Comment by Brian_K_White
8 hours ago
It's utterly unimportant. It's all research and all progress and all works towards our benefit eventually. The fact that an important discovery is still in the mouse stage and not yet in the human stage doesn't make it any less important or interesting, unless you are unutterably simple.
Put another way: the "in mice" doesn't matter because they are studying alzheimers, not mice. the mice are just the lab equipment of the moment. I don't care what kind of glassware or computers they use either.
It depends on what's being studied. There are mice studies on diet which obviously don't carry over to human beings since we don't have similar digestive systems. It may be true (arguable) that all research data is of some benefit, but don't expect people to be as excited about mouse research as human research.
How do they get the alzheimers mice? Article doesn't say. Usually in studies they take healthy mice and induce the condition artificially. That can be a confounding factor since the condition isn't induced in the specimens we care about (human beings). Is it even the same condition?
It doesn't matter how they give mice alzheimers, or any other condition. That's just part of controlling variables to test for one thing. It also doesn't matter that they were fed processed food rather than having to find things in the wild, unless the effect of diet was the specific thing they were examining.
It does not matter how they give Alzheimer's to a lab mouse providing they give Alzheimer's to a lab mouse – not a different disorder that happens to have the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
If this was a website for fundamental biology research I’d agree.
As it stands, the headline is misleading and clickbaity.
> the "in mice" doesn't matter
Of course it matters, because that has a direct bearing on how applicable it is to humans and how much time it’s likely to take to be of any benefit to humans, if it ever is. That’s the whole point being discussed.
Also see this comment to help understand why “in mice” is a huge qualifier in this case, because mice don’t naturally develop Alzheimer’s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50218606