Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

GMO lab mice are poor models for human diseases

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

From comparative medicine specialist Joseph Garner, interviewed by Aviva Garner at New Scientist:

Of the drugs that get past the animal testing phase and into human trials, only about 1 in 9 actually make it to the market, and that’s dropping all the time. It costs about $2 billion to bring a single drug to market, largely because of failed human trials. And they usually fail simply because the drug doesn’t work, or not as well as animal testing predicted. (most paywalled) More.

It may be relevant that humans can think, say, and do a lot of things that mice cannot, and we are not kept in cages all our lives either. So a disease would run its course in a different way n principle.

So much we used to know ain’t so. One wonders how a guy like Bill Nye (who argues they are essential) makes a living. He purports to be a skeptic, but was he ever skeptical of any of this stuff?

See also: Peer review “unscientific”: Tough words from editor of Nature

Follow UD News at Twitter!

How good a model for human Alzheimer disease would mice really be?

Comments

Leave a Reply