{"id":698,"date":"2008-10-16T10:32:48","date_gmt":"2008-10-16T15:32:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.randomideas.net\/?p=698"},"modified":"2008-10-16T10:32:48","modified_gmt":"2008-10-16T15:32:48","slug":"false-negatives-in-animal-tests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/?p=698","title":{"rendered":"False negatives in animal tests."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lots of treatments work very well in mice but fail to show benefits in human trials. They&#8217;re false positives, and they get lots of people excited over treatments that never end up working in humans.<\/p>\n<p>(Why do they work so well in mice, I wonder? Is it <em>because<\/em> so much of our research uses them? I wonder, if we were willing to completely throw morals out the window, could we get those sorts of results in humans by experimenting on them directly? Not that I&#8217;m advocating this.)<\/p>\n<p>I just realized something blindingly obvious: there are false negatives too. But how are these handled? Treatments that don&#8217;t work in mice <em>never make it to human trials<\/em>, even though they may work in humans. Without doing human trials on treatments that failed to work in mice, we can&#8217;t evaluate a false negative rate, but it could potentially be high. Certainly it&#8217;s nonzero in any case.<\/p>\n<p>This is another example of snap judgments shooting down ideas, but this is far less clear-cut than most criticism because failing to analyze the treatment prior to human trials can endanger people&#8217;s health.<\/p>\n<p>I think that what we need are better computer models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lots of treatments work very well in mice but fail to show benefits in human trials. They&#8217;re false positives, and they get lots of people excited over treatments that never end up working in humans. (Why do they work so well in mice, I wonder? Is it because so much of our research uses them? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-ideas","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}