Toxicological Sciences 68, 517-519 (2002)
Copyright © 2002 by the Society of Toxicology
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1 Departments of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology Duke University Medical Center, PO Box 3813 Durham, NC 27710 2 Department of Medicine (Neurology) Duke University Medical Center, PO Box 3813 Durham, NC 27710 3 Departments of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology Duke University Medical Center, PO Box 3813 Durham, NC 27710
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To the Editor:
We appreciate the time and effort Dr. Schoenig invested in critically analyzing our work (Abou-Donia et al., 2001
). Although he may reasonably have questions about details of our methodology, many of his points are unfounded.
Major deficiencies in our experiments cited by Dr. Schoenig begin with the number of control animals. We dispute this contention. As required by our Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and the animal use protocol that was approved by the Department of Defense, we strive to use the fewest possible numbers of animals in our experiments that are sufficient to provide statistically valid results. In previous work, we found that control animals have very consistent performances on the sensorimotor tasks used in the current study. There was no justification for further increasing the number of control animals.
Dr. Schoenig incorrectly believed that the solvent (70% ethanol) was used to apply