Summary 11

Laursen L. Experimental design could reduce need for animal tests. Nature [Internet]. 2009 Mar 30 [cited 2009 Sept 29]; doi:10.1038/news.2009.209. Available from: http://www.nature.com.mutex.gmu.edu/news/2009/090330/full/news.2009.209.html

Hanno Wurbel at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany and his team of scientists have been looking into mouse behavior, and it’s effect on test results. They are trying to decrease the numbers of false positives in animal research testing. They believe that if scientists take certain genetic variations and environmental variations into account from the beginning and calculate that into the results, each study done will have more meaningful results. Wurbel believes that we have been trying to make mice into exact replicas of each other, not understanding that these are animals and will have specific responses to external stimuli regardless of how genetically similar they are. In all other types of studies, scientists have accepted natural variations as a necessary and normal part of experiments.
The next step will be to set up tests in multiple labs and attempt to fold in the variations found to be similar from lab to lab into the results. Some scientists argue that all of this is a waste of time. They say that any research done must be repeated many times over in order to be reliable anyway.