Davis says scientists should make a more systematic attempt to understand disease in people, which is the direction he has taken his own research. For many diseases, he says, “We don’t know enough about the human disease to know whether it is a good model or not.” But he is enthusiastic about Krasnow’s attempt to identify a better model. “We should rationally choose other models that are closer to humans and therefore more likely to translate.”

From Idea to Madagascar

Krasnow’s path to Madagascar began in 2009 when several Palo Alto High School sophomores—Camille Ezran, Jason Willick, Krasnow’s daughter Maya, and, later, Alex Scholz—pestered him to work in his lab. After fending them off several times, he realized he could apply their growing knowledge of biology to the mouse model problem.

“We spent the entire summer trying to understand what would make a good model, since we had never been exposed to genetic model organisms before,” Ezran says. It had to be small and easy to work with. Its brain, lungs, and other organs had to resemble those in humans. It had to reproduce fairly quickly. And it had to be more closely related to humans than mice were. Spending weeks in the library and on the Internet, the students constructed a spreadsheet of the world’s smallest mammals, which they then narrowed to a dozen to examine in more detail.

The mouse lemur rose to the top. The idea gained traction when Krasnow starting discussing it with other scientists and colleagues. “They agreed with the need for a new genetic model organism and embraced the idea of the mouse lemur,” he says.

		Meet Microcebus murinus, the Grey Mouse Lemur The grey mouse lemur has many of the same characteristics that make the mouse a good model. Read More Tailing the Grey Mouse Lemur Play Slideshow

Next, Krasnow turned to Stanford veterinarian and geneticist Megan Albertelli. At first, she thought the idea was farfetched, but then she heard Krasnow describe the biological argument for the mouse lemur as a model organism. After the group learned that several European research centers had decades-old colonies of mouse lemurs, Krasnow decided his team needed to visit one to talk to the scientists.

The group went to Europe, where they saw their first live mouse lemurs at a 40-year-old colony housed on the grounds of a small castle. “That convinced me that this was something we could do,” Albertelli recalls. What excited Krasnow was that the scientists had been keeping detailed records and tissue samples for the colony’s history, including the animals’ tendency to get an Alzheimer’s-like disease.

Their next stop was Madagascar, and more research paths emerged as they talked to field biologists there. Those experts could help study genetic links to behavior, the team realized. “Social groupings, behavior, and behavioral diseases, have been very hard to study in mice,” Krasnow explains. “Those studies are already being done in mouse lemurs.”

The visit made clear to Krasnow that, to help local scientists and conservation efforts, as much research as possible should be done in Madagascar. “We would like more researchers coming to Madagascar,” says Benjamin Andriamihaja of the island’s Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments, “but at the same time we would like to protect our forest to maintain its value.”

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