Fix It Charity Is a Graduate Student Who Is Using a Transgenic

Essay

Fix It
Charity is a graduate student who is using a transgenic mouse model of frontotemporal dementia to study Alzheimer's disease. She obtains 30 mice and divides them into three treatment conditions. In the first condition 10 rats are housed communally to assess the impact of social support on the disease. In the second condition 10 rats are housed individually. In the third condition rats are housed individually but have wheels attached to their home cages so they may voluntarily engage in exercise. After one month in their respective conditions Charity sacrifices the animals and examines their brains for the presence of insoluble protein aggregates in the frontotemporal lobe. She obtains five random slices of tissue from each animal's brain and applies a stain to identify the presence of protein. For each animal, the mean amount of protein across the five slices is obtained. Charity is a second-year graduate student who has not yet taken statistics so she is at a loss for how she should analyze the data. She decides to talk to her peers to get their advice on how to proceed.
Identify and discuss the research design Charity employed. How should her colleagues suggest she analyze the data? Lastly, discuss the ethics associated with using animals in research.