Sex matters in experiments on party drug — in mice
Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers.
Hasnain says:
"Suspecting that scent was involved, the researchers put the animals inside a fume hood so that the mice couldn’t smell who was injecting them. This completely eliminated the effect of the ketamine, regardless of the experimenter’s sex. When Georgiou and her colleagues placed a t-shirt worn by a man next to the mice in the fume hood, mice injected with ketamine swam for longer than those injected with a placebo. This suggested that male odour was necessary for the drug to work."
Posted on 2017-11-22T06:03:39+0000