Todd Gould’s lab members couldn’t replicate their experiments. As New Scientist reports, they got different results when testing the antidepressant effects of ketamine in mice depending on which members of the lab conducted the experiment, which involved measuring how long the mice would swim when placed in a tank. Gould, a psychiatry researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, had read a 2014 study that found the presence of men, but not women, dulls mice’s pain, and according to a university news release, his team also heard anecdotes from other labs about experimental results that seemed to be influenced by researcher sex. So they decided to test whether this could explain the inconsistencies they saw.
The team reported in an August 30 Nature Neuroscience paper that the sex of researchers working with mice did indeed influence outcomes involving ketamine treatment, with the scent of human males triggering the ...
