Lab Mice Are Stressed Out By Male Scientists, Which May Skew Results
Albino lab mouse Wikimedia Commons Mice get stressed out in response to human men, but not women, a new study shows. Why would I care? I'm not a mouse psychologist. Well, this is actually a big deal, since reams and reams of research have been done using mice as, well, "lab rats," without realizing that the gender of the scientist could be confounding the results. Confounding how? The new study, published in Nature Methods, found that mice exposed to male experimenters were much less sensitive to pain than control animals. The same effect was seen when mice were exposed to shirts worn by men, men's underarm secretions, or bedding used by other male mammals. Thus, for example, if a male researcher were testing how a certain compound effected pain tolerance, the results could be swayed. "People have not paid attention to this...