5. 1. Situating animal behavior genetics
2. Containing complexity: At work in the
laboratory
3. Building animal models: Epistemic scaffolds
and experimental systems
4. Framing mouse, human, and discipline
5. The public life of animal behavior genetics
facts
6. Cautionary tales and experimental
practice
We were testing a knockout for drinking alcohol,
and they drank a lot of alcohol compared to wild
types. And we did it three times, and we got the
same answer, three times. And we said ,“Wow,
that’s pretty good.” So we published it, and in the
meantime, we’d gotten more mice to replace
ours because they’d gotten too old to breed
anymore. When we redid the drinking study, and
there was no difference!...
7. Cautionary tales and experimental
practice
… So we tested them again, and we got no
difference again! And we were scratching our
heads trying to figure out what went wrong, and
we screwed around with the parameters for a
year trying to figure out what was different, and
we’d get it sometimes, we wouldn’t get it other
times ... one study we’d get it in males, the next
one we’d get it in females . . . it was just really
weird. And then those mice got too old and he
sent us a third batch of mice, and lo and
behold, boom! There it was again, just really big.
10. Cautionary tales and experimental
practice
We had this situation last year, two years ago where
we couldn’t get a stimulation effect when our mice
were given methamphetamine. Many strains of mice
will show heightened locomotor behavior when
they’re given a dose of meth compared to the saline
animals. Well, all of a sudden, like we weren’t seeing
that in our animals. We’d seen it multiple, multiple
times. They didn’t show this acute response, and it
was just kind of like what the hell is going on? I
mean, I had people watch me make the drug, I had
people watch me do everything just make sure that
that wasn’t the problem.
11. Theorizing laboratory breakdowns
Collins: The “experimenter’s
regress” in cutting edge science
Jordan and Lynch:
Breakdowns in
routine scientific
practice
13. Theorizing laboratory breakdowns
G9: The more complex behavior is, the harder it is to get it to work.
And so for whatever unknown reason, things don't always turn out
as you expect them to.
NN: Like the mice wouldn't show a preference?
G9: Or all of a sudden they show some sort of innate bias for one side
versus the other for no particular reason.
NN: They decide they like the floor with the holes in it, and that's that?
G9: Yep, exactly. And so there are just difficulties with that, to get it set
up and running. It's not so much a technical problem, it's just
something that since it's so complicated, you can't figure out what's
going on that you're not controlling for.
