The Mouse Trap
The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html
The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html
"Mark Mattson knows a lot about mice and rats. He's fed them; he's bred them; he's cut their heads open with a scalpel. Over a brilliant 25-year career in neuroscience—one that's made him a Laboratory Chief at the National Institute on Aging, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, a consultant to Alzheimer's nonprofits, and a leading scholar of degenerative brain conditions—Mattson has completed more than 500 original, peer-reviewed studies, using something on the order of 20,000 laboratory rodents. He's investigated the progression and prevention of age-related diseases in rats and mice of every kind: black ones and brown ones; agoutis and albinos; juveniles and adults; males and females. Still, he never quite noticed how fat they were—how bloated and sedentary and sickly—until a Tuesday afternoon in February 2007. That's the day it occurred to him, while giving a lecture at Emory University in Atlanta, that his animals were nothing less (and nothing more) than lazy little butterballs. His animals and everyone else's, too."
