I wonder if we could one day grow miniature human bodies (not conscious ones) to use for these tests. Mice are a lot different to humans.
In the long run, using mice to test human medicines will result in selection pressure for humans whose physiology more and more closely resembles mice.
No! We will be crab! Everything becomes crab!
they use a lot of other things… including living human cancer cells in a petri dish
I believe the vast majority of cultivated human cells are cancerous cells anyway.
when researching cancer drugs, yeah
Actually it’s used in everything, it’s available, it’s well studied, it’s cheap, and most importantly it grows fast in a lab, so it’s easy to work with…
I wish I was joking, but lots of in vitro human research is done on the poor women’s cancer cells when the research has nothing to do with cancer, it’s quite the confounder
they use stem cells a lot for that sort of thing too
So we will become cancer
Maybe the real cancer is the friends we made along the way
The reality is that even if there was a magic bullet for cancer, all cancer, it would only extend lives a few years.
That’s not how evolution works though
i love this idea let’s become mice
they are widely known to be the smartest creatures on earth, followed by dolphins, and then us
Mice, notorious for having evolved to suit unclean conditions and being able to survive as carriers of disease and parasites will definitely have a different set of evolved resistances and immunities to us. It’s pretty ludacris science believes them to be a good point of comparison.
Humans only discovered hygiene somewhere in the last couple of thousand of years. Evolutionary pressure for large animals works on time lines of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Before we got cleaner (and also after that) we also lived in unclean conditions, often are still covered in fleas and lice and we are still one of the greatest spreaders of disease. Humans and mice are extremely similar in many ways, just because we have a large brain doesn’t mean we are somehow no longer the animals we always were. We share much of our evolution with mice, our cells are extremely similar and we share 92% of our DNA.
Mice are an excellent point of comparison to humans. And because they are small, live short lives and grow fast, they are excellent to serve as a basis for testing. However it’s also worth remembering the mice aren’t the starting point, nor are they the end point. It’s just one of the steps in between and many other species and techniques are used. In a lot of cases, mice aren’t used at all, but some other test is done.
It’s also like people seem to think that researchers are just doing random crap to mice and seeing what works. Like I said there is a lot of stuff that comes before and a lot of stuff that comes after. Tests with mice are often done to research something very specific, with a carefully considered method of testing and expected outcome. If someone thinks of something so hyper specific to humans, they would simply not do any trials on mice since that wouldn’t yield any results. These days we’ve also gotten extremely good at growing cells and complex clumps of cells at large scales for not much money. And these can be actual human cells with actual human DNA and biological processes. This has made animal testing far less necessary than it was in the past.
Sure at some point if something is very promising but there are doubts about some complex interaction that might be an issue, animal testing can be useful. But if the thing to test is something so specific to humans, an animal closer to humans would be used, for example pigs or some monkeys or apes. And if those doubts aren’t there it isn’t like animal testing is a required step, it is possible to go to human trials without it.
Of course this depends heavily on what it is you are trying to do. For drugs for example animal testing is often done, but often not to figure out if it works or not. But to figure out what sort of dose is needed for enough to be absorbed, but not so much the drug is wasted or the patient would experience a lot of side effects. It’s pretty easy to do a short trial on some pigs and have the first human trial get the dose right straight away. At this point it’s more of a regular way of doing things than something absolutely required. In a lot of places regulation will require some animal testing, especially for drugs, but these days with better lab tests and simulations it isn’t strictly required.
So it might be a fun shower thought, but it isn’t really how stuff works in real life.
You know lab mice aren’t just grabbed out of the sewers, right?
They’re cooking up human organoids just for that.
i was wondering what that smell was
Cancer isn’t one thing.
The whole concept of “curing cancer” is such a trope. Cancer is a condition, and it annoys the fuck out of me that people treat it as one disease like measles or the flu.
There are some unifying theories of cancer that do kinda make it into one thing: https://doi.org/10.3389/fcell.2015.00043
I.e. the Warburg effect, and damaged mitochondria being st the root of all cancers.
In your example the flu is not just one thing either, it’s a group of viruses that broadly have the same symptoms
(not mice), but Fancy Rats are extremely susceptible to tumors. It sucks. More rats I’ve owned have died of either cancer or respiratory illnesses than old age.
Bonus shot of my boy Finn:
He has a kind face.
You say that but he always wears a leather jacket and carries a flickknife with him when he goes outside!!
I mean, there are like dozens of different types of cancers, so we probably have missed some of them.
imo, there’s no single “cure” for cancer, because it’s not a single disease
There is debate on that. There is a mitochondrial model of cancer that unifies cancer into a single mechanic. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcell.2015.00043
This is different from the common somatic mutation theory which views cancer as a bad generic mutation of human DNA
Not sure why you’ve replied it to my comment which already states there are dozens of cancers and therefore dozens of cures for the dozens of cancers
Just like with antibiotics. When Penicilin was originally tested, they happened to test it on just the right animals. One kind of standard lab animals would have just died from that stuff.
Otoh, mice have never been healthier.
Nobody tell him what happens to the mice afterwards.
They go live on a farm to live out the rest of their happy mousey days.
As fertilizer.
The crazy thing is we actually do have things that work in humans but not in mice. Mice are omnivores and are very different in terms of optimal energy state. They tend to run in glucose more easily than on fat and their whole biology is built to be small and fast, with short life spans.
