You are currently browsing the daily archive for August 14th, 2007.
Here is a word that has gone through the wringer in the past few decades. Originally it meant a monstrous offense or excessive wickedness (American Heritage). However, its similarity to the word enormous has caused it to be used by an ever growing number of people to mean immense size. With all things language, attempting to turn back the natural tide of almighty usage is futile. For example, the title of an article just posted on the National Geographic website is “Angkor’s Ancient Enormity Uncovered“. I was disappointed when the story wasn’t about a mass sacrifice or other such atrocity.
Wired has a story on the fact that almost all the mice used in laboratory research today are descended from a few inbred mice about a hundred years ago. It seems like there are advantages to having inbred mice in terms of experimental control, which may have been part of the original motivation. The fewer factors that change from experiment to experiment the better you can isolate /attribute causality. But of course, the criticism here is that the lack of diversity in test-mouse genetics may be the reason that problems with certain drugs didn’t become apparent until after the drugs hit the market.
All this interesting stuff about mice aside, we are then given a quote by the illustrious Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena:
“To make an analogy between mice and humans, using the classical inbred strains is like doing studies on 10 people selected from one small town in Appalachia.”
