I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts  of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
We use mice for experimentation because they are mammals (so similar to us), small (so easily kept in large numbers), and they breed fast (so you can have several generations in a small amount of time). They aren’t perfect. Perfect would be little tiny humans that are exactly like us. Except then you’d have some ethical problems with keeping humans in cages…no matter how tiny they are. 🙂 If you’re doing medical experiments, you use mice to try to make sure that the medicine or chemical isn’t completely toxic before you move on to clinical trials (in humans).
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Carina has done a great job of answering this question! We use mice because for all the reasons Carina mentioned, they make a great model, and also they are pretty cheap. Obviously it’s hard to do some experiements in mice! It’s hard to ask them questions about pain, or about their feelings, so some experiments just aren’t possible, but generally they are a good model!
The other great thing about mice is that we can use them to make what we call a “knock out” which is when we genetically modify them to have a gene missing, a bit like seedless watermelon. We are lucky enough to have the technology to cut out a single gene (which is the specific bit of DNA that determines a single trait, like hair color, or eye color, or height) too see what it does. We have learnt A LOT from these knockout models, and this is easiest in mouse!!
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Animal models such as mice are used to gain an understanding of how things work before looking at how they differ in humans.
To think of it another way, if you know that cells divide by looking at mice and seeing cells dividing in every organ/part of the mouse, you can be pretty sure that cells will divide in human tissues too.
So when I’ve got enough information to be able to warrant to look at such “precious” human tissue, then I can see whether my research question/hypothesis is also correct in the human setting
Hope that makes sense
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Hey imadinosaur, jackie, jbarton and datchihuahua22- thanks for the Q!
There are several reasons we use mice in our studies as the other scientists have outlined. If there is a better model that translates to human then we would try to use it in our experiments. Mice are a good model for many human diseases and conditions which can be tested. In addition many chemical and medicines can be trialled out on mice or guinea pigs before taking it the next stage of doing ‘clinical trials’ on humans!
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Mice are not little humans but they do have close to 90% of the same genes as us. I introduce gene mutations (accidental change in DNA) that have been shown to occur in autism and schizophrenia into mice. I look to see if these gene mutations in mice cause similar symptoms to what we see in the human diseases.
Mice have great memories and so do we. So they are a good model of memory impairments in schizophrenia. Mice are also very social so I can test to see if gene mutations affect whether a mouse wants to interact with another mouse in a cage.
We can test therapies on our mice to see if we can improve their memory and make them more social. Once we know they work, we can then move into clinical trials in humans.
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