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Roger Highfield describes a mouse study that presents new twist on the quest to understand the difference between males and females.Scientists have found a way to turn female mice into aggressive,pelvic-thrusting masculine lotharios in an experiment that challenges established dogma.For years,scientists have searched in vain for the bits of the brain that underpin the dramatic differences between males and females.Now biologist say that all these efforts may have been in vain because such differences may not arise in the brain at all, thanks to a study that could may help provide profound new insights into the differences between the sexes.The work comes up with the startling suggestion that both male and female brains contain the circuits for male and female behaviour but the ones that are actually used depend on signals from the body,which may turn one circuit on and the other one off.The focus of sex specific behaviour in many species-though not humans-now shifts to a small sensory organ found in the noses of of most backboned creatures, except higher primates and birds.The new work of the Harvard University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute team,published in the journal Nature,indicates that defects in this organ,known as the vomeronasal organ,lead female mice to act like males, solicting them,mounting them and thrusting them while abandoning nesting and nursing."These results are flabbergasting,"says Prof Catherine Dulac."Nobody had imagined that a simple mutation like this could induce females to behave so thoroughly like males."It is as dramatic as showing a man could be made to behave like a woman at the flick of a switch,though the results do not apply directly to humans,which lack a vomeronasal organ...To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah...