Checking how DNA repair works in an animal which lives for maybe 2 years is great for understanding DNA repair in short lived organisms, but we have tk repair damage for 50 times as long. It is just so much more complex and requires such different tools when you switch from maybe 2 years to maybe 80 years, it really isn’t sane to assume it will all carry over.
Now for an accute toxin, say tobacco, sure, some things work just fine. There is not a huge difference between humans and mice when subjected to cyanide or arsenic. Being crushed by a falling piano is going to kill both of us. But a chronic poison? That will take decades to kill? That is very different. We can shed cells in a different way to how they can. We have more mass to store things. We have more energy storage. We have bigger kidneys with more opportunities for filtering. We are different.
When we enter ketosis we have some fairly significant cancer responses. When we maintain fasting for 5+ days we have a fairly large bump in autophagy, a state where the body kills off and recycles damaged cells. This state can cause some types of cancer to be more obvious to our immune systems and allow the tumor to be attacked. In some cases otherwise inoperable tumors can be removed after shrinking them through fasting. This does not replicate in mice. So yes, some treatments (not cures because that doesn’t really apply) do work in humans and not in mice.
When we maintain fasting for 5+ days we have a fairly large bump in autophagy, a state where the body kills off and recycles damaged cells. This state can cause some types of cancer to be more obvious to our immune systems and allow the tumor to be attacked. In some cases otherwise inoperable tumors can be removed after shrinking them through fasting.
Cancer cells can’t metabolize fat, when your fasting and in ketosis your body is only supplying fat and the cancer has nothing to eat (mostly, there is some glucose produced as a baseline)
I.E. fasting slows down the cancer energy rate so that the immune system can start catching up.
This is why the press-pulse cancer protocol uses deep ketosis and fasting in addition to supreasing the bodies glucose production. I.e. never adding external sugar into the body at all during treatment.
The strongest risk factor of human cancer is age. Wild mice live 6-9 months.
Yep, and surviving longer increases cancer rates. Cancer used to be a death sentence, now it is far less so. Many cancers which were a short time from death at diagnosis are now routine to remove or fix. Others that were soon fatal have 5 year survival over 90%, and some are even higher.
We haven’t cured cancer just like we haven’t cured industrial accidents, but honestly, so few people are eaten by hungry machines and left disfigured that it is likely you know less than a handful. Not cured but reduced to a much more manageable level.
This is one of the reasons why animal testing is not worth the torture the animals go through
Cancer can’t be cured because it isn’t 1 thing. And animal testing regardless of the benefit humans may receive is morally wrong.
There are many types of cancer with very high remission rates after treatment.
And animal testing regardless of the benefit humans may receive is morally wrong.
You can say whatever you want, but just because you feel it really hard doesnt mean it will be convincing to other people.
In this particular case, I think animal testing is moral as fuck, because why in the fuck would I possibly value animal lives even close to that of a human or myself.
Why do you matter more than any other animal?
Your philosophy is antithetical to existence.
Being alive kills other things, nature is competition. From bacteria and viruses in your body constantly being killed, to animals in the food supply (even veggies and croplands have pest control), just living in a safe community relies on the killing of other life: removing dangerous animals from the community, keeping pests out of food stores, keeping the water clean (kills water based life)
The phone you are using is at the end of a very complicated supply chain that mines resources from the earth, which requires killing animals… Moving resources across the earth, which requires killing animals (fish hit by boats, animals run over by cars, birds hit by trucks, pest control in all the production and storage facilities), etc.
Because I care about me more than any other animal.
If someone tried to kill you, would you just let them or not?
Any sane answer says you value you more than someone else.
Its crazy you find this opinion applied to animals to be offensive.
Humans, particularly those in modern societies, live outside of natural order. We don’t contribute anything to it and just use it up. We slaughter millions of animals that we first rape to keep manufacturing them like their products. The animals were experiment in often never see the sky or feel the earth. You matter more than them?
Yeah, I’m the crazy one…
Yup, that sounds crazy AF.
Its a wonder you think you’ll convert anyone just by sounding batshit insane.
I’m human. You think I would think my own species matters less than a different one? No other species thinks differently, why would we feel any different, especially given our massively different capabilities thought wise?
I know I won’t change anyone’s mind.
What other species kills at the level humans do? The shear fact you mention our capabilities proves my point; we do horrible things when we have the capability to choose not to.
I know I won’t change anyone’s mind.
So why are you spouting off about it? To what end?
What other species kills at the level humans do? The shear fact you mention our capabilities proves my point; we do horrible things when we have the capability to choose not to.
This could apply for so many things, but not testing for medical purposes. Thats you being irrationally idealistic past the point of stupidity.
So what, we just test things in a dish and then hope it works in a complex organism? Because the other alternative is human testing.
We do like every other animal on the planet and die.
The funny thing about this very dumb take, is if the people who believed it followed through, the idea would eventually die out.
Or it worked too well on mice and stopped regular cells from dividing.
We know a bunch of ways to kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, we usually want to avoid killing the non-cancerous ones, which is considerably harder to do.
This is where oregano oil and apple cider vinegar technology comes from.
reminds me of trump’s suggestion of using bleach to treat people with covid
