About a third consisted of breeding animals for laboratory tests.
Researchers can then turn on and off just those brain cells in laboratory animals and see what happens.
The technique, dubbed optogenetics, is barely five years old and, so far, has been used only on laboratory animals.
And forcing British suppliers of laboratory animals to close will lead to more animals being imported, with an increase in suffering.
Rats and mice are by far the most commonly used laboratory animals (used in more than 80% of procedures in 2000).
Doing conclusive experiments on people would have been out of the question, and trying to substitute laboratory animals was felt to be unreliable.
Masicampo and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University discovered this by doing some experiments on that most popular of laboratory animals, the impoverished undergraduate.
Scientists are warning that a new campaign by animal rights activists, aimed at the companies involved in the transport of laboratory animals, threatens to undermine research into new cures and treatments for disease.
It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain.
There are some studies that suggest harm in laboratory animals, but larger subsequent studies have failed to confirm any of these earlier findings of harm in lab animals, and there are no studies showing any harm in humans under normal consumer use.
Last year, two government-convened groups came to almost opposite conclusions about the dangers of BPA. On one side, 38 of the world's leading experts, who attended a workshop organised by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), concluded that people's average levels of BPA now exceed those that cause harm in laboratory animals.
And so long as such animals are kept inside the laboratory, public concerns are largely contained.
Acrylamide came to the attention of scientists after experiments on cells in the laboratory, and on animals suggested it could be harmful.
The survey of the wild animals, published in the journal Nature, builds on laboratory work which also suggests that male frogs can be feminised through exposure to the weedkiller.
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