8 ms·

Experimenters’ sex modulates mouse behaviors in ketamine trial

71 points by birriel 4y ago

bhedgeoser 4y ago
It would regulate my behavior as well TBH.
codevark 4y ago
encryptluks2 4y ago
I wonder if the thousands of years of oppression and aggression by predominantly males has somehow imprinted on them. Gender isn't specifically well defined in the study and I wonder if it is more stereotypical nonverbal behaviors that might play an impact.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  I only have access to the title/abstract, but it seems pretty clear that it's mediated by scent.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Scent from what?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - irrational 4y ago
      Scent from bodies.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      Sweat, oils, pheromones, etc. Your body produces a number of compounds which can be smelled.
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        It is my understanding that these can vary greatly even based on the same sex. I don't have a subscription to read the full article but it seems very prone to having serious flaws.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
loceng 4y ago
Just wait until you hear about Bret Weinstein's discovery about lab mice telomeres: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s
- elefanten 4y ago
  Can you summarize the point of interest as it’s contained within a 2hr podcast
  - RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
    In a nutshell, Weinstein alleges that the breeding programs used by suppliers to produce lab mice and rats result in animals with artificially long telomeres as a side-effect, which makes them behave very differently from most mammals in response to a variety of drugs and treatments. Furthermore, presumably because this could conceivably invalidate the findings of decades of research, he alleges that journals and academics collectively turn a blind eye toward (or even blackball) anyone who attempts to sound the alarm with respect to this procedural flaw. If his premises are true, it would represent a ticking time bomb for the biological science research community not unlike "replication crises" faced by e.g. human psychology researchers.
    - gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
      Fortunately he had diverging options on Covid. Therefore he was blackballed from the larger scientific community. Unless and until he repents, he shan’t have publishing access to the Holy Journals
    - svnt 4y ago
      Genetically limited strains of inbred lab animals and some of their peculiarities are a known problem. Weinstein may have a point here but he is only unique in trying to use it to stir up controversy and undermine science in general. One specific very inbred strain of mouse accounts for something like three quarters of all mouse experiments.
collectedparts 4y ago
I'm not an expert on formal scientific writing but is it really more normal to say "sex" rather than "gender" here? I had to read this multiple times to avoid confusion given the alternate meaning.
- dymk 4y ago
  Sex is a set of physical characteristics, gender is a set of social norms. Indeed scientific articles will distinguish between the two. A different experiment, for instance, would be if mice reacted differently to per-hormone-therapy-transgendered researchers versus cisgendered researchers of the same sex.
  - umvi 4y ago
    It should be noted this is a very recent development though. I'm pretty sure if you looked in dictionaries made pre-2000, gender is synonymous with sex and was often the preferred term for biological sex since as GP points out, "sex" also means intercourse. Only in the last 10 years or so has the definition of gender been usurped to have a new distinct meaning to accommodate new social developments.
    - dymk 4y ago
      Biologists and sociologists have distinguished between sex and gender for far longer than a decade.
      - wahern 4y ago
        Not just biologists and sociologists, but pretty much all of academia. As a college student in the 1990s it was my understanding this distinction came about from 2nd wave feminism in the '60s and '70s, but since then I've come to learn that they goes back even further, into the 19th century at least. Moreover, in the past decade a large segment of the left has been actively pushing back against these distinctions and attempting to essentialize (i.e. root in biology) normative gender behaviors. In the eyes of some trans activists essentializing gender norms would reduce anti-trans prejudice. I personally think it's misguided and goes too far, but it does reveal some flaws in the logic of the dichotomy. Some normative gender behaviors undoubtedly are rooted in biology, notwithstanding individual variation. But all such dichotomies are flawed--either intrinsically, or because of how they frame the relevant questions; it's the nature of the simplifications we humans make, and must make, to impose order on the natural world. I haven't seen any good alternatives to the sex/gender dichotomy, and I fail to see how anything constructive can come about from tearing it down.
ghidle 4y ago
Note that a similar effect has been observed previously with regards to stress response and inhibition of pain, in Olfactory exposure to males, including men, causes stress and related analgesia in rodents by Sorge et al (which the linked paper cites). This paper builds on that research by examining the neurobiology of ketamine response in the presence of male scent. Here's a more readable summary and context of the linked paper: https://neurosciencenews.com/ketmaine-administration-gender-21329/ https://neurosciencenews.com/ketmaine-administration-gender-...
lamename 4y ago
Not the first time factors like this have been reported [0], and hopefully not the last. I knew a rodent behavior professor in grad school who happened to only have women in his lab. No reports of being a creep, lots of reports of him being extremely rigorous in methodology. [0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24776635/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24776635/
stubish 4y ago
Rather than focus on the sex of researchers here and in previous research, taking a step back this indicates that the individual researcher is important and will influence results. After all, not everyone of a particular sex emits the same quantities of the same pheromones in the same way. It seems studies need more isolation from the researchers, or we are going to end up with more unpronounceable studies because a key researcher was nearsighted and partial to garlic.
- sithadmin 4y ago
  These sorts of findings have convinced me that studies with any variation in the caretaker for rats (and maybe other animal models) are suspect. Maybe all of them are suspect, because in my experience the vivariums that house the animals for studies like this are generally densely populated and multi-tenant. Sure, they may have extreme entry procedures - but in the end, your rat study is sitting in a lab adjacent to two other labs that are doing god-knows-what, and the positive-pressure air system for each lab can't be totally effective when you have study staff in and out through doorways. Entry to the floor usually means airlock-entry; entry between labs generally doesn't. I accidentally found myself in a position where I ended up going through decontamination chambers, donning a 'bunny suit', and doing the install for tech systems supporting rodent studies in a vivarium a few years back. Because of paranoia over pheromone contamination, I wasn't even allowed into the actual room with the rodents - I communicated with someone inside the study room while looking into the room via a window and directing them as they attached cables between systems. After that point, we had a functional wifi network in that general area of the vivarium and we never needed to send another 'techie' in again (we could just have the studies' operators do installs over video calls once we had a network).
- hhho 4y ago
  Aside from pheromonal emissions, there's also evidence to indicate that experimental rodents distinguish between strangers and researchers they've grown familiar with over time.
im3w1l 4y ago
If wonder if the mice respond differently depending on where in the cycle a woman is.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I'm sure I read an article or book chapter that went through the astounding number of confounding variables experimenters discovered when running rat experiments. Things like what they could smell, what they could hear, navigating by lights in the roof, individuals interacting with them, them learning 'tells' from the way the experiment was run that leaked info. I assume there's some textbook on this for rat experiments. edit not the one I remember but this is an overview: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8073298/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8073298/ Things like whether the mouse had more sisters than brothers can have an impact.
- lamename 4y ago
  And it's not just rats. Anything with multiple senses, a circadian rhythm, developmental variables, individual genetic differences can be subject to this variability. These are all factors that people should be taking into account, and yet unfortunately they do not. Some of it is practicality, it's incredibly challenging and expensive to control for everything, so you randomize certain factors instead. Confounding effects can sometimes be small enough to be washed out anyway. Nonetheless, it is known by psychophysicists (people who do their best to measure behavior rigorously) that all of these factors are important. Good behavioral research is incredibly challenging to get right, the best people know this, but most published behavioral research is quite sloppy.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

