I am a researcher studying diseases. You have no idea how many mice get killed without generating any data. There’s a rule in place whenever you want to work with animals that you need to plan ahead and only use as few animals as you need to get the data that you’re looking for. But things in research basically never happen according to plan. It could be due to a variety of factors: unexpected failures, overlooked factors, technical errors, or just simple negligence when performing an experiment. A lot of data and samples obtained from killed mice are discarded for one or more of the above reasons.
I get that mouse experiments are important to prove that our findings can translate to actual living animals, but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the “useful data per mouse” ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.
While you didn’t get the data you were looking for, at least in many of those cases you mentioned you did identify a flaw or failure and learned how to design an experiment that does.
I wouldn’t consider those mice as dieing without teaching you something. It might be a failed experiment, but you learned something.
Like when we were doing “oral” vaccinations with a oral gavage needle (ball tip) and going through the mouth and dosing in the stomach. We had a vial of 70% alcohol to clean the tip. Accidentally drew the alcohol up instead of the vaccine. By the time we finished the cage (6 mice, I think) the first one fell over.
I am a researcher studying diseases. You have no idea how many mice get killed without generating any data. There’s a rule in place whenever you want to work with animals that you need to plan ahead and only use as few animals as you need to get the data that you’re looking for. But things in research basically never happen according to plan. It could be due to a variety of factors: unexpected failures, overlooked factors, technical errors, or just simple negligence when performing an experiment. A lot of data and samples obtained from killed mice are discarded for one or more of the above reasons.
I get that mouse experiments are important to prove that our findings can translate to actual living animals, but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the “useful data per mouse” ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.
While you didn’t get the data you were looking for, at least in many of those cases you mentioned you did identify a flaw or failure and learned how to design an experiment that does.
I wouldn’t consider those mice as dieing without teaching you something. It might be a failed experiment, but you learned something.
I may be misreading them but it sounds like they’re describing avoidable problems.
Like when we were doing “oral” vaccinations with a oral gavage needle (ball tip) and going through the mouth and dosing in the stomach. We had a vial of 70% alcohol to clean the tip. Accidentally drew the alcohol up instead of the vaccine. By the time we finished the cage (6 mice, I think) the first one fell over.