Laboratory Mice
Mus musculus, also known as the house mouse, is the most common species used in scientific research. They are the subject of numerous experiments designed to glean insights, produce evidence, justify goals, and constitute worthy sacrifices in pursuit of the GREATER GOOD. This is similar to how estate elites view house humans.
Laboratory mice are considered a model species due to their anatomical, physiological, and genetic similarity to humans. There are species that more closely approximate human biology, but they are either too large, too expensive to keep, or it would be unethical to use them in research, if we are to consider that using any animal would be ethical under any circumstances. Regardless of our position, mice and rats are used in most cases, but do they adequately serve as a model species? That is a matter of debate, and our views will likely vary depending on the research, especially when it comes to safety.
It is probable that the more significant the product, the more significant our caution. For behavioural research, the insights on offer might be compelling, and we are likely to accept them as mindful or amusing. There are no specific products involved for the most part in such experiments. When consumer products are the focus, there may be some amount of caution present. Whatever is deemed safe enough to be sold to the public at their discretion or leisure will produce varied results. Each of us have our own unique combination of priorities, interests, biases, susceptibilities, risk-taking proclivities, personal limitations and strengths, and disposal income that inform our spending habits. We would prefer that we receive value that is commensurate with expenditure, but we accept that when we are purchasing something because we want it, anything can happen.
What if the stakes were significantly higher? What if we were running experiments to determine drug safety and efficacy? Our caution should be at the highest when it comes to medications that doctors are prescribing that may be used to treat or save the lives of our loved ones, especially children. We expect that only the most highly scrutinized research will be permitted to generate these allegedly safe and effective products that we give to our children. Are mice sufficient test subjects? Even if we believe them to be, what if there was something wrong with the mice that compromised the entire enterprise? What if this knowledge was publicly available to both doctors and pharmaceutical companies, but nothing was done about it? What if this hypothesis served as the impetus for winning a Nobel prize years after it was discovered, and still, no investigation or correction had occurred?
Bret Weinstein, PhD in evolutionary biology, author, and former professor of fourteen years, recants the story about how one hypothesis invertedly lead to identifying a problem with lab mice that called into question the validity of all drug safety testing:
“My awakening to the hazard of [the pharmaceutical industry]...came from something that happened to me during my graduate career.
When I was a young graduate student, I was working [as] an evolutionary biologist…[when] I became fascinated by the question of why…senescence happens. I ran into two quadrants of work. One surrounding cancer and the fact that in every cancer known, the enzyme telomerase is active. This is an enzyme that elongates a repetitive sequence at the ends of our chromosomes. At the same time, another group was working on the fact that that the erosion of our telomeres seems to cause our cells to stop reproducing, and that this was implicated in our growing decrepit with age.
I put these two things together with an evolutionary theory that already existed…called antagonistic pleiotropy…and I had a very elegant novel description of the mechanism of human aging and the reason selection tolerated it. But I ran into a problem…there was one glaring piece of evidence that did not fit my hypothesis, [and it] was that mice were known to have ultra long telomeres, but…had very short lives. Their telomeres were, in fact, ten times the length of human telomeres, which made no sense in light of my hypothesis of what the telomeres were doing, that the telomere erosion was effectively protecting us from cancers that would otherwise take us over.
I teamed up with Carol Grider…and she said that [she] thought they are ultra long, but there is something weird about the telomeres because if you order a different mouse, and you order them from Europe, then the length of the telomeres varies tremendously. She was interested enough that she started working with her graduate student and she tested my hypothesis that wild mice would not have long telomeres, and that in fact, it would be something about the breeding environment that we raised these mice in that had elongated their telomeres and confused us.
This has profound implications. The most significant of them is that these mice are presumably biased by their ultra long telomeres in a couple of different directions. One, they’re terrifically prone to tumors. In fact, one of the things Carol Grider told me in our initial phone conversation was that effectively all mice die of tumors if you give them a chance…The other thing is the reason that they would be prone to tumors according to my hypothesis was that [their] tissues have no break on their capacity for repair and so these animals are also terrifically resistant [to damage] according to this hypothesis. Any damage that doesn’t outright kill them is relatively easy for them to fix, so what that means is that they make terrible models for drug safety…If you give them a toxic drug that does not outright kill them, it may extend their lives because it functions as chemotherapy, slowing down their tumors.
I don’t think Pharma knew, if I didn’t say that already. Carol tested the hypothesis that wild mice have short telomeres and that, in fact, the long telomeres were an anomaly of the lab environment,…she and her graduate student Mike Hemann established [this]. At that point I knew that my larger hypothesis was likely right. Upon realizing that the mice that we get all come from a tiny number of sources in the U.S., it’s largely the Jax Lab in Bar Harbor, Maine, and that these mice have been distorted by their evolutionary environment, in this way that makes them terrifically prone to cancer and terrifically resistant to damage. If you use those mice in a drug safety test, what you will typically get is a clean bill of health. What that predicts is exactly what we saw in the Vioxx scandal.
…I think what may have happened is that Pharma did not know that it had mice biased in favor of its drugs, making them look safe upon discovering that we had this flaw in our drug safety system, and that, in fact, our scientific literature was polluted by this broken model. I expected there would be a scandal there, a rush to fix the problem, and that we would end up having to re-test many drugs [and that] many of them would turn out not to be safe, but that…a few years down the road we would have gotten back on track.
I tried to raise the alarm for a decade. I published my work, I attempted to call the attention of fellow scientists, doctors, journalists,...the bell wouldn’t ring. To this day I do not believe we have fixed this problem. What we done is obscure it, so the funny thing about this story and the strange punch line of it is I now see these mice re-emerge in the recent test [on COVID-19 vaccines], and that was the basis for declaring them safe for children. You know it’s odd, I find myself a whistleblower twice over in the same story, decades apart.
Watching my colleagues completely fail to take any action upon discovering that their model was broken in this very dangerous way alerted me to just how corrupt our system was. In other words, [the] careers [that] rested upon [these mice], [the] papers that would be invalidated by recognizing this hazard, [and] there were lots of knockout mice that had been built on the background of these distorted creatures. Presumably, that work would be a lot less valuable if one had to go back and re-knock out the same gene in the mouse that wasn’t distorted in this way. I don’t know if it was a conspiracy or what, but I do know that there was exactly none of the action that you would expect in light of the discovery of such a profound hazard.” (1)
The changes in lab mice that were generated by these environments might have been impossible to predict, but once it had been established and confirmed that the model species used in drug safety testing were broken, it is preposterous to continue. While taking an official position with respect to this issue would likely invite litigation to the detriment of big business and individual lives, it is the only ethical thing to do. It appears as though because it would compromise profits, careers, and the pride of the ambitious, those complicit in such a large-scale failure of due diligence are satisfied with continuing to endanger the lives of huge populations.
Public trust is earned and maintained by doing the right thing, and if some amount of trust is lost in any system due to errors such as these, then it can be earned back by correcting it as soon as possible. The fact that issues like this remain unaddressed in virtually every system is a testament to the contempt that many bureaucracies and corporations have for ordinary people. Our governments have already demonstrated they are willing to remove our ability to see our families, enter our workplaces, and attend our schools if we do not submit to taking specified treatments.
Have psychopaths have taken over our asylums?
See: DARK TRIAD
(1) DarkHorse Podcast, Bret Weinstein Speaks with Dr. Aseem Malhotra on the DarkHorse Podcast, released on Dec 31, 2022.
Posted: 15 Jan 2023
