The mouse has played a key role in making many medical research advances possible. Mice age 30 times more rapidly than human beings. This short life span makes them ideal for studies on aging, for example.

 

Specially bred animals, such as the "nude" mouse, which has unusually low immunity, help us to understand tumors and treatments for cancer. The many strains of inbred mice with natural genetic deficiencies have resulted in a wide range of genetic models of human diseases. Researchers can obtain a strain of mouse with a disease affecting almost any organ system or tissue to mimic the human disease they would like to study.

 

Mice reproduce readily and plentifully. Because of this, researchers can use them to study genetics, as well as the abnormalities of fetal development associated with poor genetic background, or the ways in which addictive drugs taken by pregnant females affect offspring.

 

Contributions of mice to the knowledge of basic genetics and immunology have resulted in the development of organ transplantation.

 

Vaccines for many diseases, including whooping cough and yellow fever, were developed and tested in mice. Today, surgical techniques have improved so much that even heart transplantation is being studied in the mouse. These animals contribute to research on cancer, heart disease, deafness, epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, eye abnormalities, brain dysfunction, nerve disorders, blood clotting disorders, immune diseases, in vitro fertilization, Hodgkin's disease... the list is almost endless.

 

The "Nude" Mouse   The hairless mouse is uniquely valuable to cancer research. In 1962, when the first hairless mouse turned up among experimental animals at a laboratory in Scotland, no one knew what to make of it.   Then tests on its descendants led to a surprising discovery. Cells from certain human tumors, implanted in these mice, continued to grow. For the first time, scientists could study a human cancer cell in another animal, without risking a human life.   As it turned out, what makes the mouse a perfect host also makes it bald. It is born without a thymus gland, which would regulate its defenses against disease, and the same genetic accident that deprived it of the gland also destroyed its ability to grow hair. With a virtually limitless supply of these mice, researchers have been able to test an array of new drugs and treatments; and doctors are designing treatment plans by trying alternative therapies on a series of nude mice.