Air date: May 6, 2012

Host: Jeremy Shere, PhD

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If you were to visit a scientific lab, say one devoted to developing new drugs, it would look something like this:

"Basically you’d walk into a room that has no windows, that was light controlled, that was temperature controlled, that was humidity controlled, and there would be racks, shelves and shelves of shelves, with hundreds, thousands of mice in the room in little plastic cages."

That’s Joe Garner, a professor of comparative medicine at Stanford. The biggest problem for lab mice, he says, is not that they’re in cages in windowless rooms. It’s that they’re cold.

"The typical temperature in a mouse room is what’s comfortable for a human being in scrubs in a lab coat -- that’s about 22 degrees centigrade."

Or, for us Americans, roughly 71 degrees Fahrenheit. Which might sound warm enough, except that for the mice, which are typically not supplied with nesting material, it’s a little on the cool side. And when mice are cold, they have to burn more energy and give up some biological functions -- like their immune system -- to stay alive.

"If I’m testing this drug in animals that are on the borderline of being so cold that they’re immune compromised, then maybe this drug appears to work in the mice because they’re immune compromised. But when I try it in a human being who isn’t immune compromised, it’s not gonna work."

Garner’s proposed solution to this problem is simple: give lab mice material to make nests. Doing so would save money, Garner says, because nesting mice eat less and give birth to more pups. The main reason most labs currently do not allow mice to nest is because changing the process would invalidate a century’s worth of lab mice studies -- an argument that Garner openly rejects.

"My counter-argument to that is if you’re telling me that your animal model will only work in animals that are cold stressed, then aren’t you telling me that there’s a really serious problem with this animal model and it’s not likely to translate into humans."

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I’m Jeremy Shere

Additional Resources:

• Visit Dr. Joe Garner's lab website.
• Get details about Garner's research with lab mice temperatures at LiveScience.com.