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rhapsody7099 t1_iw61orn wrote

Originally yes. Not with primates though. When scientists started to realize that mutations in DNA might be responsible for certain diseases they would treat some model organism (often mice as lots of people have said) with different things known to be mutagenic. They would then breed everything that would have some kind of “weirdness” to it, and evaluate the characteristics, then from that look into specifically what was the DNA mutation that caused it. Nowadays there’s so much information and technologies that we can easily say “I want an animal that will develop triple negative breast cancer” and make it (or order it). My understanding is “triple negative” refers to three specific mutations in the genome, so most likely they identified the mutations in humans then replicated it to other systems.

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