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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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For example, despite 50+ years of subjecting many different laboratory animals (such as dogs, monkeys, rats, mice, and so on) to enormous amounts of tobacco smoke – in one instance laboratory mice were forced to inhale the human equivalent of 62 packs of cigarettes a day – no animal has ever developed lung cancer.

As far as I can tell this is false. See here for early attempts (some successful) and here for a more recent review, including claims like:

However, in 1997 the first of a series of studies reported that exposure of strain A mice for 5 months to a mixture of 89% cigarette sidestream and 11% mainstream smoke, followed by a month recovery period in air, significantly increased lung tumor multiplicity in strain A mice (Witschi et al. 1997a, 1997b).

There may be adjacent true claims, like "inducing lung cancer in animal models via tobacco smoke is surprisingly difficult". But there's something of a chasm between "surprisingly difficult" (which would still be evidence of causation) and "not accomplished" (which is not the claim supported by recorded research.)

I think you mean well, but contrarianism is not interesting on its own.

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