Alternatives to the laboratory mouse
Editor’s note (November 29th 2023): On November 28th America’s Food and Drug Administration accepted a “Reasonable Expectation of Effectiveness" application by Loyal, a veterinary-medicine company, for its life-extending drug for large dogs. This is the first time the FDA has recognised the possibility that a drug intended for any species might have general lifespan-extending properties. It is entirely possible that at this point you, the reader, are thinking that a greatly enhanced lifespan would be there for the taking had you only had the good luck or foresight to have been born a laboratory mouse. So many things, after all, seem to extend their life’s lease.
If so, you should learn from the scepticism of Steven Austad of the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Laboratory mice are very little help, he thinks, in understanding ageing in animals that have not gone through decades of inbreeding and which live in environments that offer more danger than that inflicted in experiments. Lab mice, he feels, are not just a poor guide to the wider world of animal ageing; they are barely even mice any more.
They are, in a phrase coined by one of his colleagues, just “mouse-like objects". This scepticism may, in part, come from the fact that Dr Austad took an unusually long and circuitous route to the lab. His first degree was in English literature; as well as making an abortive attempt to write the great American novel he has enjoyed employment as a taxi driver, a newspaper reporter and an animal trainer.
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