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> Mice and rats have long served as the preferred species for biomedical research animal models due to their anatomical, physiological, and genetic similarity t
by mynameisvlad 4y ago
> Mice and rats have long served as the preferred species for biomedical research animal models due to their anatomical, physiological, and genetic similarity to humans. Advantages of rodents include their small size, ease of maintenance, short life cycle, and abundant genetic resources.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987984/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987984/
It's almost as if research is done on mice on purpose. Of course you're going to see new discoveries, positive or negative, come out of studies involving the most widely used test subject on the planet.
- jedberg 4y agoAnd in a lot of cases, these headlines talk about some amazing discovery, only for it to not actually apply to humans.
- Teever 4y agoDoes this generality apply to this specific situation? Do you even know? Does the generic 'yah but it sez in mouse' really add anything to the conversation? I'd love to hear from an expert on the subject, thats why I'm on HN.
- kerowak 4y agoI’m not sure what your objection is. The article pretty clearly qualifies its assertions that this phenomenon is observed in mice. Are you saying there is no possible way that these results could be recapitulated in humans?
- jedberg 4y agoI'm saying that we see article after article about breakthrough findings in mice, only to find out later that it doesn't apply to humans, and therefore findings in mice aren't particularly interesting news.
- pazimzadeh 4y agoExcept when they do apply to humans. For example, intracellular bacterial communities formed by uropathogenic E. coli were observed in mice before humans.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zug_zug 4y agoI think the iron-man argument is -- wouldn't it be much less a waste of everybody's time here if we never posted mice articles, and only waited until they go to the human stage to share/discuss them? Of course it's a free community, people are welcome to post and upvote whatever they like, still we do have cultural norms here around high signal/noise and I understand the sentiment.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoI mean, that's the entire purpose of the algorithm and downvoting things. Our "cultural norms" are to downvote and ignore if something doesn't interest us. Not to explicitly whine about something being posted in the first place. Does a comment complaining about the high signal/noise ratio do anything but discourage discussion?