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 ...
