The lab-born primate, developed by Chinese scientists, made history as the world’s first live-born “chimeric” monkey. And: he glowed! Green!

  • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “Mice don’t reproduce many aspects of human disease for their physiology being too different from ours,” senior study author Zhen Liu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CNN.

    But we test all our new stuff on them and write articles about Cancer cures without adding “in mice” to the title, and that gives people hope.

    Edit: I understand the importance of this research but the gleeful tone feels like it was cynically added by the author (or, I don’t know, an llm told to “humorify by 12%”) to differentiate from the original source and just feels gross.

    • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      New medicines are usually tested first in human tissue, then on mice, and finally on humans. To oversimplify a bit, the first checks if it will do the job, while the second checks if it could have side-effects in other organs. As to why monkeys are not used instead of mice, (1) they take longer to grow up, (2) they are more expensive to maintain, and (3) experimenting on monkeys is considered more of a bad thing than experimenting on mice.