Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
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Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
#2Implications for Burning Man?
Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
#3Before 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 ...
Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
#4Why does the article say that the same effect will not hold for humans? Is there anything to substantiate that?
Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
#5Before 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 ...
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Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
#6[deleted]
Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
#7Why does the article say that the same effect will not hold for humans? Is there anything to substantiate that?
It'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_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.
Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
#8> 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.
Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
#9Before 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 ...
In 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.
Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
#10What if a trans man administers the Ketamine?