5 ms·

Good luck in study section, especially with mouse specialists. I hope you have a mighty compelling argument for why a random sample of (say) house mice is going

• ennisthemennis 8y ago
  Humans have a shit ton of unmeasured confounding effects though. Which means there is an even bigger leap between inbred mice and human studies. Not saying we should abandon the current way of doing things, but a little more diversity in funded research might be a good thing, because there are some modes of failure right now. A way to evaluate drug efficacy that relies less on comparisons of large groups would be a big step, because there are a lot of disorders that are probably multiple mechanisms manifesting in similar ways Ultimately there is always going to be some trade-off between making a rigorous statement and a generalizeable one, especially because biology seems to have some pretty messy abstractions. As collecting and analyzing large amounts of data becomes more feasible, I don't see why there shouldn't be some efforts to consider genetic (or environmental) heterogeneity in animal models. Ideally I think it'd be cool to approach any given question with parallel methods that can try to address how the hypothesis holds up both in more narrow but well controlled situations, and in the "wild"
• danieltillett 8y ago
  I hope the person demanding using inbred mice has a compelling argument for why inbred mice are a good model of outbred humans. Yes we would do fewer experiments since you would need more mice per experiement, but the results of those experiements would be far more robust.