There is a great video about these sorts of effects called Lullaby For A Mouse: http://vimeo.com/33803995
The basic gist is that most research done on mice (and other animals) is complete crap:
- Almost all laboratory mice are morbidly obese and get little to no exercise.
- They're all starved of social contact.
- The variations in the daily schedule of the researchers mess with their circadian systems.
- The results vary enormously based on how the researchers treat the animals. The title comes from the fact that one of the researchers started singing to his mice in order to get better results.
I worked in a laboratory with mice for about two years after college.
* None of our mice were morbidly or even slightly obese (I know because I had to cut them open).
* The mice lived in groups of up to 6 in a cage, which I don't know how it compares to their normal situation, but it's not "starved of social contact."
* I don't remember how we dealt with the mice's circadian rhythms, but I think that we had the lights on timers for this.
* Research is inherently subject to variation. There might be compelling reasons why results would vary based on how researchers treat their animals, but I think it would depend a lot on what kind of experiments were being performed. Stating that in a blanket fashion, I think, is misleading. Biological science is just plain hard, and many experiments fail, often with no clear explanation why. That someone could get frustrated enough to start singing to their animals is not an indication that mouse research is inherently flawed.
At the end of the day, a vast quantity of scientific knowledge is owed to mouse research. Denouncing it as "[mostly] complete crap" is just plain false.
The basic gist is that most research done on mice (and other animals) is complete crap:
- Almost all laboratory mice are morbidly obese and get little to no exercise.
- They're all starved of social contact.
- The variations in the daily schedule of the researchers mess with their circadian systems.
- The results vary enormously based on how the researchers treat the animals. The title comes from the fact that one of the researchers started singing to his mice in order to get better results.