Do mice test better than petri dishes?
Shelleycat once told me that LD50 isn’t actually used/common anymore because too many animals need to be killed to measure it, and there are new, more animal friendly ways to calculate toxicity now. She knows a lot about this kind of stuff in general, so you can ask her, or wait until she finds this thread. Myself, I’m doing lab stuff but not on animals, just on cell lines. For studying things at the molecular level (protein functions) it’s very useful because all cells are somewhat the same. However, I can’t really make any organism-wide conclusions from my work, for several reasons: 1) Things that happen in 1 cell type might not happen that way in different cell types 2) Cultured cell lines are slightly different from their physiological counterpart. They’re usually cancer cells, because regular cells don’t just grow outside of the body. For example, melanoma cells in petri dishes can be used to study pigmentation, but these are muta
