Hi, sorry, this is so disingenuous of a statement I cannot pass by it without commenting. My bona fides are 10y of lab work, specifically in bioenergetics. I can tell you that 5% is a dramatic UNDERESTIMATION on the value of animal models for medicine at large.

This is ignoring at least these benefits: surgery, development, genetic studies, grafts, anesthesia, and many MANY more. Some non-drug related, some drug adjacent, and they definitely have downstream benefits to humans.

Here's a survey paper with myriad examples: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9247923/

I really don't like when bioscience articles land here in HN because they are always commented on with:"in mice", as if to say nothing we see from mouse work works. Well, not everything is software and this kind of work takes years, if not decades. It is real science unfortunately which means that most of it doesn't work! Science, and bioscience specifically, are not efficient systems. In general, the things you do are hard and probably won't work. That doesn't mean you give up.

Animal models are not great, but they are the best progression we can do right now from cell models. And as for being disposable, there are controls on how animals are used in labs in the US: every institution that has animal experimentation has an IACUC (institutional animal care and use committee) that every research proposal must go through, and they do not a rubber stamp your proposal. They want to know why you can't use cell models, and why you can't do it with less or even no animals.

It would be nice if people were a bit more even handed when these types of articles come by. I think HN can do better.

An adage from the lab: "If what we did always worked it would be business, not science."