The sad fact is that we do not even understand mice very well. There is this old joke that can be paraphrased like this: if I were a mouse I could be cancer free and live forever, because it is so easy to cure these guys of diseases. As it turns out, however, this is not true. Within my field it was long gospel that caloric restriction (discovered some 100 years ago) can robustly extend mouse lifespan until studies in the last 20 years called this into question.
What the joke gets right is that we understand humans even less than mice. In fact, despite the controversies several interventions are relatively robust in mice when it comes to extending their life and health span (rapamycin, caloric restriction, growth hormone loss) while the evidence in humans is much weaker for these.
Delivering useful drugs, hopefully faster not slower than in the past, despite these issues will be an interesting challenge.
Thanks! From what you’re saying, empirically we know some more things about mice, but that doesn’t mean understand better the details of processes going in them much more than humans.
The sad fact is that we do not even understand mice very well. There is this old joke that can be paraphrased like this: if I were a mouse I could be cancer free and live forever, because it is so easy to cure these guys of diseases. As it turns out, however, this is not true. Within my field it was long gospel that caloric restriction (discovered some 100 years ago) can robustly extend mouse lifespan until studies in the last 20 years called this into question.
What the joke gets right is that we understand humans even less than mice. In fact, despite the controversies several interventions are relatively robust in mice when it comes to extending their life and health span (rapamycin, caloric restriction, growth hormone loss) while the evidence in humans is much weaker for these.
Delivering useful drugs, hopefully faster not slower than in the past, despite these issues will be an interesting challenge.
Thanks! From what you’re saying, empirically we know some more things about mice, but that doesn’t mean understand better the details of processes going in them much more than humans.