Chapter four of Rigor Mortis goes through the mistakes made in research when using animals, in particular, mice. I know that using mice for research is common but I don’t understand how it works. First of all mice are many many many times smaller than human beings and their reactions to drugs and substances are most likely going to be very very different than the reactions of human beings. ” Misleading animal studies have led to billions of dollars’ worth of wasted effort an dead ends in the search for drugs. Failures in animal studies have also had deadly consequences.” pg.71. So how would using mice help get answers? In the book it talks about how a drug could work extremely well on a mouse and then once it’s tried on a human it miserably fails. So while reading I did some extra research and found that the use of mice for research isn’t really helping humans at all, it’s actually harming human beings if anything and torturing mice for no reason. While reading this chapter I would have to say that the most interesting part of this chapter was that they scientists and researchers continue to use mice for research even though many many studies have failed on human beings after thriving on the mice.”Likewise, exciting results in animals often don’t apply to human disease” pg.73. It seems as though they would stop using the mice for research and try a new path of investigation and research using something else. It was much smarter when they decided to change the dosage they gave to the mice to the dosage they gave the humans. There is no way the dosage given to the mice could be equivalent to the dosage given to the human and still work. If I were to be one of the scientists with this I would never have continued to use the mice for the research after so many deaths and failures. I would not continue giving the same dosage of drug to the humans that I gave the mice. I wouldn’t give them a full dosage but I would start with more than what I gave the mice. I would allow it to test out and if there continued to be so many deaths and failures I wouldn’t continue testing on animals. I would do further research and see where it would take me. I found this chapter extremely interesting and it definitely had my thoughts in a knot.
-Lila H
StarPathDesign 
Lila, this post was really great! I liked the way that you went into specific detail on how scientists and laboratories are using mice for drug tests and the different dosages used. I also admired the way that you went above and beyond and did extra research focusing on this topic. I had no idea that drugs tested on animals like mice could possibly be lethal to humans.Great work!
I really liked how your post went into detail and how you went ahead and did some extra research. I did not know things like mice are tested on for no reason since the results will not match those of a human. I always thought that mice were similar to us so the drugs wouldn’t hurt them. I know that sounds dumb but now it is concerning. Drug companies need to stop doing useless tests on animals. -Ilianna N