(not mice), but Fancy Rats are extremely susceptible to tumors. It sucks. Most rats I’ve owned have died of either cancer or respiratory illnesses than old age.
Bonus shot of my boy Finn:
Maybe there was a cure for human cancer, but it didn't work at all in mice.
Submitted 6 days ago by tinfox@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
AreaKode@lemmy.world 5 days ago
happysplinter@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I love him
RedRibbonArmy@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
He has a kind face.
D_C@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
You say that but he always wears a leather jacket and carries a flickknife with him when he goes outside!!
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Like he works in French restaurant.
Triumph@fedia.io 5 days ago
Cancer isn’t one thing.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
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.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
Credibly_Human@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I mean, there are like dozens of different types of cancers, so we probably have missed some of them.
Lightfire228@pawb.social 5 days ago
imo, there’s no single “cure” for cancer, because it’s not a single disease
Credibly_Human@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Not sure why you’ve replies it to my comment which already states there are dozens of cancers and therefore dozens of cures for the dozens of cancers
Psionicsickness@reddthat.com 5 days ago
Or it was too cheap to duplicate so there was no profit in it…
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Cheap to duplicate is great for them. That means larger profit margins.
aarch0x40@lemmy.world 5 days ago
There’s more profit in causing and treating cancer than curing it. Can’t weaken those revenue streams just so some poor people can go on living. If they were worth saving then they wouldn’t have been born better.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Dead people make short term profit. Alive people make long term profit.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Even when we find a single drug that effortlessly cures every type of cancer and costs $1 to peoduce it will be patented by some giant company and sold to highest bidders.
slazer2au@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Or it worked too well on mice and stopped regular cells from dividing.
DomeGuy@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
expatriado@lemmy.world 5 days ago
reminds me of trump’s suggestion of using bleach to treat people with covid
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Now now, you can’t be picky! And really with the outcome being the same, there’s no reason to bicker.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
This is one of the reasons why animal testing is not worth the torture the animals go through
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
I don’t think that follows logically…
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
The fact that we are not the animals they test on so they can never guarantee it’ll react to humans the same way it does to the animals? That doesn’t follow logically?
SanndyTheManndy@lemmy.kya.moe 5 days ago
They’re cooking up human organoids just for that.
toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world 4 days ago
i was wondering what that smell was
rowinxavier@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
The strongest risk factor of human cancer is age. Wild mice live 6-9 months.
rowinxavier@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Also who is out there making sure all of these incredible discoveries are accessible to mice more broadly, outside the labs?
This IS happening, right?
aarch0x40@lemmy.world 5 days ago
There are preventative measures but they’re all based on the rich not poisoning everyone for profit.
the_q@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Cancer can’t be cured because it isn’t 1 thing. And animal testing regardless of the benefit humans may receive is morally wrong.
Credibly_Human@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
the_q@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Why do you matter more than any other animal?
phdepressed@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
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.
the_q@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
We do like every other animal on the planet and die.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
There are many types of cancer with very high remission rates after treatment.
the_q@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Treatment isn’t a cure.
ILoveDurians@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
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.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Otoh, mice have never been healthier.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Nobody tell him what happens to the mice afterwards.
if_only@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
They go live on a farm to live out the rest of their happy mousey days.
As fertilizer.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 5 days ago
In the long run, using mice for medical testing will result in selection pressure for humans whose physiology more and more closely resembles that of mice.
ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
they use a lot of other things… including living human cancer cells in a petri dish
Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Se we will become cancer
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
I believe the vast majority of cultivated human cells are cancerous cells anyway.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
halvar@lemy.lol 5 days ago
i love this idea let’s become mice
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
they are widely known to be the smartest creatures on earth, followed by dolphins, and then us
Wilco@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
No, we will become monke
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Mice, notorious for living in unclean conditions and being carriers of fleas and disease 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.
Toz@fedia.io 5 days ago
You know lab mice aren't just grabbed out of the sewers, right?
Thorry@feddit.org 5 days ago
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.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s just an early testing phase, more of an “ok, this drug kind of did what we want in mice, and the mice didn’t explode. It’s time to move to the next stage of testing on something more human analogue, like a pig.”
Technotica@lemmy.world 4 days ago
No! We will be crab! Everything becomes crab!
OldChicoAle@lemmy.world 5 days ago
That’s not how evolution works though
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Assuming that
human phenotypic traits that correlate more closely with mouse traits have more-predictable outcomes with mouse-tested medicine, and
more-predictable medical outcomes correlate with higher survival and reproductive rates,
can’t you plug that straight into the Price equation?
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Mice live 9 months in the wild, and have a resting heart rate of 500-700 bpm.