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.”

This is very reminiscent of a quote given by Peter Gordon of Columbia University in the New Yorker. He was checking up on work by Dan Everett, who has been creating waves in the linguistics community lately by challenging recursion, a fundamental notion of Chomskyan linguistics (the Minimalist Program). Defending the Piraha people against accusations of inbreeding, Gordon said:

“Besides, if there was some kind of Appalachian inbreeding or retardation going on, you’d see it in hairlines, facial features, motor ability. It bleeds over. They don’t show any of that.”

Gordon later apologized for his remarks, calling them “humbling”. Indeed. But here, I’m amazed to hear a professor of genetics from the University of North Carolina parroting it. Isn’t it funny how some racist comments are socially acceptable and some aren’t? (Granted, Appalachians aren’t a separate race, but not really sure what you’d call this. Regionalism? Just plain stereotyping?)

Full disclosure: One of my grandfathers’ family is from West Virginia (but of predominantly German descent) and one of my grandmothers is from Kentucky.