James Croom, who studies Down syndrome mice at North Carolina State University, says the animals are providing valuable information useful to humans. Merely 10 weeks later, however, when researchers from the University of Hawaii reported cloning the first mouse from an adult cell's nucleus, many scientists regarded the work as a signal that cloning humans had come a giant step closer.
People have a basic misunderstanding of the mouse.
They get upset that the exact pathophysiology might be different, but a mouse is not a total mimic. You can't do a lot of types of experiments on humans. You can't order people to mate, and you can't make a human knockout. But Mus musculus is a lab favorite for practical reasons, too. Mouse mutants were valuable in biomedical research long before transgenics and knockouts came on the scene.