Joe Rogan looks back at "completely ridiculous and unethical" 'Rodent Fight Club' study: "I would love to see the data"
One of the things that made Joe Rogan such an iconic media personality is his open-minded skepticism. His willingness to have a wide range of guests in his hit podcast Joe Rogan Experience reflects his humility in accepting knowledge from reliable sources. Still, the skeptic in Rogan makes him question things a lot - all for his pursuit of knowledge.
A good example of this open-minded skepticism is Rogan's recent Instagram post, where the MMA commentator posted an article about a state-funded "Rodent Fight Club", as written by Kathy Guillermo for PETA. Rogan absolutely abhorred the study but was also curious to see the findings.
Joe Rogan wrote:
"The government spent 3 million dollars funding a study where they injected hamsters with steroids and cocaine and had them fight. A completely ridiculous and unethical study, but I would love to see the data."
When Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein warned everyone about the problem with America's lab rodents
Back in 2020, Joe Rogan made quite a profound discovery about America's laboratory rodents, as revealed to him by biology professor Bret Weinstein. As portrayed through many textbooks, movies, and other forms of media, scientific laboratories around the world use rodents - most especially mice - as subjects to test out hypotheses, new drugs, or other experiments in the pursuit of scientific discovery.
Weinstein then revealed a rather worrisome truth that's happening with American laboratories' utilization of mice in their experiments. He then mentioned DNA sequences called "telomeres", which are a sort of fuse that gets shorter every time a cell divides. Basically, the longer a creature's telomeres are, the more cell divsion/regeneration happens, and the longer the creature can live without becoming feeble.
This posed an opportunity for scientists to devise a way to slow down aging and/or even cure cancer. The problem, however, is that the laboratory mice used in American studies have abnormally long telomeres, and yet they live significantly short lives. This makes the mice terrible models to sample cancer cures or anti-aging drugs on, as their anatomy fails to reflect that of normal creatures like humans.
Weinstein added:
"I finally realized that all of the mice that we had been [looking] at were coming from one source, a labratory in Bar Harbor, Maine called the Jax Lab that was the source for all the mice being used in all the labratories in the country. I started to wonder, 'Is there something going on at that lab? Maybe mouse telomeres aren't long...maybe that's a feature of laboratory mice and wild mice will have short telomeres.'"
Weinstein then tested his hypothesis with Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Carol W. Greider and sure enough, his prediction was correct. The mice being used in American labs are terrible models to test drugs and new medical procedures on - making it an issue of safety.
Watch the entire conversation here (via Joe Rogan Experience):