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Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
- ttul 9y agoImplications for Burning Man?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Shengbo 9y agoDon't bring mice to Burning Man.
- Taniwha 9y agoBefore anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt. It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Declanomous 9y agoIn college we used to joke that animal behavior should be called animal misbehavior. We literally had one member of our lab group that could work with the mice and get sensible results. Neither of the guys could get any data that made sense, one of the women owned a cat and none of the results she had made any sense, and the fourth person (a woman) had no problem. I'm not sure if anybody suspected that rats reacted differently to how men and women smell, but only women were allowed to work as rodent caretakers or be in the rodent room at my school. Our professor showed the guys the room once, but we weren't allowed to talk, since she thought it was men's voices that set the rodents on edge. In case anybody is wondering what our experiment was, we were measuring whether caffeine affected the VO2 of mice. Their oxygen consumption pegged anytime any of the guys handled them.
- anitil 9y agoWere rats as sensitive as mice?
- chiefalchemist 9y agoFwiw I have been assured that Big Pharma will swap out a set of mice (or whatever the test species is) as a way to find the results they're looking for. This was told to me by someone who does research for Big Pharma. Someone who I have no reason not to trust.
- zaarn 9y agoBut how can we trust you to tell the truth about this?
- chiefalchemist 9y agoMy personal motto is: Don't be evil. Does that help? ;)
- ComputerGuru 9y agoI just wanted to add another anecdote (because the plural of anecdote is, as we all know, data) that your profess isn’t the only one. I’ve heard a few similar stories about guys not being allowed to enter the rodent living chambers besides an initial, introductory visit in the past.
- Alex3917 9y agoThis is a good video about the phenomenon, and specifically about how it affects research on psychoactive substances: https://vimeo.com/33803995 https://vimeo.com/33803995
- arkades 9y agoHardly new. Feynman was criticizing psych research for this sort of thing - inadequate controls - half a century ago in his talk on Cargo Cult Science. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
- mayank 9y agoInadequate controls = attempting to measure fine effects (gender normalized animal behavior) using crude methods (rat study).
- colehasson 9y agoAccuracy or precision. Pick one?
- marcosdumay 9y agoWell, why should anybody not pick accuracy every time?
- nerdponx 9y agoBecause, in the extreme, accuracy without precision doesn't tell you a damn thing.
- marcosdumay 9y agoJust like precision without accuracy, but if you get accuracy you know you have a problem, but with only precision you are hopelessly misled. If it was a strict trade-off, I would agree that the answer was somewhere on the middle. But it isn't. Most of the things that give you precision will also give you accuracy. The few things that let you exchange one for the other look too much like cheating, and seem to always have much greater impacts on accuracy than on precision.
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- wsc981 9y agoBut this doesn't make sense. Gender is a social construct.
- nikhilsimha 9y agoroflmao
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- rodrodrod 9y agoThe research is concerned with sex, not gender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction
- cristianpascu 9y agoWhatever the Holy Wikipedia says about the distinction, isn't it funny, not to say something else, that we use the same words for two/three concepts that are, supposedly, completely different and vary independently? I'm a male identifying as female expressing as male, aka sex:gender:gender-expression. Because, you know, people were so dumb until social-constructivism landed on Earth like the Messiah no-one expected. And we need to be re-educated. Or else. What baffles me most is the insistence that one can build any kind of objective distinction based on subjective experiences, that is, what one feels. We're all capable of sadness, joy, excitement, and what not. But we can not build any kind of categorization (read diversity) of people based on these concepts/states of mind. I don't identify as sad, although I'm sad from time to time. No one does. Companies can not be forced to hire more sad people, for the sake of diversity. Yet, now, it's compulsory to have more people hired because they report some sort of internal and inaccessible state of mind which they express using words used for categorizing people based on the shape of their genitalia.
- simias 9y agoPlease let's not. It's off topic and we all know that it won't lead to constructive discussion.
- legohead 9y agoRodent research is a horrible testing method. This video explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHl0nIdbiLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHl0nIdbiLA
- nezzle 9y agoYes, it's terrible. Make sure none of the following list apply to you or anyone you care for. >If you’ve ever taken antibiotics, had a vaccine, a blood transfusion, dialysis, an organ transplant, chemotherapy, bypass surgery or joint replacement, you have benefited from animal testing and research. In fact, practically every drug, treatment, medical device, diagnostic tool or cure we have today was developed with the help of lab animals. >Many diseases that once killed millions of people every year are now either preventable, treatable or have been eradicated altogether. Immunizations against polio, diphtheria, mumps, rubella and hepatitis save countless lives and the survival rates for many major diseases are at an all-time high thanks to the discovery of new drugs and the design of sophisticated medical devices and surgical procedures.
