Jeffrey Perkel | May 26, 2002 | 9 min read
The standard modus operandi for modeling human diseases in the mouse: Find an interesting gene, knock it out, and watch what happens. In theory, the approach makes perfect sense, and scientists have obtained countless subtle insights into the complexities of biology because of it. But mice, of course, are not humans, and many investigators have had to hastily rewrite otherwise elegant theories because of mouse data. One reason? Researchers have taken for granted that telomere length matters. But