"NIH Calls for Gender Equality in Lab Research"

Submitted by Minuteman on Fri, 2014-05-16 07:36

Link here. Excerpt:

'Scientists must do a better job of including female animals in their lab research, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) warned Wednesday.

In a commentary published in the journal Nature, the NIH said it is telling researchers they must include male and female animals, and female cell lines, to tease out gender differences in their experiments.

NIH officials added that sex balance of study designs will be weighed in the grant approval process, unless the subject of the research is gender-specific, the New York Times reported.
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Women now make up more than 50 percent of the subjects in clinical research funded by the NIH, but women are still underrepresented in clinical trials carried out by drug companies and medical device manufacturers, the Times reported.
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The new policies will be launched in October, but they are likely to face resistance from the scientific community because of fears about increased costs and more time-consuming methodologies, the newspaper reported.'

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Comments

Bizarre to say the least. OK, newsflash: female mice are to female humans what male mice are to male humans. I.e., scarcely a stand-in. Of all the animals subjected to medical and industrial experiments, mice by far the most frequently used. And guess just how much they have in common with humans?

Not much. OK, they are mammals, like us. They are omnivorous... check. What else? Two eyes, ears, one mouth. Hmm, what else? Hmmmm....

Vivisection itself yields loads of misleading data that help put many drugs onto the market only to be recalled once the general effects get gauged. In the past, drug-makers made arguments for using animals to experiment on because computational models and knowledge about the core causes of pharmo-toxicity were poorly-known. Now, while imperfect still, predicting what drug in development or in use is likely to have toxic effects on humans is much easier and without resorting to vivisection. Feeding drugs of this or that kind to animals is much less a reliable predictor than other methods today. (See Vivisection or Science? by Pietro Croce.) So why does it continue?

It's called MONEY! As always, Follow.The.Money. Running computational models can be done in a couple weeks, after the critical factors are identified. Animal studies on the other hand? MONTHS! Nay, YEARS! That's a lot of money coming in. You can fund your income for 5 years just experimenting on mice for just one part of a drug investigation. Of course, computational studies yielding more reliable results may only take a couple months. That's no fun. Besides, computers aren't your thing. Beakers, test tubes, and microscopes are. And, most of your grant money will end up going to computer programmers and not you, the research biologist. Again, no fun there.

So instead of getting drugs into and out of a test/safety evaluation process in a matter of less than a year, it takes 10 years. The FDA is fine with this, because, well, they're making a mint off it, too. And who does the FDA hire to oversee its rules-making and compliance? Former medical researchers and pharmaceutical company employees, of course, all of whom have a vested interest in keeping the conception-to-market timeline long rather than short. And still, medicines that do more harm than good somehow manage to make it to market -- and sometimes stay there, too.

Yes, magically, using female mice instead of male ones will yield better results for female humans when the drug given the female mice is given to the female humans. Not. For, female humans are no more female mice than are male humans male mice.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2014-05-17 19:31