- buu700 9y agoI don't buy the argument/implication that it's somehow hypocritical to oppose something while actively benefiting from it, as long as one is upfront about that fact. For example, say that we have genuinely useful medical information as a result of Unit 731 experiments and similar crimes (which may or may not be the case; I have no idea). There's no contradiction if one person supports using those existing results to save lives while simultaneously opposing further collection of such results. Another example: I personally eat a lot of meat (keto/LCHF), but even so I might support legislation to ban killing animals for food or sport, because the personal sacrifice would only be worth it to me if it came attached to a systemic change.
- rkangel 9y ago> because the personal sacrifice would only be worth it to me if it came attached to a systemic change This is the reason why. You may prefer the world to be a certain way, but you aren't willing to make any sacrifice to make it be a particular way, so it appears that you don't actually care about an opinion that you are espousing. People who don't eat meat have a net effect on a reduced demand for meat, reducing the amount of cattle. Becoming a vegetarian doesn't stop everyone eating meat, but it helps. [I'm not a vegetarian but I have some respect for people who are willing to stand by their beliefs]
- chippy 9y agoI did read the article. I didn't see that it was peer reviewed nor a repeated study, scientifically speaking. The last few paragraphs also give some (typical) scientific distance on the rhetoric that it will revolutionise ALL past rat experiments. It's still worth a read though. What I found: * It is a science story about findings presented at a meeting. The story is published in Nature, which does do very prestigious peer reviewed papers, but the findings and the story itself are not peer reviewed. * Within the same institution, the head of the lab repeated the experiment. * Some other actually peer reviewed papers with female researchers, rats and ketamine show positive influences.
- timthelion 9y agoI don't think that peer review is a very good metric in this case. Those peers could lose their jobs if rodent research is proven to be unscientific. Requiring research on the scientific merits of rodent research to be peer reviewed is like asking the plumber's union to write the building code. In many American municipalities, the code really is written by the plumbers, and the plumbers write in that water pipes must be copper, just because copper cannot be installed by a non-professional. I don't see why rodent researchers would not do the same type of corrupt and anti-truth tactic for their own professional protection.
- ensignavenger 9y ago"copper cannot be installed by a non-professional" Who says? I get your over all point, but I disagree that only "professionals" can install copper pipes. It really isn't that difficult.
- timthelion 9y agoWell, it is certainly a lot harder to do than plastic, and of course, pex is like k-nex compared to welded copper.
- chiefalchemist 9y agoAre there links to this being repeated? Else, it sounds like someone beat up their data until they found something worth publishing. It certainly wouldn't be the first time such an effort passed a "peer review."
- nkurz 9y agoWhile I think that you meant your comment to be taken at face value (ie, "disbelief is not an option") you should realize that from a different starting point it also fits well as a scathing attack on the state of modern science. Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher Absolutely. The statistics are text-book standard, and the research is peer-reviewed and published in a major journal, so as Kahneman said about the now discredited priming studies, "You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true."[1] It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents And possibly not just rodent experiments! We may even want to re-evaluate the weight we put on statistical claims across a broad range of fields. I think Gelman covers it well in his article "I disagree with Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman regarding the strength of statistical evidence": http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/03/disagree-alan-turing-daniel-kahneman-regarding-strength-statistical-evidence/ http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/03/disagree-alan-turing-dani... [1] To Kahneman's credit, in perhaps the most genuine mea culpa I've ever read, he later confessed that he had "placed too much faith in underpowered studies": https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/comment-page-1/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...
- stubish 9y agoIts already known that past experiments with rodents are problematic. A number of studies could not be repeated, and it took a while before they twigged that it was the higher proportion of female scientists. The rationale in the article I read was that the rats were more stressed when the males were around, and disguising the smell mitigated it like they found in this new study. Another similar problem was mice in maze experiments, which also could not be repeated. The experimenters were using mazes with sand on the floor rather than hard bases, and it turned out that the earlier experiments were not measuring the memories of mice; instead their ability to sense vibrations from their footsteps and helped with location senses.
- hrithikguy 9y agoWhy does the article say that the same effect will not hold for humans? Is there anything to substantiate that?
