[synecdoche]

> let's not pretend it's valuable research

Why not? How can anyone determine that research is not valuable if it's not carried out? There may be ethics points of view, that people may have different opinions about, but how does that exclude the possibility of useful results? Can the degree of usefulness be determined by the degree (or the inverse degree) of ethics? If so, how? Arguments that use self-evidence as argument for their correctness are not useful.

[gumby]

The article discusses this: while there are some superficial similarities, the drivers ture out to be different, not similar, between human and murine populations.

To usefully do any such studies you’d need to develop a model supporting the thesis that there are useful and predictive parallels between the two species for the area you wanted to study. Which would involve other, different, murine and human studies.

I think it would be possible to get IRB approval for such studies after doing the enabling studies. But I’m not sure how to even design such enabling studies.

[Asooka]

People who breed pet mice exist and they probably have a lot more data from much longer time periods on this kind of thing. I also briefly talked with a person who maintains the herpetology exhibits at a museum. They breed rats to feed to the snakes and effectively avoid the overpopulation problem by just culling the population. The rats seem to be doing just fine in that arrangement. It does sound a bit sad, but effectively small rodents have evolved to be eaten.