[mlyle]

Sheesh.

Well, sure. But even beginning to prove anything like this would be an extraordinarily expensive trial itself: what are you going to do, repeat trials for 100 substances in mice to see if you get a better alignment with later human results across potential substances than you do with current practices?

So instead, we talk about it, consider imperfect arguments, and do experiments that are somewhat silly until we start to become convinced that we've likely spotted some of the causal factors. That's what convinces us to eventually do the work that will show it.