Around the world, pharmaceutical companies conduct clinical trials to evaluate the safety and efficacy of their drugs. Clinical trials are research studies performed on people and are aimed at evaluating if a new drug is safe and effective. People who participate in clinical trials are volunteers.

1) Why do you think someone would volunteer to participate in a clinical trial? What are the pros and cons? Are there alternatives to having human volunteers participate in clinical trials?

Someone would volunteer in a clinical trial to have potentially free treatment for an illness.

Pros: Drug treatment for a problem, could work well, etc.

Cons: Death, expensive, couldn’t work.

The alternatives to using humans would be animals or cells.

Mice are often used in medical studies to evaluate the effects of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. One reason for this is that scientists know a lot about the genome of a mouse. They are bred in labs to be identical, so the only thing different between them is the treatment. Mice also have short lifespans, which allows scientists to model the effects of a drug over their entire lifespan (about 800 days). It is much more difficult to understand the effects of a drug over the lifetime of a human.

The toxicity of a chemical and its impact on vital organs is of interest when assessing the effects of a chemical treatment. A standard method used to measure the level of toxicity in an organ is to use the organ’s weight.

In this in-class activity, we will be looking at the weights of the livers and spleens in 26- week old female C57BL/6J laboratory mice. The mean liver weight is 0.999 grams (g) with a standard deviation of 0.087 g, and the mean spleen weight is 0.086 g with a standard deviation of 0.007 g.

2) Use the Empirical Rule to answer the following. Round your answers to three decimal places.

Part A: About 68% of the mice will have liver weights between 0.912 and 1.086.

Part B: About 95% of the mice will have liver weights between 0.825 and 1.173.

Part C: About 99.7% of the mice will have liver weights between 0.738 and 1.26.

3) Use the Empirical Rule to answer the following. Round your answers to three decimal places.

Part A: About 68% of the mice will have spleen weights between 0.079 and 0.093.

Part B: About 95% of the mice will have spleen weights between 0.072 and 0.1.

Part C: About 99.7% of the mice will have spleen weights between 0.065 and 0.107.