The case for free-range lab mice

It's even worse than the un-life like conditions of allowed animal models leading to bad results.

With the increasing regulatory burden and outright outlawing of animal models in scientific research biological studies are moving to new far-abstracted models that are much cheaper, easier, higher N, and counterintuitively, way, way less predictive of the actual results in human bodies. Testing 1,000,000 compounds in single cell tests (or just chemical binding assays) in a micro-well array has less predictive power and useful outcome than testing 10 compounds in monkeys. At least when it comes to figuring out which things will work in human disease. The giant massively abstracted studies also generate false positives that waste time. But they do generate publications so they're selected for at the funding level.

That's part of the reason biological research was so much more productive per $ input last century.

If human experimentation was that more useful, wouldn’t a lot more scientific results be available from countries with more lax laws against it?

> That's part of the reason biological research was so much more productive per $ input last century.

Isn't part of it also just that the long hanging fruit has already been picked?

[dead]

If you're going to look for cures for diseases in humans, you should be using human genetic and cellular models. Since running experiments on human beings is frowned upon, what with control groups and the post-experimental 'sacrifice' of the test subjects for tissue analysis and so on, what to do?

Happily, modern technology allows for development of human stem cells into a variety of cell types - even lately into complex tissues consisting of multiple cell types (2021):

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.7985...

> "In this review, we will emphasize the transitions from immortalized cell lines to stem cells and describe their use in combination with gut-on-chip models. These “on-chip” models are defined as three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures arranged as multiple cell layers actively perfused by microfluidics for medium exchange to enable an improved tissue formation with increased lifespan. We will highlight selected applications of these gut-on-chip models to understand gastrointestinal diseases and forthcoming strategies to investigate human gut physiology."

This looks to be superior to animal testing on multiple grounds - first, animal models don't respond to drugs and don't develop identical disease states to humans, second it's needlessly cruel to animals, particularly when there are now better approaches utilizing technology that should be capable of producing muscle, lung, heart, even brain tissue models based on human stem cells.