In this week's Covering Health blog from the Association of Health Care Journalists (of which I'm a member), Judith Graham, the group's "topic leader on aging," makes a point about animal research in a post about "best practices when writing about research."
She reviews coverage of a study in August that found that restricting calories in rhesus monkeys did not increase their longevity, an unexpected result. She praises a news story on the research by Sharon Begley at Reuters, and then writes this: "That's how it goes, folks. Research findings in other members of the animal kingdom (and insects and worms) do not tell you anything about what will happen in people, necessarily."
I take issue with that. Research in animals gives us an enormous amount of information about what happens in human beings. [As an aside, I think insects and worms are animals.]
Graham is correct when she says, a little further down, that health reporters can "fall into the trap of heralding 'breakthrough' studies in mice, rodents, or other critters." But then she seems to suggest that such studies should not be covered at all. "If you write about such matters–and I suggest you ask yourself why you would–always, always tell your readers that findings from animal (and insect) research do not automatically translate to humans."
Of course such findings don't automatically translate to humans, and many stories incorrectly fail to highlight that important qualification. But should we not cover the stories at all? Should reporters have ignored the story on rhesus monkeys and longevity because it was done in monkeys? Should they have ignored all the other positive studies in mice and rats?
Or to put it another way: Should reporters wait to write stories until researchers enlist human subjects for a decades-long experiment in which their diets are severely restricted?
Without the animal research, we would not know anything about calorie restriction. We might find we were getting all of our "information" about diet and longevity from vitamin shops or health-food stores. Would anyone prefer that?
In a 2007 commentary in Nature, two European scientists wrote that "the mouse is widely considered the model organism of choice for studying the diseases of humans," and that new research makes mice even more useful "for translating the information stored in the human genome into increasingly accurate models of human disease."
They write that the "ultimate model for human maladies will always be man himself," but that increasingly sophisticated analysis of gene pathways in mice is "a crucial step in understanding the underlying susceptibilities to disease in human populations," and for identifying potential targets of new drugs.
Graham wants us to ask ourselves why we would write about such matters. The answer is that exciting new findings in biomedical research almost always appear in animals years or decades before they are confirmed in humans. Reporters should–with care and with appropriate qualification, as Graham observes–write about these stories because they are news, and because they so often have important implications for our sapient readers.
-Paul Raeburn
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