Mice are excellent models for many diseases but not all. When possible we study cell culture, then mice, then humans and there are rigorous ethics committees that require justification for the study, we don’t just do these studies for no reason. Their metabolism and physiology is pretty similar to ours, which makes them useful to study inflammation, cancer, diabetes and other malignant/metabolic/genetic disorders. They have a 21 day gestation period and research mice are essentially all clones which eliminates genetic variability as a factor (making them excellent for reproducibility in a timely manner)
some drawbacks include the spine, they’re haunched which makes it difficult to study something like scoliosis, we do this in zebrafish actually. Also I believe they have some mild immunological differences like ratio of circulating white cells and bone marrow differentials and minor differences in some proteins. Basically anyone doing these studies has years of training and really knows what they are doing, they would not be allowed to conduct them unless it was absolutely necessary to answer a specific question. Mouse work is a lot more complicated/interesting than this but I think I’ve made my point for now.
Source: wrote a portion of my thesis on justification of using an animal model for obesity research, then an 8 year career in a pathology core/phenotyping lab.
Mice have the best healthcare.
Er, yes but also this…
https://www.braintreesci.com/restraint-containment-handling/restraint/rat-restrainers/decapicones/
Make injections and decapitation quicker and easier with Braintree Scientific’s DecapiCones. Tapered plastic film tubes provide quick and easy restraint of rats, mice, and other small animals. I.P. injections can be made directly through the film! DecapiCones restrain post-decapitation kicking and prevent personal contact with feces or urine. A unique dispenser holds DecapiCones open and ready for use. Simply hold the DecapiCone in one hand and introduce the animal with the other. Animals enter readily, heading for the breathing hole at the small end. Roll and squeeze the large end closed. They may be used repeatedly for injections and simply discarded when soiled. For decapitation, hold at the rear and insert the small end into the decapitator.
They come in quantities of 200, in handy pre-loaded dispensers.
Can’t believe that name. Wow.
Yeah, although maybe it’s good that they’re straightforward? No euphemisms, no pretense.
They’re used together with an implement simply called the decapitator. At this point there’s no need to mince words 😅
Good god, this text is real
Looked up decapitators… https://stoeltingco.com/Neuroscience/Decapitators~9997
“Rodent guillotine” https://www.wpiinc.com/var-2645-rodent-guillotine.html
I was going to say, I have a similar madame guillotine at home but mine is for the paper.
Lol I love how it says "considered one of the more humane ways to sacrifice laboratory rodents. Who are they sacrificing them to? The great God of science?
That’s what it’s called when it’s inhumane to let them live after an experiment.
Certain rats have incredibly elevated chances of growing tumors, for example. Letting them grow old is basically torture, so…
Still wouldn’t call that a sacrifice… That’s a mercy killing.
It’s archaic euphemistic jargon, and that’s why you generally don’t see it used outside of the niche.
Yeah, because it’s fast and little pain can be felt before its dead. Guillotines were developed to be a more humane execution for people.
“Physical methods” (Guillotine, cardiac puncture, thoracotomy, etc) are usually a secondary confirmation of death after lethal ketamine/xylazine cocktail injection, isofluorane, or CO2 inhalation.
And yeah we’re sacrificing them to the science god to try and make new discoveries and new therapies. We’re also trying to develop ways to avoid using organisms such as organ on a chip or multiple organ on a chip systems but thats expensive af and not yet sufficient quality to replace organism testing.
I instinctively read “considered one of the more humane ways to sacrifice laboratory students”
Who are they sacrificing them to? The great God of science?
Yes, for mild winters and plentiful harvests
Yes, for mild winters and plentiful harvests
Bastards, we need harsher winters over here. Otherwise the moskitos and invasive species get even more numerous.
For Reviewer B to accidentally to misclick and lose all their notes.
Man, my oldest kiddo is going into neuroscience, there are paid internship opportunities, which is awesome but I worry she’ll end up using something like these to snuff mice all day. I don’t think I could do that job.
Well they better, in california everything gives them cancer.
Mice in LSD trials:
Got to start somewhere. Can’t jump directly into human trials.
Well, yes you can, but it’s considered „inhumane“ and „unethical“
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation
(German „quotation marks“ for stylistic purposes)
Removed by mod
Literally the rhetoric that the Nazis used as an excuse to experiment on Jews in concentration camps
I don’t know much about nazis but I thought an important part of their rhetoric was to draw distinctions between types of human.
So they’d not see “10bn humans”, they’d see maybe 100m aryan and 9.9bn “untermensch”; the latter being equivalent to rats available to be experimented on.
I just find rats to be much more preferable, pleasant and considerate creatures than humans. I see humans as a single tier of unterratten; totally different hierarchcy.
so how do you choose which humans to experiment on? bearing in mind that any sort of incentive will automatically select for a particular subset, and randomness will “obviously” need to exclude a particular subset
A researcher should offer a sufficient compensation package to get enough volunteers after explaining the risks. They should get independent medical advice too.
They can still randomize within the volunteers with treatment / placebo, and maybe use quotas, but they’d just have to extend their trial period until they’d achieved a measurably representative treatment and control group and enough volunteers to test the hypothesis to the required level.
This type of non-random sampling may very well have to be done anyway, for example if they needed the power to test efficacy and safety in all the potential dug interactions or co-morbidity scenarios. Not to mention any diagnosis requirement will also screen the sample which could be influenced by health care system resources and policies, not necessarily pure morbidity. So I think they can deal with non-random sampling in med research perfectly well.
A researcher should offer a sufficient compensation package to get enough volunteers after explaining the risks.
So the poor and desperate.
Be the change you want to see in the world! Volunteer for medical trials today!
Not if they’ve pre-tested on non-volunteers though.
Hello Adolph
The success rate in humans for something discovered in mice is about 1 in 100.
So a lot of the scientific journalism presenting a mouse model as a major discovery that will revolutionise [X disease] is straight up bad faith clickbait.
Those pesky ethics committees…
Skaven using humans to develop the latest health care.
We’ll make mice immortal before going extinct…
[…] MAY […]
Vitro la Vida and Death and all his Friends
