Resources & Archives NOW They 'Get It': Some Better-Late-Than-Never Wisdom from Animal Experimenters 'Mice Are Not People' (Summer 2000) — In the April 15 issue of Health News, published by the New England Journal of Medicine, an article about the dangers of pesticides contains the singularly self-evident subhead, "Mice Are Not People." The article notes: "Much of what we believe about the adverse effect of environmental toxins ... comes from studies of mice and rats. To help control for genetic differences, rodents used in these [toxicity] studies are bred to be the same genetically. Humans, of course, are not genetically identical [italics added], and some of us may be more sensitive to the effects of certain chemicals, says David Ozonoff, PhD, chief of the environmental health department at Boston University." Rats Aren't People Either! An Associated Press wire service story about stroke studies reported on by top neurologists at the annual convention of the American Stroke Association contained the following statement by Robert McBurney of Cambridge Bioscience: "There have been many drug candidates that ... show spectacular effects in animals. They simply have not been translated into success in clinical [human] trials [italics added]." Reporter Daniel Q. Haney went on to note, "Rat strokes are not like human strokes. The rat is the classic test subject for developing brain-protecting drugs, and all the drugs work well in these animals. But people's brains are in many ways different from rats' [italics added]." Heading down the Wrong TRAIL A recent Reuters wire service story, reported in the Boston Globe, 5/2/00, is yet another example of the flawed science produced by relying on animal experimentation. The article, "Researchers find flaws in touted cancer drug" notes that "A compound that looked promising against cancer [in mice] could cause more harm than good [in humans] [italics added], and should not be tested on people unless the problem is cleared up, researchers say." The drug, known as TRAIL, worked very well on mice but it destroys human liver cells, according to Stephen Strom and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh. They said their study showed how dangerous it can be to assume that just because a drug works well on laboratory rats and mice, it can work for people too. TRAIL did not injure normal animal cells but, when Strom's team tested it against human liver cells in the laboratory, the researchers found the drug killed 60 percent of the human cells. Back to UPDATE 2000 Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 Summer mainpage.