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There are transgenic mice where they have spliced genes to cause disease, but to me this is not a probable way to learn how to cure Alzheimer's. The reason is, there are very limited choices in which mouse line to use. You basically have to pick from a menu of transgenic mice from some supplier. So you would have to be lucky enough that a supplier breeding transgenic mice just happens to have picked, with an educated lucky guess, a combination of genes that expresses a disease enough like Alzheimer's when spliced into a non-human host that something that has some effect on the mouse disease also has an effect on the human disease, compounded with being lucky enough to find a treatment for the mouse disease at all, compounded with the luck of picking that mouse line from the menu of dozens of mouse lines with human genes spliced in. So lets say a time traveler from the year 2321 hands you a vial with the cure for Alzheimer's in it, and you want to test if it works. So you open the mouse catalog, and you see a dozen transgenic mice choices. Lets say, by some cosmic coincidence, one of those mouse lines out of the dozen choices, again by luck since it's unlikely that out of a couple of spliced genes they would ever happen upon a mouse line that it would ever work, has the right gene that coincidentally the human cure will also work on that line of mice. By far the most likely outcome (11/12 times) is you order mice, they are acting like they have a brain disease, you inject them with the future cure and it doesn't help them at all. This is when you know for a fact you do have a cure for humans. This is why I'm saying these mouse studies are a waste of money and research effort. If you have a cure for Alzheimer's the mice are very unlikely to show improvement, and things that improve the behavior of the mice are incredibly unlikely to work in humans. So why do they do it? Well, there is a big pool of money available to study Alzheimer's and there are catalogs with mice in them, and you can inject mice with whatever random thing you want without a lot of 'having a reason it might work'. It's like the guy looking for his keys under a street light. When you ask him if that's where he lost his keys he says "No, I lost them way over there." Ok why not look where the keys might be? "It's too dark to see over there". In this case, it's "we don't know how to do an experiment that might be useful but there is funding and we can order mice". |