Pain Researcher Quits Academia, Takes Lab Home with Him

After resigning from the University of New England last year, Geoffrey Bove continues to study the effects of massage on rats in a facility he set up in his house.

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ABOVE: Geoffrey Bove’s home lab is fitted with a rack for rat cages and an electrophysiology rig for recording from neurons in the muscles of anesthetized animals.
COURTESY OF GEOFFREY BOVE

On a video call from his home in Maine, Geoffrey Bove gives me a tour of his animal facility. In a small room off his garage, he points out equipment for conducting electrophysiology recordings on anesthetized rats, an area to clean out the rodents’ plastic cages, and a rack where the enclosures are stacked. And he shows me his rats, to which he gives regular massages as part of a project to see if such manual therapy—a form of complementary and alternative medicine—can prevent or treat the development of fibrosis.

In early 2020, around the time that many researchers temporarily shuttered their labs as the COVID-19 pandemic forced lockdowns and institutional closures around the world, Bove walked out of academia ...

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  • Jef Akst

    Jef Akst was managing editor of The Scientist, where she started as an intern in 2009 after receiving a master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses.

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