Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
Rats and mice are considered vermin when they live in their natural habitats and compete with humans for resources. Our urge to kill them gave us domesticated cats, and we are grateful for that. However, those vermin also help us test scientific ideas, including drugs and other medical breakthroughs.
The very traits that cause them to plague humanity are the traits that make them good experimental subjects.“They reproduce quickly, they are social, they are adaptable, and they are omnivores, so they’ll eat pretty much anything,” says Manuel Berdoy, a zoologist from Oxford University. Additionally, the rodents’ diminutive size allows relatively easy storage in labs, and their shared evolutionary roots with humans mean the species’ genomes overlap overwhelmingly.
As a result,…
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