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Nature’s laboratory

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Clinical trials for new drugs are expensive and uncertain. More than nine out of every ten drugs that enter human trials fail because of harmful side effects or a lack of efficacy. Safety and effectiveness in animals often fail to translate to humans. Imperfect as animal trials are, though, we need to know what happens when we block or boost certain biological pathways with drugs. But there is another source of this data that we are beginning to draw on. Nature has already done lots of the trials we want to run, through random genetic mutations and natural selection. Since the first full mapping of the human genome in 2003, and the rise of technologies to sequence human DNA, we now can study the genetic mutations in nature that do the same thing as the drugs we want to test. For the first time, we are starting to peer into nature’s laboratory and learn from the millions of years of experiments it has done. Subscribe for $100 to receive six beautiful issues per year. On 13th March 2006,

Clinical trials for new drugs are expensive and uncertain. More than nine out of every ten drugs that enter human trials fail because of harmful side effects or a lack of efficacy. Safety and effectiveness in animals often fail to translate to humans. Imperfect as animal trials are, though, we need to know what happens when we block or boost certain biological pathways with drugs. But there is another source of this data that we are beginning to draw on. Nature has already done lots of the trials we want to run, through random genetic mutations and natural selection. Since the first full mappi

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