There are still so many things wrong in how he tells the story that it doesn't pass a basic smell test for me.
- He omits that this study was from 2000, so quite some time ago. Given that the paper about that has 200+ citations, I would say that it got the eyeballs it deserved. He doesn't offer any recent evidence that indicate that this is still the case today.
- The core claim he makes "all mice are broken" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it.
- "I called them up and they were not able to produce any records that they changed their breeding protocols" doesn't mean that they didn't change them in the 20 years that passed. It just means that they didn't produce them to some random person contacting them.
I'm not as "surprised nobody is breaking this story" as he is.
>The core claim he makes "all mice are broken" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it.
It isn't hyperbole, if Bret's claims are substantiated. The claims being that most lab mice are from the Jackson lab, that all of their mice have extremely long telomeres compared to wild mice, and that this could have serious implications on the potential harm to humans by some drugs - even while also accounting for the fact that mice are already not a good model of humans and that the same drugs are later tested on humans. (I could elaborate on this, but it's covered thoroughly in the paper and podcast.)
I agree Eric hasn't satisfactorily proved they didn't change the protocols, but if it is the case that all of their mice still have long telomeres, and if all of the other claims are true (most US researchers still using those mice + the other claims), then the claims "most mice used by US researchers are broken" and "most tests done on mice by US researchers are flawed because of it" are likely also true.
I have no idea if the above claims are true, of course, but they should be investigated on their merits.
Video links and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/g0ioxq/if_it_is_...