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Asked by mnottag to Chris, Kay, Kerstin, Lorna, Liv on 17 Mar 2010 in Categories: Test methods.
Question: @ those who deal with animal experiments. Has anything gone drastically wrong / mutated? Seriously though, how does experimenting on animals like mice and worms help anybody?
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Kerstin Zechner answered on 17 Mar 2010:
Nothing has really seriously gone wrong. Sometimes when I inject my worms with water containing DNA, the injector messes up and the worm accidentally explodes, because it gets filled with water.
Cellular processes are similar, if not the same, in worms, mice and humans. It’s much easier to do this research on animals as they are easily available, especially worms.
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Kay Penicud answered on 18 Mar 2010:
Mice bite, thats not always so fun….
It helps people a huge amount. Before any new medicine can be approved by the government and given to people it first has to be tested on animals, so they can work out how much to give to be useful but not too much to damage you!
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Olivia Hibbitt answered on 19 Mar 2010:
Hey mnottag,
No, no disasters. This is because before I can even THINK about doing anything to a mouse I need to prove that it has a 99% chance of working in an animal! Also, I really like my mice, I don’t want to do anything to them that might hurt them!
Why we do it….well I have a great example from my work….originally I was using a virus to deliver my gene, this worked PERFECTLY in cells and we thought it was going to be great, all evidence pointed towards it being excellent. As soon as we tried it in animals absolutely nothing happened! This could not have been predicted from my cell experiments! So I had to go back and start again with something new….it’s now working really well and curing mice with the disease I study! -
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