The pituitary-adrenal axis "is highly circadianly driven," Dallman explains, "and when the lights go out in the middle of the day, you're giving the circadian clock a pulse that can reset the whole animal." Plunged into darkness, the nocturnal rats began to nibble, so Dallman and two other lab members quickly set up three flashlights in the small animal room. Rats don't require much light before they begin sleeping again, and Dallman doubts that the blackout ruined the experiment.
Nevertheless, she and other California life scientists worry that the state's energy crisis might spoil its biomedical research and biotech industry for years. "You can't get by without electricity in this field," says Renee Reijo Pera, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCSF, who constantly runs PCR machines. Experiments and the manufacture of drugs and reagents require precision and predictability, both of which can vanish on days punctuated by ...
