They aren’t biologically compatible with us and so often seems like treatments that work with mice stumble at human testing stage.
So why do we keep using mice? Why not a different animal more closely related to us?
In: Biology
Mice are not that different from us. They are cheap to maintain and reproduce very quickly. They also are pretty stupid, and it feels a lot more humane to experiment on them instead of let’s say monkeys.
We also now have these very inbred lines of mice where the genetic diversity in the mice is very low. This makes experimental results more consistent across different labs. It would be very difficult to switch to another animal and get similar results without lots of world wide changes where all labs would work on a new strain of animal to use for tests.
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