
Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers - dbcooper
http://www.nature.com/news/sex-matters-in-experiments-on-party-drug-in-mice-1.23022
======
Taniwha
Before 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 ...

~~~
Declanomous
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.

~~~
freeflight
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 by females, rodents
adapt to that female smell while reacting differently to the male smell due to
its unfamiliarity?

~~~
otakucode
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.)

~~~
verbify
Rat Park can only sometimes be replicated:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292?dopt=Abstract](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292?dopt=Abstract)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2616610](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2616610)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3696469](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3696469)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18463628](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18463628)

SSC wrote an article about it:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/25/against-rat-
park/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/25/against-rat-park/)

------
cm2012
This reminds me of Feynman's story of the researcher who eliminated possible
variables in rat experiments one by one, to find a surprising result (EDIT: To
find that rats didn't need smell, spatial relationships, taste, or vision to
find the cheese - the sound of the floor was enough)
[https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/the_rat_experi...](https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/the_rat_experiment_you_dont_know_about_but_should.html)

~~~
evincarofautumn
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. Curves and lines, and strokes of different lengths and directions
against the grain of the paper, have different frequency profiles; lifting and
setting the pencil back down generates a tapping sound…that sort of thing.

People often don’t believe me when I tell them this, because they figure that
human hearing just isn’t that sensitive, or that the sound of handwriting
doesn’t convey that much information—but it does! You’ve simply never noticed
or paid attention to it because you had no desire or reason to. Another animal
might, for various reasons.

Once, my dad picked up my Magna-Doodle board as we stood outside my room, and
started writing a message to me. I listened closely and said “…Clean your
room?”—he had written “Cʟᴇᴀɴ Yᴏᴜʀ Rᴏᴏᴍ”—and I’ll never forget his perplexed
look, first at me, then turning the board around to see if any light could be
shining through. He _still_ didn’t quite believe that I could do what I had
just done in front of him!

~~~
vlehto
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 not
sure if it's real or kids magical thinking. But it could have been very high
pitched/ambient noise echoing from surfaces.

~~~
ajnin
What you heard was probably not transistors but the flyback transformer that
TVs use to generate the high voltage needed by cathode ray tubes. They
generally operate around 16-18kHz, in the high range of human hearing that
young people can hear easily but most people lose that ability as they age.

------
hn_throwaway_99
> 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.

~~~
leggomylibro
Yeah, just wait - ten years from now some organic chemist will be thinking
about some weird nonsensical reaction like that and, that'll be the story of
how Ultra-PCP was first discovered and synthesized.

~~~
mabbo
But only if your dealer is male.

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rdtsc
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 hormonal system to respond to
it, maybe trigger affection towards it. Even worse, spray it to induce rage or
hate for example.

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

(Ignore the person interviewing him)

~~~
rdtsc
Thanks, started to listen to it. Interesting stuff.

Heh, the question about the better soccer teams from countries that have
higher toxoplasmosis infestation rates. Pretty silly correlation.

Also interesting the idea that males infected with toxo are more attractive to
females and since it can spread through sperm it is now a symbiotic
relationship. I knew about risky behavior and on, but this was a new thing I
haven't heard about before.

Then oxytocin being "exploited" by dogs and pets is strange. Just waiting till
the latest phones and cars are sprayed with something that also triggers that.

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aaavl2821
there is a published study showing that loud rock music cures type one
diabetes in mice, along with 400-500 other therapies, none of which work in
humans. There are two main vendors for these diabetic mice; for some reason,
mice from one vendor develop diabetes at a different rate and certain kinds of
studies work better in them. "Everything" cures cancer in mice. Skilled animal
researchers can manipulate most mouse studies to skew results in their favor.
But it is the best we have in many cases...

~~~
simonh
It’s bern prett well proven that research causes cancer in mice.

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BurningFrog
Since they got the same effect with just a male worn shirt present, they
should be able to isolate what chemicals cause this particular effect.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
It could also be chemical + association. Or just association.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Easy enough to test with mice that have never seen/smelled males before.

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Grangar
Why does the article mention ketamine as a club drug? It's a terrible drug for
clubs if anything.

~~~
eulo__
Strongly disagree. Speed and Ketamine in combination is probably the greatest
time you'll ever have.

~~~
Danihan
I thought you're not supposed to mix uppers and downers..

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
You are not supposed to mix uppers and downers.

This is because it increases the danger of drug use and could cause death. But
no one has ever said not to mix uppers and downers because it wasn't fun.

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hrithikguy
Why does the article say that the same effect will not hold for humans? Is
there anything to substantiate that?

~~~
stevenwoo
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...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html)

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.

~~~
Simon_says
I bought some live lobsters to kill (humanely, with a knife to the brain) and
steam. I only had him in my custody for a couple hours, but I got attached. I
had a bad experience thinking about taking a life, and it kinda fucked me up.
I don't think I'll be doing it again. If I had to kill everything I ate, I'd
be vegetarian. But I have no problem buying it at the store.

~~~
fjsolwmv
Is that intellectually honest, to hide from the truth you know about your
food?

~~~
mark_edward
It's not, I feel the same way, but it's hard to be intellectually honest. I
will be a vegetarian soon I think, it's been getting harder and harder to
manage the dissonance since I got a dog.

~~~
ComputerGuru
It’s funny; that’s never a problem with a cat since they’re natural hunters
and carnivores.

~~~
yorwba
Dogs are natural hunters and carnivores, too. I don't see how they are
different from cats.

~~~
fbarred
Many dogs are natural hunters, but like bears, pigs, and humans, but unlike
cats, dogs are omnivores.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnivore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnivore).

~~~
stevenwoo
Breeds that were selectively bred in areas without carb sources for humans
cannot digest starch effectively - they still are in a way genetically closer
to wolves which can only minimally digest starch. (Siberian Huskies/Alaskan
Malemutes that we commonly associate with Northern native peoples like the
Eskimo off the top of my head)

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GuB-42
That's igNobel worthy research, that's all I have to say.
([https://www.improbable.com/ig/](https://www.improbable.com/ig/))

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barking
Someone I know used to have to get a blood test every week. One of the regular
testers used to hurt him, the other didn't. I'm sure it affected to the stress
of the visits which operator was waiting for him. With a small sample of
people doing the injecting it's hard to eliminate the effect of operator
technique.

~~~
mabbo
So, didn't read the article then? They accounted for that in multiple ways.

~~~
barking
No need for the snark, I saw the steps they took to account for that but the
fact is that they still had a small pool of human operators.

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dilap
What if a trans man administers the Ketamine?

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ttul
Implications for Burning Man?

~~~
Shengbo
Don't bring mice to Burning Man.

------
dankohn1
It's this xkcd, but with the rats generalizing about male scientists:
[https://xkcd.com/385/](https://xkcd.com/385/)

