Alzheimer's research on animals a waste of time

[Catherine]

Scientists have finally admitted that all the Alzheimer's research they have done using animals has been a complete waste of time.
We have learned nothing and produced no treatments for Alzheimer's.

Animals do not get Alzheimer's so how could they be used to study the disease?
I wish they had asked the question before they wasted many decades of work,  millions of dollars and a horrible number of animal's lives.

http://news.google.ca/news/url?sr=1&ct2=...t=2&at=dt0

Maybe now they will start to make progress, now that they have admitted that they choose the wrong starting point.
I have to wonder, given that these researchers are supposed to be the best and the brightest, did no one ever wonder if they were on the wrong track. Did their total lack of results not give them a hint that they were wasting their time.

This brings into question the whole use of animals in research. The ethics of using animals in labs aside, the lack of useful results should be enough to end the use of lab animals. Animals do not mirror us. They get different diseases and they respond to drugs in different ways.

Think about it. Decades were wasted studying a disease in animals that animals do not get.
Isn't that like studying the Antarctic polar bears and the arctic penguins?