Model Organisms Are Not Static

About 70 percent of scientists say they have tried and failed to reproduce an experiment performed by their peers. And animal studies are, perhaps, among the least reproducible of all experiments because, in an effort to reduce the number of animals used in research, scientists often avoid repeating them to confirm positive results. When animal studies are replicated, however, they often yield different outcomes. In 2006, researchers at the University of Alberta tried to replicate a 1993 mouse study. But they found that the stress levels of their mice, when put through an anxiety-producing maze, differed from the original data. They attributed this discrepancy in results to minor variations between laboratories, but could something else have been amiss? In the early 2000s, eight separate laboratories conducted the same experiment (called the “elevated maze test”) on four inbred mouse models (DBA/2, C57BL/6, C3H, and BALB/c). Many laboratories, denoted by the first name of their autho ... Read full article.