all, but some other test is done.
It’s also like people seem to think that researchers are just doing random crap to mice and seeing what works. Like I said there is a lot of stuff that comes before and a lot of stuff that comes after. Tests with mice are often done to research something very specific, with a carefully considered method of testing and expected outcome. If someone thinks of something so hyper specific to humans, they would simply not do any trials on mice since that wouldn’t yield any results. These days we’ve also gotten extremely good at growing cells and complex clumps of cells at large scales for not much money. And these can be actual human cells with actual human DNA and biological processes. This has made animal testing far less necessary than it was in the past.
Sure at some point if something is very promising but there are doubts about some complex interaction that might be an issue, animal testing can be useful. But if the thing to test is something so specific to humans, an animal closer to humans would be used, for example pigs or some monkeys or apes. And if those doubts aren’t there it isn’t like animal testing is a required step, it is possible to go to human trials without it.
Of course this depends heavily on what it is you are trying to do. For drugs for example animal testing is often done, but often not to figure out if it works or not. But to figure out what sort of dose is needed for enough to be absorbed, but not so much the drug is wasted or the patient would experience a lot of side effects. It’s pretty easy to do a short trial on some pigs and have the first human trial get the dose right straight away. At this point it’s more of a regular way of doing things than something absolutely required. In a lot of places regulation will require some animal testing, especially for drugs, but these days with better lab tests and simulations it isn’t strictly required.
So it might be a fun shower thought, but it isn’t really how stuff works in real life.
See also, humanized mice, KO mice with particular genes knocked out to see if gene therapy works, and a host of other intentionally bred or adapted strains.
Flea and lice are not indicators of cleanliness. The same way a mosquito or tick or croc bite is not. They do not care about how (un)clear you are. Why should they?
It’s just an early testing phase, more of an “ok, this drug kind of did what we want in mice, and the mice didn’t explode. It’s time to move to the next stage of testing on something more human analogue, like a pig.”
(not mice), but Fancy Rats are extremely susceptible to tumors. It sucks. More rats I’ve owned have died of either cancer or respiratory illnesses than old age.
Bonus shot of my boy Finn:
I love him
He has a kind face.
You say that but he always wears a leather jacket and carries a flickknife with him when he goes outside!!
I can fix him
so does my mom.
Like he works in French restaurant.
Cancer isn’t one thing.
The whole concept of “curing cancer” is such a trope. Cancer is a condition, and it annoys the fuck out of me that people treat it as one disease like measles or the flu.
Just like with antibiotics. When Penicilin was originally tested, they happened to test it on just the right animals. One kind of standard lab animals would have just died from that stuff.
I mean, there are like dozens of different types of cancers, so we probably have missed some of them.
Or it worked too well on mice and stopped regular cells from dividing.
We know a bunch of ways to kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, we usually want to avoid killing the non-cancerous ones, which is considerably harder to do.
This is where oregano oil and apple cider vinegar technology comes from.
reminds me of trump’s suggestion of using bleach to treat people with covid
Now now, you can’t be picky! And really with the outcome being the same, there’s no reason to bicker.
The crazy thing is we actually do have things that work in humans but not in mice. Mice are omnivores and are very different in terms of optimal energy state. They tend to run in glucose more easily than on fat and their whole biology is built to be small and fast, with short life spans.
Checking how DNA repair works in an animal which lives for maybe 2 years is great for understanding DNA repair in short lived organisms, but we have tk repair damage for 50 times as long. It is just so much more complex and requires such different tools when you switch from maybe 2 years to maybe 80 years, it really isn’t sane to assume it will all carry over.
Now for an accute toxin, say tobacco, sure, some things work just fine. There is not a huge difference between humans and mice when subjected to cyanide or arsenic. Being crushed by a falling piano is going to kill both of us. But a chronic poison? That will take decades to kill? That is very different. We can shed cells in a different way to how they can. We have more mass to store things. We have more energy storage. We have bigger kidneys with more opportunities for filtering. We are different.
When we enter ketosis we have some fairly significant cancer responses. When we maintain fasting for 5+ days we have a fairly large bump in autophagy, a state where the body kills off and recycles damaged cells. This state can cause some types of cancer to be more obvious to our immune systems and allow the tumor to be attacked. In some cases otherwise inoperable tumors can be removed after shrinking them through fasting. This does not replicate in mice. So yes, some treatments (not cures because that doesn’t really apply) do work in humans and not in mice.
The strongest risk factor of human cancer is age. Wild mice live 6-9 months.
Yep, and surviving longer increases cancer rates. Cancer used to be a death sentence, now it is far less so. Many cancers which were a short time from death at diagnosis are now routine to remove or fix. Others that were soon fatal have 5 year survival over 90%, and some are even higher.
We haven’t cured cancer just like we haven’t cured industrial accidents, but honestly, so few people are eaten by hungry machines and left disfigured that it is likely you know less than a handful. Not cured but reduced to a much more manageable level.
Also who is out there making sure all of these incredible discoveries are accessible to mice more broadly, outside the labs?
This IS happening, right?
There are preventative measures but they’re all based on the rich not poisoning everyone for profit.
Otoh, mice have never been healthier.
Nobody tell him what happens to the mice afterwards.
They go live on a farm to live out the rest of their happy mousey days.
As fertilizer.
This is one of the reasons why animal testing is not worth the torture the animals go through
