Posted: Mar 25, 2011 7:48 am
jim wrote:I just read about this on the bbc news website.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12825688
My first reaction ill admit is a fairly strong one, and quite frankly its been bothering me.
Just what the fuck are they making gay mice for?
Using mice in a lab, fair enough I get that. But what is learned from this?
This is an honest question, I truly do not understand why we are doing this.
If the aim of the experiment was to "create gay mice", then you might have a point. However, they weren't. Their research was to look at how serotonin affected sexual behavior of mammals (based on an extension of issues that anti-depressants have on people who take them). So the potential importance of this research is not fully known, but it's undeniably added to our body of knowledge on what biological factors contribute to sexual behavior.
@Nats: I agree with Ed Yong's skepticism about the specificity of the effect of serotonin on sexual behavior. Serotonin is linked rather intimately to learning and behavior in general, so I'd be interested in seeing how these mice respond to various other learning tasks. At the very least, I'd like to see stricter controls and more ingeniously designed experimental setups to make sure that it is the serotonin that is affecting the sexual behavior, as opposed to it being a more indirect cause.