When you walk in the door, Fluffy (your dog, cat, or pet of choice)
jumps up, greets you, voices their approval. He can sense you; she can smell you; he loves you. What you may not realize is that when
Fluffy senses the men in your house, she might become a little stressed out.
You may have heard about this research article published in Nature Methods recently. I saw this story on the news: men
induce stress in laboratory mice.1 I laughed, and then I needed to learn more. So let us take a brief departure from
the seriousness that cancer evokes and discuss how and why men cause stress in
mice.
The Science:
This study comes out of Montreal and the laboratory of
Jeffrey Mogil. As a pain geneticist,
he studies the factors that determine sensitivity to pain. His lab staff started to notice and
anecdotally reported how their presence might affect the behavior of the
laboratory mice. Could this be
true? Or just a researcher’s too-critical eye? The only way to know for sure was to design some experiments
to answer the question: do animals respond differently in response to pain when
exposed to male and female researchers?
