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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

#191

Post by otakucode »

freeflight wrote: post #157
Declanomous wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I 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…

Then 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.)

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#192

Post by [deleted] »

passwordqq wrote: post #119
evincarofautumn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose humans tend to underuse, or undertrain, their senses, so we fail to consider the possibility that other animals might be taking advantage of their senses in different ways. In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like…

I believe you. Have you considered the possibility that it wasn't your ears?

[deleted]

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#193

Post by blhack »

rdtsc wrote: post #18

It'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 hormona…

Listen to this interview with Robert Sapolsky. Somewhat of a superstar in this field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obmt_PkIfBE

(Ignore the person interviewing him)

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#194

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

nonbel wrote: post #159
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it's outright fraud to present your results as reliable when there's radically uncontrolled variables that dominate the results.

This is also naive. In that case you won't be able to publish your results in prestigious journals and your career will die out. That said, you do learn not to act 100% confident. You need to say "This suggests that" instead of "This proves that", etc. Anyway, the solution to reliable data is simple: Have multiple competing groups try to repeat the work as closely as possible. Now that you have something to hang your…

> This is also naive. In that case you won't be able to publish your results in prestigious journals and your career will die out.

Charlatan fortunetellers aren't owed careers as scientists -- if they can't produce reliable, predictive models because they utterly fail to control experiments,then they should have their careers destroyed.

We've seen enough damage from corporate leaders and politicians relying on guides to reading chicken entrails masquerading as science.

It's time to stop the fraud.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#195

Post by gwern »

jaggederest wrote: post #81
gwern wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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 som…

I think it would be very interesting to have labs run detailed A-A studies to investigate these kind of things. "This kind of mouse we raised under these conditions, and we changed nothing, but they varied in these ways over time" I often wonder whether the variables we check against are actually as independent and subject to the central limit theorem as we assume.

You can run A/A studies in the sense of permutation tests or bootstraps where you shuffle individual mice which weren't treated and see how often you get a 'significant' result; this is how you can see stuff like litter or cage or room effects (ie mice housed close to each other will respond more similarly to each other, and woe betide you if you do your 'randomization' by selecting from different cages rather than selecting from different individuals!) eg "Design, power, and interpretation of studies in the standard murine model of ALS" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.654... , Scott et al 2008, subsamples data from their 'control' mice to empirically estimate pseudo-effects and the null distribution. This is equivalent to raising two batches of mice and comparing. More interesting are multi-lab attempts at eliminating that heterogeneity and getting consistency in results, the most recent example being _C. elegans_ life extension - it turns out to be incredibly hard to harmonize labs in terms of measurements, environment, and results, and that's for well-established effects in model organisms which are about as simple as possible.

Unsurprisingly, there's a ton of heterogeneity which means it's easy to violate your statistical assumptions (i.i.d. being more important than normality here, I think) and so you get a lot of false positives. It's similar to the brain imaging issue: the assumption of spatial locality and Gaussianness is not really true and drives a lot of false-positive _p_-value inflation. There are really quite a lot of problems with animal studies, so it's not a surprise that they wipe out spectacularly when transferring to human.

I keep a list of systematic reviews & meta-analyses I run across at https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ#fn95 One of the most impressive ones, I think, are sepsis treatments: ~150 sepsis treatment experiments in humans based on mouse/rat experiments, and all of them failed: "Genomic responses in mouse models poorly mimic human inflammatory diseases", Seok et al 2013 http://www.pnas.org/content/110/9/3507.full.html

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#196

Post by fhood »

calinet6 wrote: post #172
ComputerGuru wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

This 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.

You 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.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#197

Post by rdtsc »

marcosdumay wrote: post #163
rdtsc wrote: post #18

It'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 hormona…

> 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?

> 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.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#198

Post by JCharante »

vlehto wrote: post #177
evincarofautumn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose humans tend to underuse, or undertrain, their senses, so we fail to consider the possibility that other animals might be taking advantage of their senses in different ways. In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like…

I used to hear transistors very clearly. One of the things I knew as a kid from anther room or sometimes even from outside was if someone had their TV on. The noise was so high pitched that I didn't even consider it a noise. I just knew and didn't think much about it. One weird memory is that I remember detecting objects in silent and dark room at home if they were like 10cm from my head. Even with eyes closed. I'm n…

> One weird memory is that I remember detecting objects in silent and dark room at home if they were like 10cm from my head. Even with eyes closed. I'm not sure if it's real or kids magical thinking. But it could have been very high pitched/ambient noise echoing from surfaces.

I think that's something that is common, but I have no idea what it's called.

If you hold something (especially if it's sharp) up to someone's forehead but not close enough for it to make contact with them, they will get this weird sensation building up in their forehead. Or at least I and a lot of the people I've tried it with have. It wasn't in a completely dark room so I bet you could see the shadow through your eyelids but it's still pretty weird.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#199

Post by majewsky »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #184
zaarn wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how can we trust you to tell the truth about this?

My personal motto is: Don't be evil. Does that help? ;)

Google has the same motto, and we can see how that's going...

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#200

Post by majewsky »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #194
nonbel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also naive. In that case you won't be able to publish your results in prestigious journals and your career will die out. That said, you do learn not to act 100% confident. You need to say "This suggests that" instead of "This proves that", etc. Anyway, the solution to reliable data is simple: Have multiple competing groups try to repeat the work as closely as possible. Now that you have something to hang your…

> This is also naive. In that case you won't be able to publish your results in prestigious journals and your career will die out. Charlatan fortunetellers aren't owed careers as scientists -- if they can't produce reliable, predictive models because they utterly fail to control experiments,then they should have their careers destroyed. We've seen enough damage from corporate leaders and politicians relying on guides…

Consider the consequences of what you're demanding: You'd basically outlaw any research on complex systems. Everything in biology, sociology, archeology, climate science, etc. Is that a reasonable response to the problem at hand?
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