By Perpetua Egesimba
Scientists from Nigeria and Germany have said more secrets of the brain have been unveiled in their work carried out on male and female mice.
In a statement, Dr Philip Njemanze, a Neuroscientist at Chidicon Medical Center, International Institutes of Advanced Research and Training, Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria, announced that they are the first to successfully demonstrate that male and female mice see colors differently in the brain. While male mice process blue lights with the left brain, female mice process with the right brain.
This they said is the opposite trend of the observations seen in humans which has long been one of the holy grails of neuroscience. According to Njemanze, who led the research by a multi-center international group of scientists together with Professor Peter Brust, Head of the Department of Neuroradiopharmaceuticals at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Research Site Leipzig, Germany, the finding radically altered their understanding of the field.
“We were stunned when we made the discovery. For a few minutes, we just didn’t believe what we were seeing, Mathias Kranz, a PhD student called elatedly ‘We have done it’ as we watched the images of the combined positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging (PET/MRI), we almost started dancing around at the Isotope Research Facilities in Leipzig, were the work was conducted. It was very exciting. We felt yes, our Eureka moment finally came,” Njemanze stated.
He said news of the finding was greeted with general surprise, except, at Chidicon Medical Center. “Privately, a few of us had long thought this might be the case, given what was observed about a decade ago in humans, but we kept it quiet because we were afraid our colleagues would think we were crazy, if we thought color vision in mice will show gender differences of the sort seen in humans.”
According to him, not everyone was convinced as their report was criticized as premature by some. On the social importance of the work, Njemanze adds that, some may believe that it may not support the idea of gender as a social construct, and affirms gender-related differences based on neurobiology.