Posted: Mar 29, 2011 12:27 am
Federico wrote:Mr. Samsa,
I must say I'm really surprised that a clever and well read person like you failed to detect the huge and unpardonable error of not quoting the pioneer work of Bernard Brodie on the role of serotonin on brain workings and particularly -- in collaboration with
G.L.Gessa -- on sex preference. Errare humanum est.
Wikipedia
"Bernard Beryl Brodie (1907 – 1989), a leading researcher on drug therapy, is considered by many to be the founder of modern pharmacology and brought the field to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. He was a major figure in the field of drug metabolism, the study of how drugs interact in the body and how they are absorbed. A member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Brodie was a founder and former chief of the Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology at the National Heart Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland."
PS His Alma Mater was McGill U.
Well you sure showed me. That is known as a "burn".
A few niggles I have with your argument though:
1) Despite my cleverness and well-readness, I'm not actually expected to have read every single article that has ever been written.
2) You haven't specified which paper by Brodie and Gessa that you thought was important. I'm sure that between the two of them they've written a handful of papers, many of which are to do with the effects of serotonin on the brain.
3) Just because an author writes on a similar topic (i.e. serotonin and sexual behavior) does not mean that their research is necessarily important to the work at hand. For example, in the paper in the OP, the introduction of serotonin to the brain (like the paper you presented) is only tangentially related, hence why the discussion of such research only earned itself half a paragraph in the introduction.
4) When we read the paragraph that mentions research in this area, we find that instead of mentioning the "seminal" research that you linked to, they instead cited the actual seminal research on the topic - that is, they cited the original research which preceded the work of Fiacco, Brodie and Gessa. Specifically: Ferguson, J. et al. “Hypersexuality” and behavioral changes in cats caused by administration of p-chlorophenylalanine. Science 168, 499–501 (1970), and Malmnäs, C. & Meyerson, B. p-Chlorophenylalanine and copulatory behaviour in the male rat. Nature 232, 398–400 (1971).
5) Since the effects of introducing serotonin to the brain and observing effects on sexual behavior was only a minor point, these two papers would have sufficed to make their point, but they also included a third reference; Salis, P. & Dewsbury, D. p-Chlorophenylalanine facilitates copulatory behaviour in male rats. Nature 232, 400–401 (1971), which cites nearly every relevant paper ever written by Gessa, Tegliamonte, and Brodie.
6) The Del Fiacco paper you linked to has only been cited 11 times since 1974. It's such a minor paper that a peer reviewer would probably ask people to remove references to it, especially when making such a tangential point.
Summary: I think you've misunderstood the aim of the experiment in the OP, and you've done a poor review of the literature by failing to correctly identify the seminal work in the area you thought you were researching.