Experimenters’ sex modulates mouse behaviors in ketamine trial
nature.com
nature.com
I accidentally found myself in a position where I ended up going through decontamination chambers, donning a 'bunny suit', and doing the install for tech systems supporting rodent studies in a vivarium a few years back. Because of paranoia over pheromone contamination, I wasn't even allowed into the actual room with the rodents - I communicated with someone inside the study room while looking into the room via a window and directing them as they attached cables between systems. After that point, we had a functional wifi network in that general area of the vivarium and we never needed to send another 'techie' in again (we could just have the studies' operators do installs over video calls once we had a network).
This paper builds on that research by examining the neurobiology of ketamine response in the presence of male scent.
Here's a more readable summary and context of the linked paper: https://neurosciencenews.com/ketmaine-administration-gender-...
I knew a rodent behavior professor in grad school who happened to only have women in his lab. No reports of being a creep, lots of reports of him being extremely rigorous in methodology.
Things like what they could smell, what they could hear, navigating by lights in the roof, individuals interacting with them, them learning 'tells' from the way the experiment was run that leaked info.
I assume there's some textbook on this for rat experiments.
edit not the one I remember but this is an overview:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8073298/
Things like whether the mouse had more sisters than brothers can have an impact.
These are all factors that people should be taking into account, and yet unfortunately they do not. Some of it is practicality, it's incredibly challenging and expensive to control for everything, so you randomize certain factors instead. Confounding effects can sometimes be small enough to be washed out anyway.
Nonetheless, it is known by psychophysicists (people who do their best to measure behavior rigorously) that all of these factors are important. Good behavioral research is incredibly challenging to get right, the best people know this, but most published behavioral research is quite sloppy.
A different experiment, for instance, would be if mice reacted differently to per-hormone-therapy-transgendered researchers versus cisgendered researchers of the same sex.
Moreover, in the past decade a large segment of the left has been actively pushing back against these distinctions and attempting to essentialize (i.e. root in biology) normative gender behaviors. In the eyes of some trans activists essentializing gender norms would reduce anti-trans prejudice. I personally think it's misguided and goes too far, but it does reveal some flaws in the logic of the dichotomy. Some normative gender behaviors undoubtedly are rooted in biology, notwithstanding individual variation. But all such dichotomies are flawed--either intrinsically, or because of how they frame the relevant questions; it's the nature of the simplifications we humans make, and must make, to impose order on the natural world. I haven't seen any good alternatives to the sex/gender dichotomy, and I fail to see how anything constructive can come about from tearing it down.
To the Editor:
The term "gender" is increasingly misused as a substitute for "sex." Does "gender" appear to reflect a greater sophistication, or reluctance to use a term with a possible indecent connotation?
"The Gender Gulf" by Louis Harris (Op-Ed, Dec. 7) misuses the term three times (not counting the headline), including this: "the generation gap is less evident and the gender gap more acute." Among the same day's letters, one ("Sexism on Sesame St.") misuses gender five times including "gender imbalance."
"The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage" by Theodore M. Bernstein (New York, 1965) states, "gender is a grammatical term, denoting (in English) whether words pertaining to a noun or pronoun are classed as masculine, feminine or neuter. It is not a substitute for 'sex' (but then, what is?). Indeed, in some foreign languages 'gender' often disregards sex. In German, for example, 'Weib,' The word for woman, is neuter; in French 'plume,' the word for pen, a sexless article, is feminine. To use 'gender' as if it were synonymous with 'sex' is an error, and a particularly unpardonable one in scientific writing."
From Fowler's "Modern English Usage" edited by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford, second edition, 1965):
"Gender, n., is a grammatical term only. To talk of 'persons' or 'creatures of the masculine or feminine gender,' meaning 'of the male or female sex,' is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder."
I can only assume you have elected to permit this misuse, despite a valid and useful distinction between the terms.
