People go on about this too much. Its the first step, it shows promise.

Does that mean it will neccesarily work? No, of course not. But its still exciting to see progress being made.

But it's not progress. Not really.

Mice are used only partly because they share a considerable amount of DNA with us. But they're mostly used because they're cheap. Both in financial and ethical costs.

They live for about two years, and breed in about three months. They are disposable. Over 100 million are killed each year in various labs across the country.

And for all of this, only about 5% of medicine that show positive animal results make it to market in some fashion. So basically, the best thing we can say about a mouse-tested drug is that "this most likely won't make things worse". But that's like a low bar.

	▲	whatshisface 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think there's some kind of fallacy where you can look at five drugs, all of which came from a pool of 100 promising candidates, then look at the next 100 candidates and say for each one individually that it is not worth celebrating. I call it the, "rounding to zero" fallacy. In reality, if you have 100 5% chances of a cure for a previously incurable illness, you can celebrate each chance a lot.