Why are mice being used to study rejuvenation technologies?
Mice are a really useful experimental organism for many areas of biology and especially for their work that I'm doing on combating aging. There are really three main reasons why they're so useful. First of all they've been used in biology for many, many decades and so we've developed a great many techniques for manipulating mice. Putting new genes into their bodies for example so that we can identify what happens to them and these techniques have been developed for reasons that have nothing to do with life extension but they work just as well for the sort of things that we need to do the experiments that we need to do. The second thing that's really good about mice is that they're not very expensive they're more expensive than fruit flies but they're not very expensive so we can do an experiment on a lot of mice at the same time and see what happens. The third reason of course is that they don't live very long so we're able to find out pretty quickly whether these mice are actually going to be living longer as a result of the therapy than if they didn't have the therapies. Now all these things are true to an even greater extent for fruit flies for example, fruit flies live a really short lifespan and they're even cheaper than mice and they've also been worked on in the laboratory for just as long as mice. But unfortunately they're bodies are built very differently from our bodies and so if something works in fruit flies that's only very weak evidence that it will really work in humans whereas if it works in mice that's much stronger evidence.