SIDNEY WEINSTEIN Danbury, Conn., Dec. 10, 1990
The writer is editor in chief, International Journal of Neuroscience.
https://archive.ph/2020.06.11-213210/https://www.nytimes.com...
Here's William Safire talking about it in 1984 ("On Language; Goodbye Sex, Hello Gender"):
https://archive.ph/2022.07.07-142246/https://www.nytimes.com...
Webster's 1828: https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/gender
Webster's 1913: https://www.websters1913.com/words/Gender
Both include "sex, male or female" as a definition; the 1913 marks it as "[Obs. or Colloq.]" while the 1828 does not.
That's how language changes over time.
Incidentally, we don't have the concept of "homogender" and "heterogender" to this day - at least in English. I can't speak for other languages. This also demonstrates a clear difference between "sex" and "gender."
Anyway, I got used to it because it's a useful distinction when applied to people.
I'm pretty sure in a 20th century dictionary you'll find gender was a purely grammatical term. And it was an uncommon word in English because all of our nouns are not gendered like so many other languages.
Old french/vulgar latin had a neuter gender, which pronoun sounded a lot like the male pronoun, and with nominative ending who were the same. Hence male pronouns are the default pronouns.
"The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism."
Some decades on, he noted that the rationale for introducing the term was to "make it possible to write about people who came into one's office as either male or female, but of whom it could not be said that their sex role in the specific genital sense was either male or female insofar as they had a history of birth defect of the sex organs. The majority of people who contributed to this new meaning of gender were hermaphrodites or intersexes. To them, social science and social history overall owe a debt of gratitude."
It has two meanings, the biological sex of an organism and the biological reproduction of that organism.
The other alternative would have been them doing some experimental fucking next to the mice to see what happens. Such a paper would undoubtedly have been titled differently.
"Experimenters' (possessive) sex" : so, their biological sex is the only thing they can posses in this sentence. They can't "possess" sexual reproduction in this context, that would not make any sense. This is just simple grammar.
Gender would also make zero sense because this is not an article about gender.
I can understand the confusion if English isn't your first language but outside of that it's very clear.
2: capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways
Thanks to grammar, we are literally incapable of understanding "sex" in this context to mean anything other than biological sex. I can't believe I'm having to explain this multiple times.
The only argument people are making is that they lack the reading comprehension to understand the sentence correctly.
Science does not need to adopt a whole new language because the rest of popular culture is ambiguous.
And unless there's the possibility that people are fucking in front of the mice, there's no ambiguity here.
I'd assume it's quite unlikely mice care about psychological characteristics of researchers, but it'd be an interesting piece of research to read :)
Even in animal husbandry, determining one from the other is called sexing and not gendering. Some fish and other aquatic animals change sex over the course of their lives - never a mention of gender.
Gender is a human social construct, albeit closely connected to sex. Loosely you could perhaps say that gender is the cultural and societal presentation of one's sex.
If you were person speaking English before about 2000 or so, maybe a bit later, and you were neither a gender studies researcher or in touch with that discipline directly, the words would literally both mean the same thing and basically it’d be a question of which the scientific field in question used more.
Gender is about grammar and pronouns. It is a lot more important in other languages than English, and often has nothing to do with sex. There are languages where the genders are "alive" and "dead", or "adult" and "child or animal".
To reiterate one of my other comments, the time of appearance and usage of the terms show how language changes over time. As of yet, I'm unaware of "homogender" and "heterogender" terms, although they can be translated directly into known/existing sexuality categories that aren't the same as heterosex and homosex.
Weinstein may have a point here but he is only unique in trying to use it to stir up controversy and undermine science in general.
One specific very inbred strain of mouse accounts for something like three quarters of all mouse experiments.
By the way I'm understanding it, sounds perhaps like he may have a point? If the majority of tests are performed on genetically limited breeds, then it would seem that more people ought to be looking into this
There are many potential issues with lab strains beyond genetics such as microbiome, developmental processes, nutrition, etc.
Your body produces a number of compounds which can be smelled.