Mentally Ill Mice?

       Unlike their less liked cousins who dwell in your basement, laboratory mice have long been the favorites of psychiatric researchers. In fact, an estimated twenty to thirty million of these unsung heroes donate their "lives" to science every year in America. The laboratory mice are either selectively bred or genetically modified to exhibit symptoms of human psychological illnesses such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. Developing drugs are tested on the supposedly mentally deranged mice to assess the drugs' efficacy and side effects. Millions of dollars and years of painstaking work are poured into this stage of the research before human trial can be carried out and the drug be approved by the FDA. The use of mice in psychiatric research has become conventional since the 1980s, with only one simple problem: mice and human have fundamentally different behavioral traits and psyche.

       If you have a pet hamster or have handled mice in labs, you probably know that small rodents like mice are extremely sensitive and fragile. An unfamiliar scent of the handler, a shake on their cage, and even a change in lighting would throw them into a spell of panic. Therefore, we cannot be sure if the mice's "erratic" behaviors that researchers identify as signs of mental illness are just natural signs of the animal being under stress. Even if we assumed that mice can actually manifest identifiable symptoms of psychotic diseases, who is to say with absolute confidence that they know exactly how to translate the mice's conditions and reactions into human equivalents?

       And mice do not just "act" differently from humans: the chemistry of their brains works differently as well. Even if a drug were perfected on mice, it might not have the intended results on humans. A few lucky strikes such as Ambien (that treats insomnia) are eventually found to have alternative uses in human, but many others end up having major side effects, and a lot more simply have to be discarded because they do not work on humans at all. Scientists are now exploring alternative research methods, one of which is to switch from mice to rats, small rodents that, to my surprise, are different from mice.

Questions for reflection:

Mice and human share about 99% of their genes. Mice eat little, reproduce very quickly, and are easy to keep in confined spaces. So far, no other species can replace mice in the research process with a significant improvement in its accuracy and efficiency. Instead of changing the animal we use in lab, we should put more resources and energy into researching the behavior traits and brain chemistry of mice.  By understanding more about mice and their similarities and differences with humans, we can hope to better the psychiatric research process. What are some bioethical questions psychiatric experiments on mice may raise? What does testing on mice mean to the human subjects in later parts of the researches? Are we being irresponsible by subjecting our human subjects to treatments we know might not work at all?  

Sources:

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/11-of-mice-and-men-and-medicines