In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer’s disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn’t even clickbait.
In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer’s disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn’t even clickbait.
In a mouse model. The mice don’t have alzheimers they have… something we gave them that looks like it… Hopefully it is similar enough
We… we gave… Alzheimer’s to mice…?
Are we the baddies?
We did something to the mice then rescued it in a different way. Hooray! Next we’ll save test tubes from cancer…again.
I feel like if the average person had any remote idea just how gloriously, horrifyingly complicated the human body is, we would be simultaneously far more skeptical of press releases, and far, far more invested in the actual science going on to figure out how to keep the whole cathedral from collapsing.
If you can’t get excited by incremental advancements, you should probably unsubscribe from science as a topic.
There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.
I agree the field is full of subpar sensationalist coverage. I didn’t find this case so terrible as such things go. People in the thread were all freaking out about how “It’s not really Alzheimer’s, it’s something like Alzheimer’s which we did to the mice! Nothing to see here!”
Which is an overreaction. On the one hand it should be obvious up front that mice cannot have actual human Alzheimer’s because they are fucking mice. So setting those semantics aside, something happened here, and people seemed disappointed that it wasn’t everything.
So I think both of our points are valid here. Yes, coverage of science is terrible, but anyone who wants to follow science should be prepared for some very incremental advancements.
Dude it’s worse than that. I was a working neuroscientist for almost twenty years. So…jaded.
Do tell
This is why almost everyone does development, not research.
There has been a fucking epidemic of MD/scientists running to the media with miracle cures lately.
Mice do not get Alzheimers, they were engineered to show one aspect of the disease that has been promoted by fraudulent studies. As for the reversal, mouse brains are highly plastic and similar to a human baby, nothing like a >60 year old.
HAH HEY EVERYONE THIS GUY THINKS MICE HAVE BRAINS MADE OF PLASTIC /s
Well I hear we are adding more plastic to the brain through micro dosing micro plastics in our every day lives. Wait…
Yeah, I didn’t read the whole thing but apparently only in 5xFAD mice. I wish they would have also tried it in a Tau model like PS19.
Both pointless. Mice do not get neuronal loss like human disease. These diseases have been stalled for 30 years on animal models generating “high impact” manuscripts that go nowhere.
Meanwhile, in human research, just taking vaccines can lower AD incidence by 30%. For real, proven. Not “soon”, not “within 5 years” . That is far mor relevant than animal model studies.
If you’re talking about the infectious brain hypothesis, I agree. I’m submitting a manuscript on this topic right now. I wouldn’t say that all mouse studies are pointless though. People just tend to design and/or interpret them poorly due to ignoring limitations. Mouse and human physiology are in fact more dissimilar than the majority of researchers seem to acknowledge.