Watch out, little white lab mouse. Barnyard animals are gunning for your job.
A bullish group of agricultural scientists says that farm animals have been vastly underrated as a resource for improving human health -- and they're vying for some of the billions of dollars the government invests in biomedical research.
The human-sized hearts and blood vessels of pigs are well-suited for the study of cardiovascular disease, they say. Cow embryos have the unusual ability to start forming body structures in lab dishes, where they are easy to observe. Chickens are the only animals besides humans known to suffer from ovarian cancer.
"Farm animals are more closely related to humans genetically and physiologically," said Jim Ireland, a professor of animal science and physiology at Michigan State University in East Lansing, who notes with pride that at least 17 Nobel Prize winners used barnyard species in their experiments.
However, he lamented, "most of the research dollars have been invested in using the mouse."
Mice, of course, have many advantages as research tools. Hundreds can be housed, fed and scrutinized for the same cost of studying a single pig or cow. Research labs all over the world are organized around mice, and an entire industry has sprung up to supply the critters in endless genetic variety and all the paraphernalia needed to study them.
At UCLA, mice are central in about 1,000 of the 1,200 research projects involving live animals, and most of the rest use rats, said radiation biologist William McBride, chair of the university's animal research committee. The rodents are simply more practical.
"We don't have green fields," McBride said.
But livestock are convenient in other ways, agricultural researchers say.
They can be studied for months or even years, with their normal barnyard lives interrupted periodically for blood tests and other medical exams. Some farm animals reside in state-of-the-art facilities that meet guidelines set by the National Institutes of Health. When the research is over, most simply return to their herds.
Nearly all the livestock are ultimately destined for the slaughterhouse -- a source of cash that helps defray research costs, said animal physiologist Larry Reynolds of North Dakota State University in Fargo who uses sheep to study fetal nutrition during pregnancy.
