Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Another variety of hype was the cross-species leap. As we’ve seen previously, lots of preclinical medical research is done using non-human animals like rats and mice – a practice known as translational research, or animal modelling.18 The idea is that the basic principles of how, say, the brain or the gut or the heart work can be studied in the animal ‘model’ and then, with lots of work, the findings will eventually translate to humans, helping us design better treatments. Yet there are a lot of steps between making a discovery in mice (or in cells in a dish, or in computer simulations) and it being relevant to humans. There’s a whole cycle of development, validation and trials that must occur first, a painstaking process that can take decades.19 The vast majority of results from mice, somewhere around 90 per cent, don’t end up translating to human beings.20