"Bad" Autism Animal Models

Tracy Bale, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how maternal stress during pregnancy might lead to neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia or autism.After a Saturday morning session at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago, she talked about what she calls her "big soapbox issue": the fallacious idea of a true animal model for a human psychiatric disease — and the pitfalls of over-interpreting rodent behavior.Read more at...SFARI, October 2009.