Kellendonk et al. (2006) & Moore et al. (2006)

The paper by Kellendonk et al. (2006) shows its age. Being almost ten years old, it uses techniques that are now surpassed by others, but are no less useful because of that. Though, to me, the paper was a bit uninteresting, it was a simple and effective study that surely added a crucial piece of evidence to the pool of research at the time about schizophrenia. I thought it was interesting that they included explanations at the beginning of each new experiment as to why they were doing them (and I liked this), yet had no explanation of what the results meant until the discussion (which I found a bit jolting). Aside from organization criticisms, one major question I had was about why they didn’t delve into the developmental portion of the research more. On a related note, the team said that they wanted to look into the effects of developmental overexpression of D2Rs, yet the only transgenic group was one in which the animals were on dox, therefore with no expression of the D2R gene. Their interpretation of this makes no sense to me; it seems to me that they should’ve had an off-dox group to show the effect of overexpression of D2Rs on development and subsequent working memory tasks.

The paper by Moore et al. (2006) shows its age as well, but not to the same extent. It uses similarly outdated techniques, but they are sufficient for the purposes of the paper. There are some techniques that I was unfamiliar with, and even after reading the paper fully I am still unsure of the necessity of them. However, I believe that the paper was extremely effective in its simplicity and I very much enjoyed reading it. During discussion I am sure I will have many questions as to the methodology, but I think this paper had one important aspect the Kellendonk paper did not: possible applications to humans.