The science of mice handling advances

Nature reports on a study about the best way to pick up a lab mouse:

Picking up mice at the base of the tail is standard practice in laboratory research, but whether this is the best method is unclear. Researchers now suggest that cupping a mouse in the hand or carrying it in a small tunnel reduces stress and encourages cooperation.

I like that last bit about mouse co-operation. Has a pharmaceutical company ever had a meeting in which its scientists said to them "sorry the new drug tests failed, but you know we're not entirely sure the mice were co-operating"?

It is, however, a little surprising to me that these science types haven't tried to standardize mice handling before:

"The paper has made me rethink some of the things we do," says Scott Russo, a behavioural neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. His lab members routinely clutch mice by the tail, even though they investigate the effect of stress on anxiety, depression and addiction. "Tail handling could absolutely influence the effects we observe," he says. Anxiety behaviour in mice is notoriously inconsistent — it fluctuates across strains, and even across days, he says. "If this is a way to reduce inter-experimental variability, this would be a very important finding."