Model behaviour

摘要

Dangle a mouse by its tail, and it will wriggle and strain to escape before eventually recognizing the hopelessness of its situation. Measure the time it takes to abandon thoughts of helping itself, and you have one of the classic animal tests for depression.rnExcept it's not, says Laurence Tecott, a research psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. "We can't say that that mouse is depressed, and we cant say you would be if you were strung up by your tail," he says. The reason we have not seen a genuinely new class of drug in psychiatry for 50 years, he asserts, is largely because animal models are woefully inadequate representations of human-specific disorders.