New Twitter account flags article on research conducted in mice but implied to be in humans

19 thoughts on “New Twitter account flags article on research conducted in mice but implied to be in humans”

1. “Are female mice women?” It depends on whether they identify as women, or are you a trans-speciesphobe?

   1. I was thinking the same thing.

2. Good grief this is bad.

3. The worst part is that mice never read those articles.

   1. +1

4. Although there is no reason to extrapolate to humans )i agree 100% there), physiological findings in mice should give us food for thought, and -I hate this trope- some more research.

   1. I can immediately say that in humans, exercise during pregnancy raises the risk of miscarriage.

5. I met a “science writer” once. I wonder if she does this kind of thing. It’s unfortunate, but after this I’ll always be suspicious of the trade.

   1. There are good science writers – for example Jennifer Ouellette, Carl Zimmer – but these here are probably not really science writers but journalists tasked with writing about science things.

      1. The other possibility is that there is nothing wrong with the writers, the fault lies with the sub-editors who write the headlines. (To be fair, many of the articles make it clear that the study was run on mice). A good headline is the headline that generates maximum clicks.

         1. Yes, that’s likely as well as the people who select the images for the article.

            1. That is so true. I have a permanent frustration with newspaper editors over any technical article concerning trains, planes or automobiles; you can be at least 90% sure they will insert a picture of the wrong train/plane/car, and I don’t mean just hair-splitting tiny differences but spectacularly wrong to the point of being misleading.

               The article would be better off with no picture, but they just grab the first picture of a train/etc that comes to hand and think their job is done.

               cr

         2. I disagree. If the result is just in mice then what is the news value of the piece at all? I shouldn’t modify my behaviour based on a result that’s just in mice. I have no power to do the necessary follow up research to see if it applies to humans. I can see no public interest in outlets like Business Insider or Tech News Today publishing stories about preliminary mouse research week after week. I seems like lazy, thoughtless repackaging of University Press releases

6. I spent years trying to get my mother to stop smoking. She continued until she died—at age ninety. At one point I showed her the evidence of tobacco on the mortality of mice. She told me “All that proves is that mice shouldn’t smoke.”

7. It would give the game away if an article began with a line like ‘Scientists find that mothers that eat their newborn babies…’.

   1. That sounds fascinating. Tell us more. *click* *click* *click* *click*…*click* *click*…*click* *click*

8. Nice Twitter site!

9. Mice don’t eat bacon.

   So they say.

   Don’t eat a lotta swine myself. But every so often I give in to the irresistible force of bacon or pulled pork BBQ.

10. To slightly defend the writers of the second and third articles (the second piece especially), the erroneous inference was arrived at by the researchers carrying out the experiment, not the journalists.

    Jun Seok Son, a doctoral student at Washington State University, who carried out the study, said: “Based on our findings, we recommend that women – whether or not they are obese or have diabetes – exercise regularly during pregnancy because it benefits their children’s metabolic health.

    Accepted, it’s still a dereliction of duty not to ask the question “how do you know what works for mice also work for humans?”

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