Researchers could cut the use of animals in their experiments by changing the way they analyze their results, according to a study by scientists based in Germany and the United States.
In a typical animal experiment, researchers will try to standardize factors such as the animals’ genetic backgrounds and laboratory conditions to make it as easy as possible for other researchers to reproduce their results later. Now, a team led by Hanno Würbel at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany, has reanalyzed a study of mouse behaviour by taking such genetic and environmental variations into account, and they got fewer spurious results, or false positives, than the initial study.
David Osterbur spent a decade pursuing an academic science career before tiring of the “never-ending cycle” of unfunded grant applications, he says. When his wife, like him a developmental biologist, accepted a job offer in Massachusetts, he took advantage of the change in location to weigh a change in career. He was considering a career in public health so he could continue using his science background, when his wife suggested he become a science librarian. “I had always enjoyed being in the library. In graduate school, people would always come to me when they couldn’t find something,” he says.