Just when you think you know everything there is to know about a model you run tests on, out comes some whippersnapper to upset the scientific apple cart. It makes you wonder how this could have gone on for so long, but as the article says, the researchers became “ingrained” to a certain way of doing research, which I think is also a problem with climate science. – Anthony
Tests in Mice Misled Researchers on 3 Diseases, Study Says
By GINA KOLATA, NYT
For decades, mice have been the species of choice in the study of human diseases. But now, researchers report stunning evidence that the mouse model has been totally misleading for at least three major killers — sepsis, burns and trauma. As a result, years and billions of dollars have been wasted following false leads, they say.
The study does not mean that mice are useless models for all human diseases. But, its authors said, it does raise troubling questions about diseases like the ones in the study that involve the immune system, including cancer and heart disease.
“Our article raises at least the possibility that a parallel situation may be present,” said Dr. H. Shaw Warren, a sepsis researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and a lead author of the new study.
The paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps explain why every one of nearly 150 drugs tested at huge expense in patients with sepsis has failed. The drug tests all were based on studies in mice. And mice, it turns out, have a disease that looks like sepsis in humans, but is very different from the human disease.
…
“They were so used to doing mouse studies that they thought that was how you validate things,” he said. “They are so ingrained in trying to cure mice that they forget we are trying to cure humans.”
“That started us thinking,” he continued. “Is it the same in the mouse or not?”
The group decided to look, expecting to find some similarities. But when the data were analyzed, there were none at all.
“We were kind of blown away,” Dr. Davis said.
Full story here
h/t to Indur Goklany
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
At least they admitted it. They didn’t concoct “adjustments” or torture the data to force the mice disease to fit after all.
While the types of data and methods differ, there is a parallel with some of the problems detailed at Climate Audit for Mannian studies lacking in statistical significance and/or reproducibility. Plenty of climate science auditors have said about the same as this researcher:
This was investigated in great deal by Edith Efron, “The Apocalyptics”, 1984, ISBN 0-671-41743-6.
Before that time Dr Bruce Ames devised a famous series of rodent tests whose results fuelled the theory that there would be a pandemic of cancers caused by man-made chemicals. Edith, the non-medico journalist, was right. There is no such epidemic. Bruce has done a 180 turn. See the 2005 article (and many more similar) http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/1514/ that includes:
“About 50 percent of chemicals, both natural and synthetic, that have been tested in standard, high-dose, animal cancer tests are rodent carcinogens. What explains the high percentage? In standard cancer tests, rodents are given a near-toxic dose of the test substance over their lifetime, the maximum tolerated dose (MTD), to maximise the chance of detecting any carcinogenicity. Evidence is accumulating that cell division caused by the high dose itself, rather than the chemical per se, contributes to cancer in these tests.
……………………………………..
“The Apocalyptics’ of 589 pages is a 30 year old prescription of what is now in progress with another topic, global warming. If you, as an interested person, seek ways to hasten the use of proper science with global warming, methods that proved fruitful are to be found in this book. It plays out the end game, first in the book, then in real life and particularly exposes administrators, politicians, poor-quality scientists and spin doctors and being hugely destructive.
…………………………………….
It was written by a skeptic, unfunded by big anything, and is unusual because the many hundreds of references specifically exclude those by industry, especially tobacco.
The references are verbatim and sourced. Those who are hung out to dry meet their fates from their own words.
Keep your old files safe & secure. The accused tend to deny.
I think I sense a corollary to GCM studies and studies of the actual climate. The GCM proponents are just as blind to the difference between their computer models and the real climate.
Opposition driven by grant money for years. Can’t get scientific journals to publish.That sounds a bit familiar.
On the positive side, now there are many promising drugs available to treat mouse sepsis.
From ‘The Apocalyptics’:
“The ‘environmentalists’ and ecologists, whose base was the EPA, demanded control of industry in the name of nature’s innocence, while experts in chemical carcinogenesis and occupational toxicologists, whose base was OSHA, demanded control of industry on the grounds of ‘man’s’ guilt; and ‘public interest’ groups emerged to do battle for both factions.”
” The press was taken in; the public was ignorant; epidemiologists, who knew better, hesitated to publicly attack other scientists…”
Ring any bells for anyone?
From the article;
“As a result, years and billions of dollars have been wasted following false leads, they say.”
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you………
Many years ago a large multinational computer company (really large, before the current computer companies, their name is abbreviated to three letters starting with “I”) spent lots of money trying to make computer circuits with Josephson junctions (potentially much faster than silicon transistors). After many years (and dollars) somebody finally noticed that these junctions (at that time) did not ALWAYS make a nice clean switch from the OFF to the ON state (metastability).
That does not matter too much UNLESS you plan on using hundreds of thousands of them. Just think of a digital computer with lots of ZERO’S and ONE’S and a few percent “I’M NOT SURE” bits running around.
Nobody makes a Josephson junction computer to this day. Just another dry hole drilled, explored and plugged as a dead end technology.
Cheers, Kevin.
The problem with cancer studies in mice is that usually the mice get inoculated with some cancer cell line that has been propagated in the lab for a long time, and therefore has changed quite a bit from the actual cancer of origin.
The problem of inadequate mouse models also applies to Alzheimer’s disease. This is due to the confusion caused by someone who thought it was a good idea to extend the originally narrowly defined term – it applied only to presenile dementia, a rare condition of dementia that becomes manifest in middle age and progresses to death in a few years – to garden variety senile dementia. The mouse model resembles the rare presenile condition, but it has little similarity to the much more common senile dementia. Of course, the smell of the latter is what attracted the vultures, err, pharmaceutical companies, and failure was/is predictable.
