Nice Mice- Eleanor J

This week I read about the chapter Mishaps of Mice from the book Rigor Mortis. This chapter was especially interesting for me because I have always wondered about the accuracy of the use of animals for drug testing, and this was a great chapter for me to read. The chapter answered a lot of my questions, and even though we are only required to read 3 chapters, I think I might find myself reading more of this book.

The information I learned in this chapter was very new and interesting to me, and the most interesting thing to learn about was how drug testing might not be working for humans when tested on mice, because the mice are not being diversified enough to have more accurate drugs for humans. For example, I realized if you are only testing on the same white mice with similar characteristics and genes then how will it be good to use for humans that are not all the same? This was something I had never thought of before, and is good information to know for the future.

If I was a scientist from this chapter, when I learned this new info I would probably start to inform others. It is important for people to know of this, because not only should some people not want to support animal drug testing, but also other scientists would come to a better solution than to be making false drugs. “Imagine that I was testing a new drug to help prevent nausea in pregnancy, and I suggested to the FDA that I tested it purely on 35 year old white women all in one small town in Wisconsin with identical husbands, identical homes, identical diets which I formulate, and identical IQs. And incidentally they all have the same grandfather.” Garner states. “But that’s exactly how we do mouse work. And fundamentally that’s why I think we have this enormous failure rate.” Based on what I learned and read about on this chapter of Rigor Mortis, I think while experimenting I would diversify the animals you are testing and consider all variables. The drug you are trying to make is not only for a certain kind of person, it should be able to work for all types of people who are wanting to use the product.

Based on research I looked at online, many people are against this use of animal drug testing, and often when the drug doesn’t work, animals have already been killed in the process. This website talks about how drugs that work in mice, often will fail when tested on people.(http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/04/10/522775456/drugs-that-work-in-mice-often-fail-when-tried-in-people)