In very intelligent and intricate ways, scientists can be a bit dumb sometimes. 

 

Imagine a golden retriever as a stand-in for Brad Pitt. They’re both mammals, they’re both beautiful, and they both eat food. We can’t possibly see anything wrong with this situation. 

 

Not too far from this absurd example is how the scientific community has thought about animal testing. Sure, mice and humans are both mammals, and both are beautiful (to their mother) but inside and out, there are some pretty big differences. 

 

Did you know mice can’t spew? Apparently, their diaphragms are a bit wimpy and their stomachs are too bulbous. If we were mice, we’d be offended!

 

Anyhoo, that probably explains why vomiting didn’t crop up as a side effect during animal tests of drugs like Rolipram; a drug showing promising results in the fight against depression until human trials resulted in non-stop vomiting. Years of research and millions of dollars were literally flushed down the toilet because researchers ass-u-me’d that humans were the same as mice.

 

Another thing mice can’t do is have a stroke. They’re robust little critters, aren’t they, what with their plaque-free blood vessels? Unfortunately, this meant 114 potential stroke therapies initially tested on animals failed in human trials.

 

But that’s how it goes with science: 10% of the time you win, the other 90% you find nothing and keep scratching your head. 

 

This doesn’t explain, however, why scientific research is so goddamn sexist. Regardless of pronouns and gender identity, biologically speaking, males and females are different. Research from more recent years shows that even on a cellular and genetic level, biological sex matters. Let’s hear that again… “on a cellular and genetic level, biological sex matters”!

 

And yet, many studies that we still reference for medical interventions today don’t take this into consideration. 

 

Since 1923, if not earlier, scientists have excluded female animals in trials, even when studying effects on issues that only affect women. The argument was “fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable”.

 

But wait, what about the male mice who, when housed together, establish a dominance hierarchy boosting testosterone levels of the alphas to 5 times that of the betas? But that’s not hormonal, right? That’s just dudes being dudes. Clearly, science hasn’t removed itself from the patriarchy.

 

So if sexism runs rampant in animal testing labs too, what are we going to do about it?

 

Thankfully, major funders of scientific research including the US National Institutes of Health, which handles 80,000 grants a year, now have a requirement that the research they fund take into account sex as a biological variable (or at least have a very good reason why not). 

 

So, from genetically modified lab rats to simulations and AI, accompany us down the rabbit hole into some of the less well-publicised tales from the world of animals as proxy people, and join in a collective facepalm at the pervasiveness of sexism.

 

Previous episodes mentioned:

 

- Gain of Function Research and the Lab Leak Hypothesis! (& YouTube link)

- What Do We Do With The Immortal Quadrillionaires? 

 

SOURCES:

• The Atlantic - Medicine has a rate problem (It’s stranger than you think)
  

• Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics - The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation
  

• Nature - Males still dominate animal studies
  

• The Guardian - Use of male mice skews drug research against women, study finds (by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent @hannahdev)
  
  

• CNN - Lab rats are overwhelmingly male, and that’s a problem (by Katie Hunt)
  
  

• NPR - Drugs That Work In Mice Often Fail When Tried In People
  

• The Conversation - Of mice and men: why animal trial results don’t always translate to humans
  

• European Animal Research Association - Animal research saves lives. So why do opponents say it is ineffective?
  

• Vox - Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade. Have we learned anything?
• Nature - 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility

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