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Comment by bro-stick | Hacker News Reader

Mouse models are rapidly becoming obsolete as it's becoming easier than ever to model entire, differentiated tissues grown from red blood cell-derived adult stem cells.

It's also now possible to do clinically-useful testing of targeted treatments using genetically-edited control tissue cultures against unedited tissue cultures.

The point is that it's better to test something that is as close to the patient as possible, not guess with other species or even other people whom express genes differently.

FYI: making a new mouse models requires lots of chopping off heads of mice whom don't possess the desired gene. While transgenic, highly-edited living models might be nice, there's probably a more humane/simpler/reproducible way to do the exact same thing.

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>>Mouse models are rapidly becoming obsolete as it's becoming easier than ever to model entire, differentiated tissues grown from red blood cell-derived adult stem cells.

No they aren't. Transgenic mouse models are a $billion industry. We do not understand biological mechanisms nearly enough to not use live animal models. We are not even able to recreate single cell organisms with our level of knowledge and engineering.

>>FYI: making a new mouse models requires lots of chopping off heads of mice whom don't possess the desired gene. While transgenic, highly-edited living models might be nice, there's probably a more humane and simpler way to do the exact same thing.

Ah, the real root of your argument. Do you even know what the word humane means? I work in a labroatory and the animals are treated better than the people. Yes, a lot of mice are killed.. but for a reason. You say there's probably a simpler way to do the exact same thing, but there simply isn't. I wish more people were actually educated in this matter, but emotional responses tend to get more results.

I work for the Stanford Med School, so where do you work?

But regardless, you're rationalizing your own biases and agendas on outdated techniques and racing to the bottom with a disrespectful, ad hominem approach. How pleasant and humane of you. Maybe you should look to the future instead of attacking what isn't in your narrow focus, because you come across as a troll.

Watch this, and learn something: https://youtu.be/ilVjSnE5t44

Overcompensating by treating animals well isn't a valid rationalization for anything which comes next, regardless of benefit.

So the human lives saved would be the valid rationalization.

Not only that .... chopping off heads isn't how mice are terminated, from what I've been told by someone who worked in fetal development research on mice.

I always assumed that the sacrifice method depended on the research. You might liquefy them in a centrifuge, or pith them with a probe, or asphyxiate them in pure gaseous nitrogen, or flash freeze them in liquid nitrogen. Whatever makes sense for the study.

But if the animals in question are not part of the study at all, I don't see how it matters much. Maybe there's a little mouse guillotine. Maybe one person on the team owns a reptile pet that is very well fed. The reason why rodent models are used in the first place is that they're mammals, easy to care for, breed, and handle, and no one really cares if they die by the millions.

If they were outside the lab, they would likely get poisoned or crushed by snap traps. (That's better than what a cat would do.) Cuteness won't save you from my wrath if you eat my food and then poop in whatever you left behind. At least the ones that died in the labs had real jobs, instead of living hedonistic freeloader lifestyles inside someone else's couch.

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