Mice Can’t See What’s Coming

A recent news item discussed the use of virtual reality glasses on mice to see how they react to swooping birds. It’s not that complicated, they are scared, and they will either be killed or not in the next minute or so and having that on screen repeat is not very nice.

There are times when the world of science confuses me and even disappoints me and that is after 40 years of telling students how wonderful science is and that they should follow it as a career. There have been discoveries that have arisen from unusual experimental results including that magic purple pill, Viagra, but many left field experiments should be left out in the field.

Perhaps if scientists concentrated on some of the big issues, stopping cancer, improved food production and stopping climate change we would have a better world and more regard for those scientists.

Dennis Fitzgerald,
Melbourne, Australia