Fear or Hope, You Decide

Aditi Bhargava
10 min readJun 6, 2022

Over interpreting results and sound bites in science are dangerous but seem to have become the norm. A Linked-in post that my husband chanced upon was inferring about the power of “hope” from a rat behavioral experiment. My husband read the post aloud (taken verbatim from the post)- “An interesting Brutal experiment was conducted in the 1950s by a scientist named Dr. Curt Richter. In that experiment, he took a dozen domesticated rats and placed them into jars half-filled with water to test how long they could tread water. Unsurprisingly, the rats drowned, but the idea was to measure the amount of time they swam…

Aditi Bhargava

Dr. Aditi Bhargava is a molecular neuroendocrinologist with research focus on sex differences in stress biology and immunology.