Bethany Brookshire
speaker
250 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 10 Jan
Bethany Brookshire’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's tough to say. I did show that in some animals you get tolerance to other drugs that are similar. In some you get sensitization, so they're more sensitive to the effects. You also get transferral, so different drugs that don't necessarily primarily hit that pathway will begin to hit that pathway.
I can say that, for example, in the area where I was looking, which is a group of structures that we call the basal ganglia, there's a lot of similarity between basal ganglias across all mammals, heck, across like reptiles. It's when you get into kind of higher order stuff that things get more different. Certainly there are drastic differences in things like the immune system, but...
I do strongly feel that rats and mice are really essential to our understanding of the human body and the human brain.
Mice and rats have become very popular research animals in part because they were actually sold that way. C.C. Little, who founded the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, which is one of the world's biggest purveyors of mice for scientific purposes, he wrote a piece in Scientific American selling the mouse as a lab animal to the public. The opening line was, do you like mice? Of course you don't.
He basically said, mice are awful and we hate them, but they could be heroes of medicine.
It can be a replacement for other animals that we are currently using. At that time, dogs were a really big research animal. He proposed mice as being, you know, cheaper, faster. They do have all of those things. We have amazing abilities to alter their genetics now. But all of that stems from the fact that we consider them pests. We consider them expendable.
It's complicated.
Yes. Hundreds. And I feel bad about it. At the same time, you know, they worked really hard for me. They worked hard for me. I liked working with them. Rats are much sweeter than mice, by the way. If you're gonna have one as a pet, have a rat. Mice I like because mice are honest. Mice don't like you. They're never gonna like you. Rats like you.
You pick one up and after a while they snuggle into you. They'll like snuggle in your armpit or your elbow or they'll get on your neck. They're sweet and they're smart. They make great pets, honestly.
Yeah, that's Magrat is her name. And she is not mine. And sadly, she has since passed away because rats don't live very long. But she was a wonderful model. She did not pee on me the entire time. I was shocked.
I absolutely think the way we see animals in media can strongly affect our perception. I've been able to learn from my own research that rats are absolutely not public enemy number one everywhere.
They don't have to be the villain that we see them as. They could be something else. And the good news is that humans can change their minds. We do it all the time. So we could do it with rats too. I love the movie Ratatouille. I love that movie because not only do I like rats, I love food. I've never yet been able to make that picture perfect Ratatouille that Remy makes. It never looks that good.
We really hate them. We hate their success because their success feels like our failure.
There's a whole 99-page report about how we're going to do that. But we will also hear from rat lovers. Eventually, because you're feeding it, because it's a little bit lovely, you end up feeling some warmth towards it. And what you might call rat exonerators.
Because everybody who hates rats wants to name them after somebody they don't like.
So basically the name stuck because somebody was picking a fight with Norway at the time.
Europe was very black rat dominated until we think the 17th or 18th centuries when we began to see the brown rat. That is native to what we think of as Mongolia. Rattus norvegicus ended up getting spread into Europe. And then with colonialism, it just went everywhere else because rats and boats go together real good.
Interestingly, people have not liked rats, but they didn't necessarily consider them disgusting until about the 18th or 19th century. People didn't like them because they were a problem of the food supply, right? They would get in and they would eat your food and nobody wants that.
But they weren't considered to be disgusting in terms of they weren't considered to carry disease for a very long time. The association of rats with disease is a relatively recent one.
It intersects with the plague, but not when you think it does. So there have been three major pandemics of plague that we know of in recorded history. The first was the Plague of Justinian, which I believe was in the 6th century. The second was the Black Death, which was famous and began in the 14th century. The third global pandemic of bubonic plague is now.
Showing 201–220 of 250 · page 11 of 13
← Previous
Next →