A take on why lab mice are little use for investigating human illnesses:
Just think about what it would mean if a human experiment were comparable to a mouse experiment. We would be using a population of nothing but 42-year-old white males that live in identical ranch homes in some small town somewhere with identical diets, identical wives, identical children, identical furniture; they eat the same thing every day for every meal, the thermostat is locked, and the gardener is an extremely scary-looking Tyrannosaurus rex that pulls the roof off their house once a week and destroys their Facebook account and all of their social information.
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These are Stepford mice! It’s the only field of biology or psychology where we don’t recognise that variation is what makes us special, what makes us interesting – and what makes us ill.
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It’s little use manipulating animals, by genetic engineering or otherwise, so that they simulate the symptoms of conditions they don’t really have.
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