The next big disappointment will be the mouse models of aging. The problem here is that mice simply haven’t been optimized by evolution for longevity. Why? Because there are too many cats around – the chance of a mouse to actually benefit from a longevity gene is so small that in practice such a gene confers no selective advantage. In contrast, humans are a dominant species with few enemies, and they can turn their longevity genes to account; therefore, they have already been optimized for this trait quite thoroughly.
Improving the life expectancy of a mouse in the lab may be fascinating, but it is about as relevant to humans as optimizing the aerodynamics of a Ford Model T would be to improving the fuel efficiency of modern cars.
All of this is not rocket science, as they say. But then, the myopia of practicing scientists, not only in climate science, can really be quite astounding.
Nice find, my friend.
w.
The lessons for all of us are more or less clear. The two most striking are keep the objective clearly in mind and clearly defined; always, always, always, question what and why never taking anything as a given.
KevinK,
I remember Josephson junctions. Wondered whatever happened to them. Now I know.
Remember bubble memories? Same thing. They could hold their memory without power for many years. Perfect for use by a Voyager satellite. Problem was, a few of the bubbles would get lost. So they couldn’t be used.
A jeweler friend of mine ended up with a boule of the bubble material. It’s called “GGG” [gandolinium-something-garnet]. It makes a really beautiful golden yellow gemstone. Sparkles like a canary diamong, and much more rare than diamonds since it is no longer made. He could sell them as a very rare garnet. But he’s honest, and feels he must tell customers exactly what it is. Most of them lose interest at that point [I don’t know why, I bought one for my wife and she loves it].
Pardon me for saying it once again, but there are no CAGW climate scientists with empirical instincts. The lack of parallel development is powerful evidence. They spent many king’s fortunes on supercomputers and poorly done paleo studies but spent only a pittance on empirical research. They are wedded to their tools come hell or high water. They should shift most of their funding to Willis.
in the late 60’s several brands of diet soda had cyclamates as a sweetener. I could barely tell the difference between diet and regular soda – and no after taste! Then came the big report – “Cyclamates Cause Cancer!” Reading about the report I thought, Of course if you inject an ounce of any chemical into a mouse it will get cancer. Even water! They quickly switched over to a new sweetener, and seems like they try another new one every few years. After that I have never tasted a diet soda that did not leave an after taste. About ten years ago I did read that they had proven those early studies wrong, but no one is going to try cyclamates a second time.
In the last 10-15 years, every time I have heard/read the line, “In a study in mice, researchers have found . . . . “, I have yelled, “So what! I’m not a mouse!”. Seemed kind of obvious to me.
And NIH recently announced it was getting rid of many of its primates claiming they don’t need them for drug testing as you can proceed directly from mice models to humans in testing – of course this was partly under pressure from the animal rights lobby. Wonder if NIH will have second thoughts about that; given its bureaucracy, probably not until some kids are killed with a drug tested only in mice.
…..it is not ‘ rocket science’ it is “rocket surgery” ];{)
Alfred
Good catch, Indur! No surprise that Nature and Science both rejected the paper.
KevinK says: “Many years ago a large multinational computer company (really large, before the current computer companies, their name is abbreviated to three letters starting with “I”)…”
International Pondering Products?
Years ago, early 90’s, when citrus solvents were all the rage, I guess they still are to some extent, there was all of a sudden a report that they caused cancer in rats. One of those real life experiments where they apply it to the animals skin just about continuously to see what would happen. You can expect that the animal can eat oranges all the time but how would the rat get hold of a concentrated version of the peel extract and get it on its skin is harder to believe. Fair enough they have to start somewhere to see what it could do to human skin if overexposed.
Yet another facility found that it was apparently helpful in limiting human breast cancer.
So rats are not necessarily much help either.
We are starting to run out of suitable test animals soon.
D. B. Stealy wrote;
“Remember bubble memories?”
Yes I do, There was a semiconductor company down in Texas that had a “fire sale” on their remaining stock back in the early 1980’s. I think they were trying to recoup their loses by selling them to the “dupes”, sorry, I meant “creative engineers”. I almost bought some.
Cheers, Kevin.
Didn’t the EPA have an answer for that?
Jason says:
February 11, 2013 at 7:04 pm
“On the positive side, now there are many promising drugs available to treat mouse sepsis.”
Cool! Obamacare promises to make humans just like mice.
GCM equivalent of a medical research mouse
http://tinyurl.com/cjhg9wz
Testing human drugs in mice is like testing the Earth’s so-called “greenhouse” effect in a cardboard box. 🙂
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/06/the-r-w-wood-experiment/#more-78966
(Anecdote)
About 1982 in Los Angeles I attended an American Mathematical Society dinner. The speaker was a pharma statistician discussing lab rat and mice studies for carcinogenic potential of chemicals. The focus of the speaker’s talk was all about how you overdose a couple dozen rodents for their short lifetime and see if and how quickly they develop a cancer. If they do, then there was a model that projected back to “acceptable” exposure for millions of humans over decades. These rodent dose data were extrapolated back toward zero by several orders of magnitude.
The funny thing he didn’t spend any time on control. So in the Q&A, I asked, “What is the chance that a rat in your control group develops cancer?”
The speaker didn’t directly address it. “Well that depends upon the species of rat used in the study. ….” We never got to the reason why different rats were used an the implications of that fact. But as to the control rate, I wasn’t going to be deflected.
“Ok. Take for example one of the species used most often. Do 1 in 10 of the control get cancer? 1 in 50?”
“One in three.”
I remember a collective gasp coming from the audience seated around the room. A 40-ish man on the other side of my table shook his head and muttered sotto voce, “You can’t do anything with that kind of data.”