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Go figure: Harvard, Northeastern researchers discover female mice might be worth using in neurological research studies
By adamg on Fri, 03/10/2023 - 1:38pm
The Harvard Gazette reports that researchers, who have long excluded female mice from neurology-related studies because they were thought to be too hormonal are, in fact, good subjects - and might even be better for tests than the males of the species.
Rather than simply accepting decades of assumptions, researchers at Harvard Medical School and Northeastern put both male and female mice to work in tests involving their neurological functioning - they monitored mice given free range to explore an open space - and found that female-specific hormones did not cause lab equipment to explode or whatever the supposed common knowledge expected.
In fact, they found there was more variation in certain results among male mice (the report, of course, does not blame this on male hormones), which means that in certain tests, the females might be better subjects because researchers love base uniformity among the animals they use for tests.
Complete report: Mouse spontaneous behavior reflects individual variation rather than estrous state.
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Comments
What a wacky co-inky-dink!
“They were thought to be too hormonal” is the same bullshit reason men cited to prevent women from practicing science… or medicine… or banking… or voting…
Yea but seriously.....
Who is going to make the male mice sandwiches now?
HEEEYOOOOHHHHH!!!
how do they know
they are female?
Easy
They check their hormone levels.
how do you tell the difference between M&F chromosomes
pull down their genes.
They...
are scientists.
So I used to raise mice, and
So I used to raise mice, and let me put it like this: you can _definitely_ tell which mice are male, so the females are the other ones.
aren't the female mice more expensive
like, you have to buy them dinner first
Hormonal complexity
Humans are hormonally complex.
Humans are behaviorally complex.
The quest for clean data and perfect linear relationships and normal distributions is a quixotic and fictitious piece of nonsense when dealing with living systems, including humans.
Any fool who thinks it is "just simpler" to restrict to males and then generalizes the results belongs in the same burnt out dumpster that Nate Silver jumped into when he failed to understand or deal with study design complexities and complicated statistics for complicated humans.
The woke agenda has gone too far!
Now cancel-culture is coming after the white lab mice!
/s
White mouse lines are more
White mouse lines are more typically used in cancer research. Most animal research with mice I've done has been with BL6 "black" mice, because they don't have good lawyers.
Equal rights
So now female lab mice get to 'enjoy' the same experimental treatments, then get killed and dissected just like their male counterparts?
I suppose that is progress of a sort.
Well, they were getting born anyway
so presumably this means they're getting killed as adults now, rather than as pinkies.
More like human women will
More like human women will get to enjoy medical research that accounts for the physical differences between male and female subjects. Women's health is a tragedy in this country and it starts from the very bottom, in that medical research uniformly eliminates females from basic medical labwork.
Maybe one day, us left handed
Maybe one day, us left handed people, can participate in studies too.