SABV
MOGILab tests both male and female animals in all experiments, and Dr. Mogil’s first observation of a qualitative sex difference was published in 1993. In 2005, we published an editorial in PAIN entitled “The case for the inclusion of female subjects in basic science studies of pain”. In it, we showed that in the decade from 1996 to 2005, a full 79% of preclinical studies published in PAIN were performed in male rodents only, with an additional 5% using both sexes but not mentioning whether sex differences were observed or not, and an additional 3% not even mentioning the sex of their subjects. Importantly, we provided data showing that in contrast to many people’s expectations female mice do not display higher (estrous cycle-related) variability in pain measurements; this provided the impetus for similar biomedicine-wide demonstrations of equal variability by sex in mice (Prendergast et al., Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev., 40:1-5, 2014) and rats (Becker et al., Biol. Sex Diff., 7:34, 2016). In 2016, Dr. Mogil published a Perspective in Nature entitled “Equality need not be painful”, making the scientific and ethical case for equal usage of female and male subjects in preclinical research.