On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Mike Palij went:
http://tinyurl.com/b5amaz
|Don told me that potential antidepressants were
|deemed worthy of trying out on people if a rat who had ingested them
|took longer to drown than a rat normally takes to drown when placed
|in a pool with no exit. To this day, this test is still used - only now to
|save time the rats are weighted.
I am sure that there are others on the list (e.g., David Epstein) who
can lay out the phases of drug testing and what the above test is
(is it the Morris water maze?
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_water_maze ).
But such details might detract from the writing's "punch".
The Morris water maze is used in rodent studies of learning and
memory. It's not exactly a maze, but as the term suggests, it does
have a hidden platform on which the rodents can learn to perch once
they find it.
A different water test, called the forced-swimming test, is used as a
behavioral assay for antidepressants. The major difference is that
there's no hidden platform to learn about in the forced-swimming
test. There's just...swimming.
HOWEVER, I've never seen any reference to a forced-swimming test in
which rodents were permitted to drown (or weighted down so they would
do so!). In a brief Google Scholar search, I found that all
references to drowning were in the context of specifying that the
rodents were RESCUED if they seemed to be about to drown:
<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=drown++forced+swimming+antidepressant>
I didn't check all 1,290 hits, but I'll be (negatively) impressed if
anyone finds one in which the rodents weren't rescued.
--David Epstein
[email protected]
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