71 points by birriel 4y ago

bhedgeoser 4y ago

It would regulate my behavior as well TBH.

codevark 4y ago

encryptluks2 4y ago

I wonder if the thousands of years of oppression and aggression by predominantly males has somehow imprinted on them. Gender isn't specifically well defined in the study and I wonder if it is more stereotypical nonverbal behaviors that might play an impact.

advisedwang 4y ago
I only have access to the title/abstract, but it seems pretty clear that it's mediated by scent.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Scent from what?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - irrational 4y ago
    Scent from bodies.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Sweat, oils, pheromones, etc. Your body produces a number of compounds which can be smelled.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      It is my understanding that these can vary greatly even based on the same sex. I don't have a subscription to read the full article but it seems very prone to having serious flaws.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

loceng 4y ago

Just wait until you hear about Bret Weinstein's discovery about lab mice telomeres: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s

elefanten 4y ago
Can you summarize the point of interest as it’s contained within a 2hr podcast
- RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
  In a nutshell, Weinstein alleges that the breeding programs used by suppliers to produce lab mice and rats result in animals with artificially long telomeres as a side-effect, which makes them behave very differently from most mammals in response to a variety of drugs and treatments. Furthermore, presumably because this could conceivably invalidate the findings of decades of research, he alleges that journals and academics collectively turn a blind eye toward (or even blackball) anyone who attempts to sound the alarm with respect to this procedural flaw. If his premises are true, it would represent a ticking time bomb for the biological science research community not unlike "replication crises" faced by e.g. human psychology researchers.
  - gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
    Fortunately he had diverging options on Covid. Therefore he was blackballed from the larger scientific community. Unless and until he repents, he shan’t have publishing access to the Holy Journals
  - svnt 4y ago
    Genetically limited strains of inbred lab animals and some of their peculiarities are a known problem. Weinstein may have a point here but he is only unique in trying to use it to stir up controversy and undermine science in general. One specific very inbred strain of mouse accounts for something like three quarters of all mouse experiments.

collectedparts 4y ago

I'm not an expert on formal scientific writing but is it really more normal to say "sex" rather than "gender" here? I had to read this multiple times to avoid confusion given the alternate meaning.