- stevenwoo 9y agoIt's long been thought that a large percentage of studies on mice can not be replicated in humans because we are such different species but we use mice because it is cheap. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t... Some larger animals might be somewhat closer but a.) much more expensive b.) more ethically challenging to kill/drug something more intelligent at the scale at which we do mice An acquaintance of mine did work in medical studies with mice and he quit after a few years because he said one handled the mice so much that he grew attached to them and could not bear to kill them at the end of the trials anymore. On the other hand we eat pigs and octopus and those are pretty smart creatures.
- Simon_says 9y agoI bought some live lobsters to kill (humanely, with a knife to the brain) and steam. I only had him in my custody for a couple hours, but I got attached. I had a bad experience thinking about taking a life, and it kinda fucked me up. I don't think I'll be doing it again. If I had to kill everything I ate, I'd be vegetarian. But I have no problem buying it at the store.
- stuntkite 9y agoI watched a documentary on Horseshoe Crabs recently where the researchers were clearly very attached to their specimens talking about their personalities like they were nephews/nieces. I think they are a more bizarre thing than a lobster, but I'd never before thought giant seabugs could be cute. They are definitely cute. That said, I'll put a lobster in a pot without hesitation. I like to put a cigarette in their claws beforehand like a last smoke before a firing squad. I appreciate their sacrifice for my butter drenched enjoyment.
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- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago> She and Gould suspect that the antidepressant effect is the result of a specific interaction between ketamine and the male odour in the mouse brain. Wow, this is a really fascinating study, and goes to show how evaluating psychoactive drugs can be so difficult. There are so many confounding variables that it's very difficult to know what is causing an effect.
- leggomylibro 9y agoYeah, just wait - ten years from now some organic chemist will be thinking about some weird nonsensical reaction like that and, that'll be the story of how Ultra-PCP was first discovered and synthesized.
- mabbo 9y agoBut only if your dealer is male.
- dilap 9y agoWhat if a trans man administers the Ketamine?
- Simon_says 9y agoI wonder if mice can finally settle whether traps are gay.
- chaosbutters314 9y agoYou're an ass. Comments like this make me hate people. Why does it even matter what their sexuality is? And why does that group of people need a special name
- DonHopkins 9y agoIt's not his first transphobic remark. Not only does he call trans people "traps", but he also objects to using proper pronouns because "I don't like my speech being dictated". It's easy to guess what he's obsessed with and ashamed about, and it's not about his lack of ability to treat people with respect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15242499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15242499 And FYI, in case you're a nice enough person to have missed the reference, "Are Traps Gay" is an alt-right meme and shout-out to Milo Yiannopoulos.
- thisacctforreal 9y agoSheesh, when did that start having alt-right connotations? It's a question anyone remotely into contemporary anime/manga would ponder.
- DonHopkins 9y agoSince you asked: August 10, 2015.
- stordoff 9y ago> is an alt-right meme and shout-out to Milo Yiannopoulos Wait, since when? The way it is phrased, and often the discussion it prompts, is certainly transphobic/homophobic, but any context I've seen it in (which hasn't been for a good few years) has been totally divorced from the alt-right. Did I miss it getting picked up by those groups at some point?
- rdtsc 9y agoIt's interesting to think about what this could mean for people. We use these mice because they often are convenient models for humans. Are our moods are just as affected by combinations of lots of little things like these - smells, hormones, chemicals in the cleaners, hair products etc. On the scary side imagine being able to use this for evil. Spray something like this on your product to manipulate people's hormonal system to respond to it, maybe trigger affection towards it. Even worse, spray it to induce rage or hate for example.
- booleandilemma 9y agoLove Potion No. 9?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gruez 9y ago>spray it to induce rage or hate for example no need for provocteurs at pro^H^H^H riots anymore!
- psergeant 9y agocf: https://gizmodo.com/scientists-link-cat-parasite-to-common-neurological-d-1806174772 https://gizmodo.com/scientists-link-cat-parasite-to-common-n...
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- marcosdumay 9y ago> Are our moods are just as affected by combinations of lots of little things like these - smells, hormones, chemicals in the cleaners, hair products etc. Is that a question? Isn't this well known?
- rdtsc 9y ago> Is that a question? Isn't this well known? I didn't mean only that we feel happy when we smell lavender or something like that, but more drastic things. Others mentioned toxoplasmosis, something like that basically. Now imagine being able to control and tailor that. Or something like rabies where it induces rage for example.
