The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy
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The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men Gang aft agley.
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The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'menGang aft agley.
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The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cats' teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice
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I have a cat named Trash. In the current political climate it would seem that if I were trying to sell him (at least to a Computer Scientist), I would not stress that he is gentle to humans and is self-sufficient, living mostly on field mice. Rather, I would argue that he is object-oriented.
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Animal model systems in cancer research have been a total failure…not a single essential drug for the treatment of human cancer was first picked up by an animal model system. All of the drugs in wide current clinical use were only put into animal model systems after finding clinical clues to their therapeutic possibility. The money was spent…for two main reasons. First, it was a highly profitable undertaking for certain medical schools and research institutions that were incapable of doing any genuine cancer research. Second, it was sustained by a superstitious belief in a grossly unscientific notion: mice are miniature men…in sum, from the standpoint of current scientific theory of cancer, the whole mystique of the animal model systems is hardly more than superstitious nonsense…the moral is that animal model systems not only kill animals, they also kill humans. There is no good factual evidence to show the use of animals in cancer research has led to the prevention or cure of a single human cancer.
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Change is needed. Thirty years of experience with subcutaneous xenografts, human tumors implanted under the skin of the mouse, have satisfied few because so many drugs that cure cancer in these mice fail to help humans. A 2004 analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that only 3.8% of patients in phase I cancer drug trials between 1991 and 2002 achieved an objective clinical response — and the response rate is declining. Almost all drugs tried in humans work against subcutaneous xenografts in mice. “How many more negative data do you want? It’s very depressing.”
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Crazy? Once I was crazy. They locked me in a room to die. Die? I don't want to die. All the mice will get me. Mice? I hate mice. They drive me crazy. Crazy? Once I was crazy. They locked....
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It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my ''poems'' are competing.
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Since its inception 25 years ago, EPA [the US Environmental Protection Agency] has applied the same logic to hundreds of other substances, extrapolating from high levels in animal studies to arrive at acceptable levels for humans. But that approach, say scientists both inside and outside the federal government, may no longer be the best way to safeguard public health...EPA's new emphasis on molecular data is based on a growing body of evidence that extrapolations from megadoses can provide a misleading picture of the effects of low-level exposure. Chloroform is a good example. EPA's current strict standards were derived from a study in which mice developed liver tumors after exposure to massive daily doses of chloroform pumped into their stomachs over several months. However, those findings may not be relevant to human exposures, according to a paper picked by the Society of Toxicology as the best published last year in its journal.
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The lifetime feeding study of mice and rats appears to have less than a 50% probability of finding known human carcinogens. On the basis of probability theory, we would have been better off to toss a coin...The `definitive bioassay for carcinogenesis' as now designed has never been subjected to proper validation as an assay for human carcinogens. At attempt made in this paper to examine the literature suggests that it may have an unacceptably high false negative rate and that it produces so many contradictory answers as to suggest a very poor specificity.
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It has been conventional practice to test potential carcinogens using highly inbred strains of rodents. The rationale was the supposed superior reproducibility of results compared with those obtained from wild-type animals. However, that assumption can be questioned. At least three examples of genetic drift of inbred strains can be cited... Lifetime expectation [in an inbred strain of mice] of developing one or another form of neoplasm ['spontaneous tumour'] had risen from 10 to 80 percent.
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The use of inbred strains as test animals can be further questioned on the basis that they often develop spontaneous tumors in organs where cancers are not frequent in humans. For example, incidences of mouse liver tumors in 2-yearold B6C3F1 mice has ranged from 17.8 to 46.9 percent. In contrast, the death rate from liver cancer in the United States is about 0.005 percent.
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'For 35 years U.S. scientists labouring in the National Cancer Institute's screening programme have injected more than 400,000 chemicals into leukemic mice, hoping to find chemotherapies that would help solve the riddles of cancer... We've been using the wrong system as the screening device.'
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Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife - birds, kangaroos, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes and dingoes - by the million in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billion and eats them. This in turn kills man by the million, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative - and fatal- health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year, sends out cards praying for 'Peace on Earth.'
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Even when there are common target sites for a given carcinogen, there are usually important differences, between man and animals, and between different species and strains of animals. These 'spontaneous' tumours in rats and mice... [vary] widely according to sex, strain, diet, conditions of maintenance, hormonal status, immunological status and latent virus infections.
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You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house
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Sharp as a sack full of wet mice.
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The standard carcinogenicity bioassay, which involves treating two rodent species for a minimum of 2 years, at a range of doses, is acknowledged to be an insensitive tool because of the background `noise' of spontaneous disease. Most strains of rat used in such studies have high incidence of pituitary and mammary tumours; some inbred rat strains frequently develop leukaemia or testicular tumours; mice strains show high incidence of malignant lymphomas and liver tumours.
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The drive to resist compulsion is more important in wild animals than sex, food, or water. He found that captive white-footed mice spent inordinate time and energy just resisting experimental manipulation. If the experimenters turned the lights up, the mouse spent his time turning them down. If the experimenter turned the lights down, the mouse turned them up. The drive for competence or to resist compulsion is a drive to avoid helplessness.
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The new system which is being employed at the Development Therapeutics Programme in Frederick, Maryland, uses an arsenal of automated devices and computers to test potential cancer-fighting drugs on real human cancer cells grown in laboratories rather than on mice. This enables scientists to test more than 300 chemicals a week. Many of these drugs had failed in the past when tested on mice.'
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We have learned well how to treat cancer in mice and rats but we still can’t cure people.
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These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as 'I see where I can make an annual cut of 3.47 in my meat budget.' But they have no slow, big ideas.
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We have cured mice of cancer for decades--and it simply didn't work in humans.
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[mouse models are] woefully inadequate…if you look at the millions and millions and millions of mice that have been cured, and you compare that to the relative success, or lack thereof, that we've achieved in the treatment of metastatic disease clinically, you realize that there just has to be something wrong with those models.
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From a comparison of the results of the present study with those of other studies, one can draw the following conclusions: compounds that cause hepatomas (liver cancers) in mice, may not always be carcinogenic in rats, or if carcinogenic in both species, the compounds may have different primary target sites. The extrapolation of such results to define any risk to humans remains a troublesome problem.'-
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The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades, and it simply didn’t work in humans.
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Only the most foolish of mice would hide in a cat's ear, but only the wisest of cats would think to look there.
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'The argument from man is so much more convincing than the argument from mice - which indeed, may be completely misleading, as in the case of urethane, which has some inhibitory action on human tumours, but a marked, though temporary one on chronic human leukemias.'
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…some findings in colon cancer mice, which were very good models, actually led to clinical trials in humans which resulted in an increase in cancer.
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