"apparently so many things work on mice but not people?"
If we experimented on people (tho it would take longer) we would probably find lots of things that work on people but not mice.
If we experimented on people (tho it would take longer) we would probably find lots of things that work on people but not mice.
I say this as someone who is a proponent of the murine model. I think animal models are incredibly valuable to science and we wouldn't be where we were without them. That said, imagine all the things I described being performed on humans... I don't think that would go over so well.
A "nonfatal" lab setup wouldn't yield the same kind of results. You would be greatly limited to the scope of what you could investigate. Many experiments kill out of necessity. Also for the sake of throughput. Most of the experimental mice lines are doomed simply by the fact they lack critical immune function--we stock them that way for the sake of isolating experiments to a particular immune system function. Scientific abstraction. (And for reproducability. They're standardized equipment, if you will.)