- BurningFrog 9y agoSince they got the same effect with just a male worn shirt present, they should be able to isolate what chemicals cause this particular effect.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoIt could also be chemical + association. Or just association.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoEasy enough to test with mice that have never seen/smelled males before.
- roel_v 9y agoHow?
- BurningFrog 9y agoIf the shirt contains 50 chemicals, try each of them in isolation. For starters.
- roel_v 9y agoThat's what they do on CSI, but that's not how it works in real life. I'm not a chemical engineer, so I can't explain why this doesn't work, but I've proposed this approach and various variations on it to some engineers for other purposes and got all sorts of explanations why it wouldn't work which I didn't understand; but the underlying concept was that you can't just take a sample of whatever and deconstruct and reconstruct it at will.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago> you can't just take a sample of whatever and deconstruct and reconstruct it at will This is fairly generally true in science. Deconstructionism was a fever dream.
- cm2012 9y agoThis reminds me of Feynman's story of the researcher who eliminated possible variables in rat experiments one by one, to find a surprising result (EDIT: To find that rats didn't need smell, spatial relationships, taste, or vision to find the cheese - the sound of the floor was enough) https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/the_rat_experiment_you_dont_know_about_but_should.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/the_rat_experi...
- nsnick 9y agoYour comment is click bait.
- cm2012 9y agoEdited
- vorotato 9y agoTLDR: Long story with a moral of document your steps, and read others documentation lest you fall into the same traps they did.
- gwern 9y agoI never did manage to trace Feynman's story back to a source, but nevertheless, also something Derek Lowe repeatedly covers for biology/chemistry on "In the Pipeline": a lot of the 'cell lines' or 'reagents' used in lab work turn out to just not be what they're supposed to be, either because they never were or they degraded into something else in storage or something. So to give a recent paper he blogged, there's something like 30k papers using "immune system cells" which are actually just HeLas; presumably the cell lines in question got contaminated or swapped somewhere along the way, but that raises the question of what any of those papers mean... And of course there are similar issues with mice. You have all the different strains which are genetically different, but they'll also be genetically changing over time through drift & selection & mutations, so your Wistar-XXX may not be the Wistar-XXX from 50 years ago. Or mice chow - sure, the label may say it's the same but when was the last time you checked? (Think about that paper about how all sorts of lab animals, supposedly fed constant diets and under constant controlled environments, keep getting fatter over the past century. Something is changing; what? Genetics? Food composition? Micronutrients? Lab infections? Microbiomes? Measurement tools themselves?)
- aaavl2821 9y agothere is a published study showing that loud rock music cures type one diabetes in mice, along with 400-500 other therapies, none of which work in humans. There are two main vendors for these diabetic mice; for some reason, mice from one vendor develop diabetes at a different rate and certain kinds of studies work better in them. "Everything" cures cancer in mice. Skilled animal researchers can manipulate most mouse studies to skew results in their favor. But it is the best we have in many cases...
- simonh 9y agoIt’s bern prett well proven that research causes cancer in mice.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- barking 9y agoSomeone I know used to have to get a blood test every week. One of the regular testers used to hurt him, the other didn't. I'm sure it affected to the stress of the visits which operator was waiting for him. With a small sample of people doing the injecting it's hard to eliminate the effect of operator technique.
- johnsprial 9y agoRodent rights! Future generations will judge us harshly on flippant animal experimentation.
- Grangar 9y agoWhy does the article mention ketamine as a club drug? It's a terrible drug for clubs if anything.
- ionised 9y agoI know people who do it in that context. Baffles me though.
- eulo__ 9y agoStrongly disagree. Speed and Ketamine in combination is probably the greatest time you'll ever have.
- Danihan 9y agoI thought you're not supposed to mix uppers and downers..
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoYou are not supposed to mix uppers and downers. This is because it increases the danger of drug use and could cause death. But no one has ever said not to mix uppers and downers because it wasn't fun.
- Grangar 9y agoLying on the floor of a club curled up drooling all over yourself in a dissociated state doesn't sound very appealing to me. I'd keep that for controllable environments.
- sincerely 9y agoKetamine is a pretty popular club drug in Europe, but isn't used much for that purpose in North America (outside of very specific "scenes").
- dankohn1 9y agoIt's this xkcd, but with the rats generalizing about male scientists: https://xkcd.com/385/ https://xkcd.com/385/
- thunderman10 9y agoWhat if the female researchers identify as male?
- GuB-42 9y agoThat's igNobel worthy research, that's all I have to say. (https://www.improbable.com/ig/ https://www.improbable.com/ig/)