Article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution LicenseArticle distributed under the terms

Article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
Article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Macr?and Richter Frontiers in Zoology 2015, 12(Suppl 1):S20 http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/12/S1/SPage 2 of”involving comparison between two or more branches of science or subjects of study” [2]. His criticism principally grounded upon two specific aspects: (1) paucity of experimental Enzastaurin biological activity species used in research; (2) limited number of experimental paradigms and domains investigated. With respect to the first aspect, Beach observed that, in spite of the admirable aim to derive fundamental theories resting upon a comparison across multiple species, the majority of experimental studies were conducted on white albino rats. In his analysis, Beach observed that, although the total number of published articles linearly increased between 1911 and 1948, the number of species studied approximately halved during that same time period. More dauntingly, he showed that, towards the end of 1940’s, approximately 70 of all published articles were devoted to the Norway rat. With respect to the type of studies conducted, Frank Beach PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27484364 noted that the nature of the experimental paradigms adopted to derive general conclusions was scant. Specifically, he reported that, among the same subset of studies, those devoted to conditioning and learning, reflexes and simple reactions, and sensory capacities accounted for approximately 80 of all studies (with conditioning/learning representing the largest proportion). Other highly relevant fields (e.g. reproductive, social, and emotional behaviours) accounted for a negligible proportion of all studies. Based on these considerations, Beach equated comparative psychologists with the improbable characters of the poem, and the white albino rats with the alleged “Snark” that ultimately manifested as the “Boojum”. Thus, under the assumption that rats constituted the species of choice in comparative psychology, experimenters employed them with the aim of disclosing the basic processes governing behaviour of a wide spectrum of taxa. With this perspective, rats represented the “Snark” capable of providing scholars with fundamental information about human behaviour. However, such an assumption turned out to be fundamentally wrong, because the conclusions derived from a single experimental species would not generalise to a larger context. Instead of constituting the desired target, laboratory rats turned out to be a limitedly informative tool that, rather than behoving scientists, had the capability to eradicate comparative psychologists. Back in 1950, rather than a “Snark”, laboratory rats epitomized the dangerous “Boojum”. In this article, we argue that now a days we are facing a similar difficulty in applied research. Specifically, as preclinical neuroscientists, we are hunting a very few experimental “Boojums” (predominantly mice) while being persuaded that they constitute the “Snark” potentially disclosing the mystery of translational research.ReviewFrom non-comparative to non-translationalAlthough the considerations reported in Beach’s article were meant to pertain to comparative psychology,.