They have shared our homes and our food for Millennia. No doubt the relationship first became close when humans took up farming and stored grain. Since then mice have colonized our warehouses and silos, invaded our basements and garages, and raided our kitchens. The house mouse’s scientific name, Mus musculus, says it all: Mus may be derived from a Sanskrit word meaning “thief.” But mice are cute too. So while we’ve been inventing all sorts of ways to exterminate them, they have been burrowing their way into our imagination and culture, from the “wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie” of Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse” to Stuart Little and, of course, Mickey.
We have another thing in common: Ninety-nine percent of human genes share a comparable version in the mouse, and many of them appear in the same order in our chromosomes. We also have similar reproductive and nervous systems. That’s why the mouse has served as the principal model for biomedical research for more than a century. Now, with the advent of increasingly sophisticated genetic engineering techniques and ever more powerful computer technology, mice have become stand-ins for humans upon which it seems every imaginable disease or condition is being studied, along with compounds to treat them. Hardly a week goes by without some new findings about heart disease, cancer, obesity, anxiety, or the life-prolonging benefits of red wine, all based on mouse models. The Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist James Lileks wrote: “I have come to suspect that mice are Nature’s Play-Doh; you can probably prove any thesis, given enough mice. They are resilient, up to a point, and unlikely to assemble class-action suits, so you can do all sorts of things to them.”
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