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.
In the long run, using mice to test human medicines will result in selection pressure for humans whose physiology more and more closely resembles that of mice.
i love this idea let’s become mice
they use a lot of other things… including living human cancer cells in a petri dish
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?
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.
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?
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.
(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:
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 love him
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.
Or it was too cheap to duplicate so there was no profit in it…
Cheap to duplicate is great for them. That means larger profit margins.
Even when we find a single drug that effortlessly cures every type of cancer and costs $1 to peoduce it will be patented by some giant company and sold to highest bidders.
There’s more profit in causing and treating cancer than curing it. Can’t weaken those revenue streams just so some poor people can go on living. If they were worth saving then they wouldn’t have been born better.
Dead people make short term profit. Alive people make long term profit.
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.
reminds me of trump’s suggestion of using bleach to treat people with covid
We warned the stupids off doing that way too quick if you ask me.
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.
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?
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.
There are preventative measures but they’re all based on the rich not poisoning everyone for profit.
Cancer can’t be cured because it isn’t 1 thing. And animal testing regardless of the benefit humans may receive is morally wrong.
So what, we just test things in a dish and then hope it works in a complex organism? Because the other alternative is human testing.
We do like every other animal on the planet and die.
You have fun with that, I’ll take the medicine.
