One thing I never understood is that if results in mice so often don’t carry over to humans, what about the opposite - treatments that might work for people but are discarded because they don’t work well with mice.
It reminds me of a scene from House MD; >People should not be testing drugs because they are desperate. But, people won't test drugs unless they are desperate. We need drugs to save children and puppies ergo we need desperate people ergo welfare kills sick children.
Maybe in the future AI will solve this problem, if we can learn to accurately model the human body. But given it's insane complexity that's certainly going to be a big challenge
It’s clear to me that modeling the human body would be complicated, but I don’t have any idea about the order of magnitude. Can someone chime in?
I bet this would require computational power equivalent to whatever is "processing" the govern of real-world interactions in our bodies.
So, to very accurately model the human body, you need a model that has as many parameters as there are molecules in a human body, give or take a few orders of magnitude.
I have no idea to what extent you could get away with more high-level models - i would expect they could work well for some kinds of problems, but not for very systemic interactions, like hormonal or aging-related issues, that affect each cell in the human body to some extent.
You'd probably start off instead by emulating specific proteins. That's already really hard, but obviously a trillion times easier than what you're suggesting.
Once you can emulate a number of proteins you can start to emulate interactions of drugs with those proteins. That's probably going to get you to a good enough heuristic where you can say "ok let's try this on something alive" or "this clearly doesn't work".
This is, to my knowledge, the existing approach being taken. It's just that a single protein is extremely complex. A single protein is a series of amino acids linked by peptides - each amino acid is itself a pairing of numerous atoms.
As you go from atom -> amino acid -> poly peptide -> protein you get a massive increase in complexity.
And the toe nails and similar things are why I was saying "give or take a few orders of magnitude". Not to mention, certain drugs could affect your toenail.
I think you could get to human trials using just a computer if you had a sufficiently sized set of emulated X's and Y's.
The body is much more complex than a collection of proteins.
Their "testers" happened to be people unjustly persecuted by their bosses, ranging from children to women and elderly.
Other groups of people have done plenty of unethical medical experiments since then - also typically against marginalized people.
Take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_M._Southam, for instance - thanks to his contributions to the study of cancer (consisting of injecting cancer cells into people without their consent). Thanks to his, uh, contributions to the field, he was later elected president of the American Association for Cancer Research.
[1] Which is utter nightmare fuel.
[2] Most of the members of which were given immunity from war crimes prosecution by the United States. Utterly mind-blowing. The ones that the communists were fortunate enough to get their hands on were subjected to a helping of Soviet justice.
If such a thing were legal, human test subjects would be the lowest classes, who would accept a pittance to support their family, or worse, who would sell their children for drug testing to score another hit. The vast majority of early drug trials cause extreme harm, so in essence any such contract would be a game of Russian roulette, except bullets to the head are a quick death. The extremely powerful incentive for companies would be to misrepresentat the risks and pay a pittance for the earliest trials, since these are the least likely to lead to profitable new medications.
Not to mention, if we were to replace mouse models with human subjects, the cost to develop new drugs would skyrocket, as even the least pittance afforded to some slave laborer in the this world would be more expensive than a mouse.
Secondly, we've removed the profit motive, so that people are not allowed to be coerced by money into trying out someone's drug, and drug companies are not incentivised to test their drugs exclusively on the poorest people - this helps prevent abuse.
Also, one benefit of mice is, morbidly, that you can immediately kill and autopsy them after treatment. I hope we can all agree that this would probably not be the right call for humans.
Simplicity can be elegant, but it can also be foolish. As a mechanism to combat wealth inequality the term foolish is probably even a bit euphemistic.
Personally I wouldn't advertise any patriotism here, it is very important not to take advantage of desperate people here as long as the experimental treatment cannot possibly help against their conditions. Otherwise you certainly would loose more than you would gain. I doubt there can be a general rule though, the right choice depends on the circumstances and the risk to the patient.