The Mouse Trap

It's just the latest step in a trend that began more than a century ago. The splendid menagerie that once formed the basis for physiological study?the sheep, the raccoons, the pigeons, the frogs, the birds, the horses?has since the early 1900s been whittled down to a handful of key "model systems": Animals that are special for not being special, that happen to flourish under human care and whose genes we can manipulate most easily; the select and selected group that are supposed to stand in for all creation. Where scientists once tried to assemble knowledge from the splinters of nature, now they erect it from a few standardized parts: An assortment of mammals, some nematodes and fruit flies, E. coli bacteria and Saccharomyces yeast. Even this tiny toolkit of living things has in recent decades been shrunk down to a favored pair, the rat and mouse. The latter in particular has become a biological Swiss army knife?a handyman organism that can fix up data on cancer, diabetes, depression, post-traumatic stress, or any other disease, disorder, or inconvenience that could ever afflict a human being. The modern lab mouse is one of the most glorious products of industrial biomedicine. Yet this powerful tool might have reached the limit of its utility. What if it's taught us all it can?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=d70dbf5316d175c15e0db7d455fddb9b

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