The truth is hard to believe: A pair of experimental mice can be as expensive as a billion-dollar car

Mice are extremely necessary organisms in scientific research activities. And because of their importance, some mouse lines can be terribly expensive.

From the 16th century, rats were used as the most common test animal in genetic, psychological, and medical studies.

The reason that scientists "favor" mice over other animals is because of the many advantages they possess. For example, small size, easy to raise, fast reproduction, good learning ability . and especially easy to breed and edit genes.

Mice seem to be animals born for science.

For most animals - including humans, inbreeding is an absolute must, as it poses a risk of serious malformations that can kill offspring from the womb. But with mice, they can still create a wealthy family with only the original two siblings.

So scientists only need to select or hybridize a few mice with the desired gene mutation that can create a whole new mouse line in a short time.

For example, with white mice - the most popular experimental mice - they were initially a few rare individuals with albinism in gray-haired mice. But it is this trait that shows that they possess genes in the homozygous recessive organism, and that makes it easier to identify genotypes through external morphology.

Later little albino individuals were bred together, to create as many lines of white mice as we see today.

When the mice cost a million

Over time, more strains of laboratory mice were created, with mutations suitable for different research directions. For example, tissue regeneration MRL mice are used for experiments on wound recovery and regeneration; NOD mice are more likely to develop type 1 diabetes as a research model for this disease; or SCID mice have absolutely no immune system, used to transplant tissues and tumors .

Depending on the mouse line, they may have a terrible price.

And as usual, different mouse lines will have different values.

For white mice used in conventional experiments, prices only range from a few tens of thousands to several hundred thousand. But suppose it was a 3-week-old MRL mouse, the price could skyrocket to nearly $ 100.

The highest price in the lab rat family must include the lines created by. The reason is that they can be quickly created according to orders and carry extremely rare mutations that conventional breeding is difficult to match.

According to Biotechnology SAGE Labs (USA), which specializes in producing genetically modified mice, the average price of a genetically modified mouse is over $ 445 (about 10 million).

The mouse looks small, but his value may not be small.

Even, there are those that are modified according to the customer's specific requirements (of course still within the allowable range), the value falls to about . 95,000 dollars (more than 2 billion dong).

This amount is equivalent to the price of some medium-class cars, and if converted into gold, they are more expensive than the same amount of gold.

However, although it can be "horribly" priced, we need to recognize that the true value of each experimental mouse can be incomparable.

Because their contributions to the development of science in general, and for remedies that help cure millions of people in the world in particular, are invaluable.