Question: Why do you use animals stem cells to experiment on when you could just use human stem cells instead?

David Christensen answered on 12 Nov 2013:

That’s a good question, thanks Chloe. I don’t use animal stem cells myself, but will try to answer your question.

A lot of scientists use mouse stem cells because they can use mice in the lab for experiments. If the scientist is trying to find a stem cell-based cure for heart defects, using mouse embryonic stem cells to make a mouse heart that can be transplanted into a mouse is something that can be done legally with a special licence. Scientists aren’t allowed to do that sort of thing in humans until they know that the experiment will very likely work and usually a lot of testing with animals is required before any tests are done in people.

Another way scientists use mice and mouse embryonic stem cells is by taking the stem cells and altering them very slightly in their DNA and then injecting these altered stem cells into an embryo. They can then place this embryo into the uterus of a mouse as a pregnancy and they can get new mice that have a specific genetic difference.

For those of us who work with human embryonic stem cells, work on mouse embryonic stem cells is often useful because the cells are very similar, but they are not the same in every way, so we still need to do research on both.