experiments

Last week I helped dissect stomachs for one of the experiments relevant to my work.  I was very keyed up and tense as they brought the first mice out and put them in the carbon dioxide box and the leading grad student demonstrated cervical dislocation with a simple pull of the tail.

I'm a little nauseous in retrospect when thinking about it too much, but in the moment, everything went like clockwork.  All the tubes for samples were previously labeled, everyone was at their station for dissection of a particular organ system: blood withdrawal from the heart with a syringe, spleen dissection, stomach dissection, and lymph nodes of the small intestines.  It was very intellectually interesting to see the stomachs and challenging to dissect them into the required four pieces without mangling them; a mouse stomach is smaller than the tip of one's thumb.

From an aesthetic point of view, this was far less wasteful and personal than the live immune-cell imaging I had seen before, which required one mouse for each experiment, complete anesthesia, dissection of the live organ system of the unconscious mouse, then hours under the microscope.  Once complete, the mouse was euthanized.  But in this system, the mouse had already lived three months (probably a good deal longer than most would in the wild) with a good life, and we were taking tissue samples from many organ systems and will be gaining as much information as possible from the experiment.

Even when writing this, I find myself shying away from the bald reality towards euphemisms like "cervical dislocation" instead of "breaking the neck", "euthanasia" instead of "killing and discarding in a plastic biohazard bag."

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What to me was rather distressing was really the lack of ceremony in the whole thing.  I don't know what I would have wanted: a prayer, a Native American ceremony, a few words thanking the mice for their lives and deaths?  A little memorial ceremony at the end and burial with flowers in the back plot of the medical center rather than an unceremonious dumping into a trash bag for incineration?  It sounds kind of silly, but I think if I ever got to the point where I had to lead a team to do this routinely, I probably would say something like this (if not every day, maybe once a year or when new people joined):

"Science is expensive, and it costs not only our money and time, but the lives of these animals.  I believe what we are doing is necessary, but doing it ethically means that we minimize suffering and do our best to maximize all that we can learn from each animal.  Mice aren't test tubes to be used and discarded; we do need to recognize that we are extinguishing a flicker of consciousness in each experiment.  So take a moment to recognize this and be grateful."