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> This is not some secret knowledge uncovered via youtube.

If you do a quick head count of people who know about this effect in 12 months it may well turn out most of them learned it from YouTube.

That still doesn't mean it was secret knowledge before, the people who have use for this information could readily access it.

I think the argument here is that scientists who work with mice are by-and-large aware of this. It's fine we're communicating this to the public, but the tone that's struck by the Rogan podcast feels a bit more like we're exposing something scientists are hiding or are unaware of.

I think his point is that those mice are misleadingly bad and it is a fixable problem that for some reason the scientific community is refusing to address.

The scientific community often comes to an incorrect consensus, and this consensus becomes dogma that must not be questioned because the consequences would be too damaging to reputation/credibility/whatever.

Here's another example from a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225 - "How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure"

When you've got enough incentive, it's hard to resist the urge to use your power to simply decide what is and is not allowed to be true.

The consensus on mice models is that they suck and we need something better, and until we do, everything needs to he tested in humans before widespread approval is given so we arent ever relying on mice data alone to make regulatory decisions. Seems like a reasonable consensus to reach

>The scientific community often comes to an incorrect consensus, and this consensus becomes dogma that must not be questioned because the consequences would be too damaging to reputation/credibility/whatever

While this does happen, science at least allows the possibility of enough evidence to force people into accepting the new model. Without science, many more things are considered untouchable dogma and there is no method to challenge that.

Scientists are still human and make dumb ego driven mistakes, science still provides the best theory out there.

Fixable and refusing to address? At the end of this I've linked a grant request from the NIH for better models, and this isn't a u ique or one of grant request. Hundreds of researchers and companies are working tirelessly on things like organ on a chip. Every drug required human trials to prove they work and could never get approved on mouse trust alone. Preclinical work will use animals up to monkeys if needed to get the best data. Neuroscience is developing brain organoids we can use that are created from actual human cells so we can move away from mice. This is millions of dollars of research being poured into this space because it turns out the scientific community does not like spending billions of dollars on failed drugs that we might have known about if we had better models. Saying the problem is fixable and that the scientific community just doesnt care is incredibly naive - it's like saying higher energy density batteries are trivially achievable but battery researchers are just too lazy right now. Its difficult, and many mainstream researchers have literally dedicated their lives to it.

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-19-369.html

Can you elaborate more? I followed telomere research a bit for years and I had never heard about what Bret Weinstein said.

Isn’t his claim that the lab mice adopted to some change in telomeres that significantly distorted the results of tests? I guess famous intellectuals with PhD aren’t credible sources but Eric Weinstein said that for over a decade they tried to get publicity for the story but ran into resistance.

I am more familiar with the basic research phase but in my experience very few groups actually treat model choices as an engineering tradeoff. Labs usually write grants centered around whatever model organism(s) the lab is already used to, and it's rare to see a proposal that doesn't use one of a few "accepted" models. I've never seen anyone sit down and have a discussion at the proposal stage about this, to actually seriously consider alternative setups or even just acknowledge why they are choosing this same mouse again. The tradeoff defense comes after the fact, and really only if someone else brings it up.

I think it is in part a symptom of the cost of research causing labs to be centered moreso around a methodology than a question. Having some labs like this isn't a problem, but when an entire field starts to trend this way, and almost everything that gets funding chooses a particular side of a tradeoff (that isn't super well quantified to begin with), then I think we could end up missing a lot.

If you look at it another way, groups that have a handle and understanding of a particular tool may have insight into how that tool can be used to answer a biological question. I don't think there is anything really wrong with that, but grants should be denied if they aren't proposing ways to move the field forward.

There are tons of mouse labs, however some have specialized mice or mouse systems. There are also other labs that specialize in other animal systems. These systems are nontrivial to switch between for many reasons, which I think you acknowledge. It is useful for the field in general to have access to the results of a variety of research tools that every individual wouldn't necessarily have access to.

Guess you have missed his point. The mice is bad as they are bias. They are too good to survive in a lab. It is not a trade off. The result is invalid.

Poor GP.

In my humble opinion it's not that bright to think of animals as an utilitarian resource for the human race to plunder, or to consider their monetary value as any sort of a yardstick.

Certainly if we hold these kind of ethics we've got no excuses if an advanced alien race wants to use us in their medical experiments.

>Certainly if we hold these kind of ethics we've got no excuses if an advanced alien race wants to use us in their medical experiments.

If an advanced alien wants to use us in experiments, I doubt they'd care much about what we say on the matter. And for all we know, the aliens might come from a predator background and only consider vicious species as true equals.

Just to drop you down a peg, I can invent a sci-fi scenario in which my point is made too: An advanced race views how we treat animals beneath us and decide to reciprocate as we are as far beneath them as mice are to us.

That would be like us slowly torturing cats to death just because cats do that to mice [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ZH3VzjZGU

Humans have slowly tortured cats to death - far, far longer than the few minutes that a cat "plays" with a mouse: https://medium.com/@jasoncomely/the-terrible-truth-about-mod....

It's not even comparable.

In the end, all non-human testing of potential treatments are meant to be fail-fast/fail-cheap. In terms of fail-fast, the timeline for seeing "lifetime" effects of a drug is far shorter in a rodent than in a human. In terms of fail-cheap, the ethical and monetary cost of a rodent suffering or dying due to unwanted effects of a drug candidate is judged to be lower than similar suffering in a human.

I do agree that lab animals aren't a resource in themselves – they're just the currently "next best" model to test in before trying a drug out in humans. In fact, mice are actually quite expensive in terms of time and money – custom-genotype mice can cost hundreds of dollars each, and that's just the up-front purchase price. The overhead of maintaining a mouse line is also quite high, with a huge loss incurred for accidental death or euthanization before they've been used as a model. When many research facilities were first shut down due to COVID lockdown this year, I heard that many labs at my university had to euthanize all their mice as they wouldn't be able to care for them. This represents a loss of months of research time and possibly thousands to tens of thousands of research dollars.

Another thing to consider is that many drug candidates that make it to the animal testing stage don't succeed with safety and/or efficacy testing. According to the FDA, 92% of pre-clinical animal tests actually fail to predict drug effectiveness in humans. This highlights a pressing need for other fail-fast/fail-cheap methods that should precede animal testing, like cell culture methods that could be used as a pre-animal screen.

>the ethical and monetary cost of a rodent suffering or dying due to unwanted effects of a drug candidate is judged to be lower than similar suffering in a human.

Thank you for the insightful comment, I'll cite the part that is relevant, since my (very serious) point was indeed that by this logic a more "advanced" being than us would have (by our own morals) the right to conduct medical experiments on us humans, because we are capable of feeling less pain.