11 ms·
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
by Taniwha 9y ago
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, 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.
- calinet6 9y agoThis is really interesting. Clearly they're trying to control for sensitive variables that make little sense even to them, and yet they're still using rodents as subjects and publishing studies likely without mention of these oddities. Not saying everyone is doing it wrong, but wow.
- fhood 9y agoYou have to allow for some level of pragmatism. They found a method that seems to provide better data without actively biasing their results. Rodents make convenient test subjects, and no scientist wants (or more likely it doesn't even occur to them) to include an unproven methodology in their published work.
- kbutler 9y agoAre they publishing "make sure only [female name] handles the mice"? Or do they just publish, "X caused effect Y"? Frankly, identifying why it requires a female, or female non-cat owner sounds like it may be more interesting than whatever other result they are working on...
- Declanomous 9y agoIf results were thrown out because of a confounding factor then it would hopefully be mentioned in the paper. I've had a similar thought about these little insights. There are literally thousands of times more biology undergrads than there are people doing biology research. Biological experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. There are so many confounding variables, data is hard to collect, etc, that experiments bomb as often as they succeed. A lot of these experiments are extremely well supported, so you might actually be able to discover something novel if you were able to track the failures. Anyways, I don't do anything with biology anymore, but I strongly believe that biology is a field where citizen scientists could make a meaningful impact.
- freeflight 9y agoI wonder how practical it would be to automate all the rodent handling/experimenting? Because that seems like it'd be the only way to properly remove such unaccountable influences, like people smelling of cat/giving off different smells and thus influencing the reactions of the animals. Couldn't it also be possible that rodents reacting like that is the result of established practices? I.e.: Rodents get only handled by females, rodents adapt to that female smell while reacting differently to the male smell due to its unfamiliarity?
- SeanDav 9y agoEven automation would not solve this issue. If these results are scent related, then it is quite possible that different automation methods would produce different scents, or even the same method, in a different environment / location. This is a fascinating issue.
- ensignavenger 9y agoBut you could at least use the same automation methods across different study groups within the same study, eliminating potential confounding variables between your groups.
- otakucode 9y agoThen you would have to deal with the effect of subjecting the mice to such a degree of control, precision of action, predictability of environment, and other factors. As was found with the 'Rat Park' experiments in the 70s, experiments on rats in cages are not informative about the behavior of rats not in cages. It is tremendously difficult to study systems as complex as living animals, and we ignore "unimportant" factors at our peril. How different would our society be if the Rat Park experiments, which showed that rats addicted to cocaine will naturally ween themselves off of the drug when provided with a stimulating social environment, was reported on first instead of the one we heard about instead that claimed cocaine was so addictive that a rat which takes a dose becomes inescapably addicted and will dose themselves with it until they die? (Which they will.... if they are locked in a cage and the alternative is just living in a miserable cage.)
- jrcii 9y agoWe should see what would happen to their oxygen consumption if one of the guys identified as a female, because that means they're female, right? That's what NPR and the San Francisco liberals who run this website told me to think.
- autokad 9y agointeresting stuff, hope this was all documented in the papers derived from those experiments
- Declanomous 9y agoI didn't go to a research University, and I'm fairly sure none of the staff used mice as a model organism. I think they were merely used in student experiments. Now some of those students may have published work as part of their senior capstone, however it's pretty unlikely. You need a lot of knowledge to get to the point where you can publish something meaningful in biology. If you were to publish a work as an undergrad, you are probably working on a professor's project or with a less complicated topic.
- 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
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 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.