It may come as a shock, but mice are some of the closest species to Humans genetically speaking [0] with 95-99% similarity depending on the gene in question, and a large portion of diseases are shared by both mice and humans [1].
One of the geneticists who worked on identifying this is also on HN and tried to explain this [2] but HNers think they are smarter than actual leaders in the fields of genomics.
A top-10 list indicates 6 primates, cat, dog, and cow. While there has been a lot of testing done on primates and dogs, they are much more sympathetic for animal-rights groups, and the general public, when protesting vivisection, breeding, and confinement.
Anatomically and behaviorally, primates would still be the top choices there. And many, many disciplines experiment on animals, where results don't come at the genetic level.
Good, the genetics match closely. But mice (or rats: see the idiom "lab rat") are also considered vermin, prolific breeders, fit in your hand, short life-cycle, and easily obtained. So they join fruit flies in the lab experiments.
Interestingly, pigs are used in many types of medicine while not enjoying that genetic similarity. In the 1950s and 60s, your insulin and thyroid meds were often derived from pigs.
All that may well be true. But one doesn’t have to be a leader in the field of genomics to have read decades of articles breathlessly proclaiming medical breakthroughs (in mice) and then not ever seeing them hit the market (in humans.)
Or in other words the meat of the critique is not aimed at genomics, but rather in science marketing.
You can say the same thing about Phase 1 to 3 as well.
The reality is every theraputic has some kind of negative side effect, which may reduce the incentive for it to be productionized becuase the whole point about medicine is harm reduction.
Passing the hurdle of being viable in mice is a major hurdle because in most cases, experiments fail. And if it's efficacy is proven in mice, it shows viability in a specific approach and justifies investing the hundreds of millions of dollars in trying to bring something to Phase 3.
I'm not sure why the snark is necessary. Nobody is suggesting that mice are a terrible animal model or trying to tell researchers how to do their jobs, they're just frustrated by pop science coverage that leaves crucial information out of the headline and over-hypes early research. At least the BBC article doesn't bury the lede.
I don't think the problem is specifically mice, but disease models. Some of the hardest diseases to study mice don't naturally (or commonly) get so it has to be induced in some way.
Yes, for example, ALS. Mice don't naturally get ALS and while a somewhat similar condition can be provoked in them, the model does not fit well and seems to be almost useless for producing actual human treatments of ALS.
Yeah, we could absolutely do a better job with solid interfaces for each service. To be clear, our nextjs apps, temporal workers, etc are all well defined, and changes in a single package are easily tested (and well tested). It's integration testing we struggle with.
And, there's always a tradeoff here between engineering & our real job as a startup, finding PMF and growth. That said, we want as much eng velocity as possible and a fast, solid integration testing platform/system/etc helps a ton with that.
So, it does sometimes duplicate code, especially where we have a packages/ directory of Typescript code, shared between two nextjs and some temporal workers. We 'solve' this with some AGENT.md rules, but it doesn't always work. It's still an open issue.
The quality is general good for what we're doing, but we review the heck out of it.
will email! Your homepage doesn't make the environment part clear - it reads like it's akin to cursor multiple agent mode (Which I think you had first, FWIW).
Man I was vim for life until cursor and the LLMs. For personal stuff I still do claude + vim because I love vim. I literally met my wife because I had a vim shirt on and she was an emacs user.
We do integration testing in a preview/staging env (and locally), and can do it via docker compose with some GitHub workflow magic (and used to do it that way, but setup really slowed us down).
What I want is a remote dev env that comes up when I create a new agent and is just like local. I can make the service but right now priorities aren’t that (as much as I would enjoy building that service, I personally love making dev tooling).
Apple has done a good job on the implementation and documentation for their confidential computing (https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...) but of course it’s Apple only. There’s a few folks working on a non-Apple version of this, eg https://confident.security/ and others (disclaimer that I helped work on a very early version of this.
Read the Apple docs - they are very well written and accessible for the average HN reader.
Yep, often things are measured in FTE or FTE-equivalent units. It’s not precise of course but is a reasonable shorthand for the amount of work required.
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