文档介绍：Prelims- 3/23/07 11:45 AM Page xi
Preface
For a long time I was fascinated by trying to understand the behavioral, endocrine
and neural mechanisms controlling rat sexual behavior, independently of whether
such an understanding was of any use or not. My favorite afternoon distraction
was to walk over to the lab and see how the experiments were going, and if possi-
ble I made some observations of a couple of copulating rats. Although I have had
this habit for many years, I have never got bored of seeing the same motor patterns
repeated over and over again. There is always something new to discover. There
may be some unexpected effect of an experimental treatment, a rat that behaves in
an unusual way, or just a funny conversation with a student observer, who I had
judged as very boring until then. However, with the passage of time and the accu-
mulation of knowledge and experience, it was impossible to avoid getting some
thoughts concerning the meaning and even the real interest of experimental stud-
ies of rodent sexual behaviors. These thoughts partly originated in discussions with
people outside the field of rat sex research, who candidly asked if the rat data had
any relevance for humans. My standard answer was that I didn't care, since my inter-
est was focused on scientific rather than utilitarian problems. If that answer were
satisfactory or not was of no concern to me. At that time another issue appeared
more disturbing than questions regarding applicability of rat research to humans.
The discovery that once glorious notions slowly were forgotten and replaced by
other ones, and that dominant research themes and strategies demised and were
replaced by other ones troubled me a lot. Still worse, the replacements were not
necessarily new, they were often only different. Like we can observe at the sea-
sonal shows at Paris’ haute couture houses, e and go, and e
back again in an eternal vicious circle. The