What is "chicks"

Usage examples of "chicks".

Can I integrate the minuscule observations of this behaviour of the chicks I work with and the chemistry of their brains with such richness of evocation?

In the next chapter I ask you simply to come with me through a day in the life of the lab as I go through the routine tasks of experimentation, training chicks, dissecting their brains, measuring their biochemical constituents in quantities of thousandths of a milligram, and trying to extract meaning from the tables of figures that these measurements produce.

I am going to have to compare a particular set of biochemical processes in the brains of chicks that have been treated in several different ways.

No book whose central characters are young chicks could be complete without a tribute to Pat Bateson, who was responsible, back in the 1960s, for my first blind date with what has become a continuing obsession, and who since then has continued to sharpen the experimental wits of one whose first training was, after all, in the most reductionist of the neurosciences.

I have to change into another, far from spotless coat -the chicks I was working with yesterday have already seen to that.

For the last couple of days before the chicks are due to hatch, batches of fifty or so eggs are moved by the animal technicians, Steve or Dawn, into the brooders in the next room, shallow temperature-controlled boxes, each covered with a clear plastic dome, whose lights are timed to go on and off to simulate night and day outside the brooders.

There the chicks chip away at their shells and pull themselves, sticky, wet and tired, into their first contact with the external world.

Mass-produced they may be, but these chicks are still biological creatures, not little machines, and it is their biology which makes them important to me.

I pick up a plastic box, sprinkle some sawdust on its floor to stop the chicks scrabbling, open the brooder dome, count out twenty-four and take them into the next room.

Pen 2 in the book, then dip the second bead in the yellow liquid and offer it to the two chicks in the second pen.

So if one group of chicks is making more nerve cell membrane, on average, than the chicks of another group, there will be more of the injected radioactive sugar in its membranes at the end of two hours.

Some of my chicks, which would normally peck at a bright bead, have pecked it once and found it tasted bitter.

If I were to persist in treating chicks as Descartes might have wanted me to - and indeed as some schools of behaviourist psychologists would still maintain - as insentient machines, mere logic circuits based on carbon chemistry instead of the more reliable silicon chemistry of the computer, I would soon cease to be able to design sensible experiments or interpret the results that I obtain.

You will find they describe how their animals were bred, what operations they may have done on them, how their tissues were processed - but never that the rats, mice, cats, monkeys or chicks were killed.

Pat to train the chicks, dissect and code the brain samples, and send them down to me at Imperial to do the biochemical analyses, blind as to which samples came from which condition.