Of mice and deadly banana

So you're saying the reason my sex life is so messed up is because I've never liked the smell of bananas?

 

can anyone interpret the purpose of the study for me?

 

An accidental discovery of a formerly unknown instance of olfactory messaging in mammals seems like a fair thing to write a paper about.

 

I've seen worse.

 

I would say most basic science research has no apparent "purpose" applicable as being "useful" for ordinary people. Many scientists and most scholars in the non-science domains try to stretch their story to make it "applicable" to our lives so they can get grant proposals approved, but the major motivation for doing the research is to satisfy their curiosity. It may or may not pay off to advance the knowledge for applied science research. But that is the nature of the basic research.

 

To expand the base of human knowledge.

Because of funding shifts, research in the US has moved to applied research. Which is fine, but the ideals for applied research mostly come from basic research. Cutting funding to basic will eventually lead to a lack of things to study for applied.

 

There is a third form of research. Define a desired forward looking product functionality and it will establish focused research objectives to reach that goal. In some cases the focused research will need some identified new basic research results and these will spin off as side benefits from the project. I have been involved with two such long-term, forward looking, applied research projects and both generated patents and basic research results.

JeffD

 

Given that the two groups of mice were already in the lab for use in other research, maybe the question (if there is a question) should be what the purposes were of those two originally intended studies.

When they discovered that their two groups of mice were interacting with olfactory signaling, and that was a new thing to know about mammals, so they wrote it up and sent off the paper, I'm not sure what question is left about that, other than "well, wouldn't you?"

 

Agreed. However, I don't know if there has been much "shift" in recent years (say the last 30 years or so). As far back as I can remember, it has been always more emphasis on applied scientific research than on basic science. Not that successfully competing for grants for applied scientific research in such fields as medicine is getting any easier, but as far as the funding by US.gov goes, there has been always more emphasis on the research budget for the APPLIED sciences than for BASIC sciences. The graph below illustrates the point. In today's dollar amount, the funding has increased more for NIH than for NSF. For the period 1995-2020, NSF funding had not quite doubled, while for the same period NIH funding has quadrupled.

And I agree with you 100% about the part that basic research is the foundation of knowledge for applied science. But I am glad that my salary is coming out from the NIH grant not from the NSF grant as it did many years ago.

NSF funding: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01076-x

NIH funding: National Institutes of Health (NIH) Funding: FY1996-FY2022 - EveryCRSReport.com

 

No, you're too young to learn about such things!

 

Research happened here:
Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain - McGill University

The group receives Canadian research funding because (presumably) Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research ranked their research proposals highly. I suppose there is an ultimate goal to reduce pain etc. in humans. So it is applied research. Mice are just ... lab mice towards that goal.

To research pain directly in humans requires a lot of approval steps anywhere I know of.

Apparently some of these volatile organics are used in other ways in mouse research, with a presumption that they have no behavioural effects. The banana folks showed otherwise, which would seem to have basic-research implications.

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I don't judge value of other peoples' research in fields far from my own. Nor pay much attention to clickbait popular assessments thereof. But have at it, if you desire to get Prox-mired.

 

There's actually a twitter account dedicated to all the health research claims for humans whenever the only proof they have is in mice. There's lots of all kinds of stupid in what you say is "clickbait popular assessments" in medical research. And https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice is pointing out the problem with these great leaps of unsubstantiated logic from lab animal to humans.