Nicole C. Nelson, an ethnographer specializing in science and technology studies, delves into the intricate world of animal experiments for psychiatric research. She discusses the challenges of using mice to understand human behaviors like alcoholism. The conversation explores the complex relationship between animal models and the scientific process, emphasizing how contextual factors influence experimental outcomes. Nelson also highlights the struggle researchers face in communicating complex findings to the media, revealing the tension between scientific rigor and public understanding.
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insights INSIGHT
Complexity as Practical Challenge
Complexity in behavior genetics is a practical challenge, not just a philosophical claim. -Each subtle change in environment can alter observed mouse behavior, making findings unstable but better reflecting complexity.
insights INSIGHT
Caution from Eugenics History
Behavior genetics carries a legacy of eugenics, making scientists cautious about claims.
This cautious stance tempers promises and sets long, uncertain horizons for discovery.
insights INSIGHT
Negotiating Model Usage Scope
Animal models are tools whose scope is carefully negotiated within the research community.
Model builders often restrain overclaims, emphasizing appropriate uses rather than exaggerating capabilities.
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Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders
Nicole C. Nelson
Nicole C. Nelson's "Model Behavior" offers a deep dive into the complexities of animal experiments in behavioral genetics. The book challenges traditional views of the laboratory as a place of controlled simplification, revealing a reality where stable findings are elusive. Nelson's ethnographic study highlights the crucial role of environmental factors, often overlooked in the pursuit of genetic explanations. The research underscores the inherent challenges in translating animal models to human behavior, emphasizing the provisional nature of scientific knowledge in complex systems. The book's insights are relevant to anyone interested in the philosophy of science, animal ethics, and the intricacies of scientific research.
Promising Genomics
Promising Genomics
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Aaron Panofsky
Mice are used as model organisms across a wide range of fields in science today--but it is far from obvious how studying a mouse in a maze can help us understand human problems like alcoholism or anxiety. How do scientists convince funders, fellow scientists, the general public, and even themselves that animal experiments are a good way of producing knowledge about the genetics of human behavior? In Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders(U Chicago Press, 2018), Nicole C. Nelson takes us inside an animal behavior genetics laboratory to examine how scientists create and manage the foundational knowledge of their field.
Behavior genetics is a particularly challenging field for making a clear-cut case that mouse experiments work, because researchers believe that both the phenomena they are studying and the animal models they are using are complex. These assumptions of complexity change the nature of what laboratory work produces. Whereas historical and ethnographic studies traditionally portray the laboratory as a place where scientists control, simplify, and stabilize nature in the service of producing durable facts, the laboratory that emerges from Nelson's extensive interviews and fieldwork is a place where stable findings are always just out of reach. The ongoing work of managing precarious experimental systems means that researchers learn as much--if not more--about the impact of the environment on behavior as they do about genetics. Model Behavior offers a compelling portrait of life in a twenty-first-century laboratory, where partial, provisional answers to complex scientific questions are increasingly the norm.
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