A professor at McGill University found that lab mice respond differently to male and female scientists.
Jeffrey Mogil, a McGill professor of behavioural neuroscience found that when induced with an inflammatory pain simulator, the mice did not respond as expected.
Mogil concluded that the presence of males in the room was the cause.
“The smell of males causes a chemical in the brain to be released, which inhibits the injected simulator to perform as it is supposed to,” Mogil said. “This is presumably caused by an anxiety response. Males are probably going into hunt mode or defending their territory against the other males present in the room.”
A similar response was seen in reaction to the bedding of other male animals such as dogs, cats, rats and guinea pigs, Mogil said.
This new discovery will affect the future of neurological research, according to Douglas Whalsten, a neuroscience professor at the University of Alberta.
“We must carefully balance every experiment so that equal numbers of mice in all conditions are tested by each experimenter doing the testing,” Whalsten said.
Testing environments will have to be more closely controlled, and the documentations will require details of the genders of any scientists present and the amount of time they were in attendance, according to Whalsten.
Matthew Hildegrad, a neuroscience professor at Carleton said this finding will reinforce the rigour of controlling as many variables as possible.
“Something as simple as keeping track of genders of mice and the sex of experimenters will have to be documented from now on,” Hildegrad said.
Hildegrad said Mogil’s discovery demonstrates “how subtle changes that we aren’t conscious of in studies can greatly affect an experiment’s outcome.”
Mogil said while his findings raise a number of questions regarding past experiments, it may aid in explaining differing outcomes in duplicated experiments, thus explaining a number of scientific mysteries.
“People are presenting it as bad news, but it is actually good news,” Mogil said.
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