dymk 4y ago
Sex is a set of physical characteristics, gender is a set of social norms. Indeed scientific articles will distinguish between the two. A different experiment, for instance, would be if mice reacted differently to per-hormone-therapy-transgendered researchers versus cisgendered researchers of the same sex.
- umvi 4y ago
  It should be noted this is a very recent development though. I'm pretty sure if you looked in dictionaries made pre-2000, gender is synonymous with sex and was often the preferred term for biological sex since as GP points out, "sex" also means intercourse. Only in the last 10 years or so has the definition of gender been usurped to have a new distinct meaning to accommodate new social developments.
  - dymk 4y ago
    Biologists and sociologists have distinguished between sex and gender for far longer than a decade.
    - wahern 4y ago
      Not just biologists and sociologists, but pretty much all of academia. As a college student in the 1990s it was my understanding this distinction came about from 2nd wave feminism in the '60s and '70s, but since then I've come to learn that they goes back even further, into the 19th century at least. Moreover, in the past decade a large segment of the left has been actively pushing back against these distinctions and attempting to essentialize (i.e. root in biology) normative gender behaviors. In the eyes of some trans activists essentializing gender norms would reduce anti-trans prejudice. I personally think it's misguided and goes too far, but it does reveal some flaws in the logic of the dichotomy. Some normative gender behaviors undoubtedly are rooted in biology, notwithstanding individual variation. But all such dichotomies are flawed--either intrinsically, or because of how they frame the relevant questions; it's the nature of the simplifications we humans make, and must make, to impose order on the natural world. I haven't seen any good alternatives to the sex/gender dichotomy, and I fail to see how anything constructive can come about from tearing it down.

ghidle 4y ago

Note that a similar effect has been observed previously with regards to stress response and inhibition of pain, in Olfactory exposure to males, including men, causes stress and related analgesia in rodents by Sorge et al (which the linked paper cites). This paper builds on that research by examining the neurobiology of ketamine response in the presence of male scent. Here's a more readable summary and context of the linked paper: https://neurosciencenews.com/ketmaine-administration-gender-21329/ https://neurosciencenews.com/ketmaine-administration-gender-...

lamename 4y ago

Not the first time factors like this have been reported [0], and hopefully not the last. I knew a rodent behavior professor in grad school who happened to only have women in his lab. No reports of being a creep, lots of reports of him being extremely rigorous in methodology. [0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24776635/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24776635/

stubish 4y ago

Rather than focus on the sex of researchers here and in previous research, taking a step back this indicates that the individual researcher is important and will influence results. After all, not everyone of a particular sex emits the same quantities of the same pheromones in the same way. It seems studies need more isolation from the researchers, or we are going to end up with more unpronounceable studies because a key researcher was nearsighted and partial to garlic.

sithadmin 4y ago
These sorts of findings have convinced me that studies with any variation in the caretaker for rats (and maybe other animal models) are suspect. Maybe all of them are suspect, because in my experience the vivariums that house the animals for studies like this are generally densely populated and multi-tenant. Sure, they may have extreme entry procedures - but in the end, your rat study is sitting in a lab adjacent to two other labs that are doing god-knows-what, and the positive-pressure air system for each lab can't be totally effective when you have study staff in and out through doorways. Entry to the floor usually means airlock-entry; entry between labs generally doesn't. I accidentally found myself in a position where I ended up going through decontamination chambers, donning a 'bunny suit', and doing the install for tech systems supporting rodent studies in a vivarium a few years back. Because of paranoia over pheromone contamination, I wasn't even allowed into the actual room with the rodents - I communicated with someone inside the study room while looking into the room via a window and directing them as they attached cables between systems. After that point, we had a functional wifi network in that general area of the vivarium and we never needed to send another 'techie' in again (we could just have the studies' operators do installs over video calls once we had a network).
hhho 4y ago
Aside from pheromonal emissions, there's also evidence to indicate that experimental rodents distinguish between strangers and researchers they've grown familiar with over time.

im3w1l 4y ago

If wonder if the mice respond differently depending on where in the cycle a woman is.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I'm sure I read an article or book chapter that went through the astounding number of confounding variables experimenters discovered when running rat experiments. Things like what they could smell, what they could hear, navigating by lights in the roof, individuals interacting with them, them learning 'tells' from the way the experiment was run that leaked info. I assume there's some textbook on this for rat experiments. edit not the one I remember but this is an overview: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8073298/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8073298/ Things like whether the mouse had more sisters than brothers can have an impact.

lamename 4y ago
And it's not just rats. Anything with multiple senses, a circadian rhythm, developmental variables, individual genetic differences can be subject to this variability. These are all factors that people should be taking into account, and yet unfortunately they do not. Some of it is practicality, it's incredibly challenging and expensive to control for everything, so you randomize certain factors instead. Confounding effects can sometimes be small enough to be washed out anyway. Nonetheless, it is known by psychophysicists (people who do their best to measure behavior rigorously) that all of these factors are important. Good behavioral research is incredibly challenging to get right, the best people know this, but most published behavioral research is quite sloppy.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]