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(Disclaimer: This blog deals with killing animals for research, so don't read it if you're squeamish.)
Animals are very common in biomedical science research. They're used as vessels to produce certain types of antibodies, they're used to test the safety and efficacy of drugs, they're a common target of genetic manipulations.. the list goes on. Mice are the most common animals used in research. They're small, simple to take care of and easy to breed. Research institutions can house tens, or even hundreds of thousands of mice in large custom-built facilities.
My lab uses mice as a source of primary cells, in order to study its development. In order to obtain these cells, we have to kill the mice first. The mice are placed in a special chamber and carbon dioxide is introduced to kill them. If done properly, the mice appear to go unconscious and die painlessly, at least I hope so. After doing this a few times, you kinda get numb to the thought of killing these mice. Well, more or less.
I thought I grew numb to it, until I was working in the mouse facility today and had to get rid of excess mice. What do I mean by excess mice?
Mice that were bred in excess quantities due to large number of mice born from a litter.
Poor experimental planning, breeding a ton of mice then subsequently realizing that they're not needed.
Mice that have the wrong genotype. Mice are bred to have a specific genetic background, but due to the laws of probability there might be mice with an unwanted genetic background.
Older mice that are no longer of any use.
So I had to get rid of these mice. And it's not 1 or 2 mice, there's like almost a hundred of them. It's apparently a "bad week", on other weeks there's usually much less unwanted mice. Well, sucks to be me. I had to euthanize these 100-odd mice, so I just need to put all of them into the CO2 chamber, wait a few minutes and dispose their corpses. Not so easy.
When killing a mouse, just gassing them to death isn't enough. There's a remote possibility that the mouse might not have died, and if a mouse "wakes up" it's bad news. So we need to perform a "secondary method" of ensuring death. What's this secondary method? Basically mutilation of the body, including methods like decapitation and slicing the diaphragm apart so the mice can no longer breathe. It's really fucking disgusting, even worse if you have to do this to a hundred mice. You can probably imagine how bad it felt.
The killing part is inevitable when working with animals, so it's usually advised to utilize alternative systems if possible. The replacement model that's frequently used is cell culture, which involves growing cells in tissue culture on petri dishes. The main problem with this is that the cells used are cancer cells and are pretty screwed up in some way or another, so they're not a perfect replacement to animal models.
Not looking forward to the next time I have to do this...
  
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can't they give the excess mice away to other labs if they bred to many? or is it cheaper to just breed them for yourself?
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Why don't they gas them again if they didn't kill them the first time?
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I don't envy you. I can't even step on a caterpillar.
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It's really depressing to think about how much cuteness is dying every day 
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That's why I work on bugs. I do feel kinda bad when I have to kill my guys, especially when I drown them in ethanol but they're still just bugs. Unfortunately bugs don't translate well to human-related stuff so we can't replace all the mice with aphids or something .
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On October 19 2012 03:28 Qeet wrote:
can't they give the excess mice away to other labs if they bred to many? or is it cheaper to just breed them for yourself?
Usually breeding is planned pretty well to minimize this, but it doesn't always work out. It's possible to transfer mice between labs, but it is troublesome and needs to go through a lot of paperwork, mainly because there's the possibility of spreading pathogens to different colonies of mice. Each lab maintains hundreds or thousands of mice, so coordinating such transfers on a regular basis will be really chaotic. Also, a lot of labs have very specific genetically altered mice that aren't used by other labs, so no one will want them.
On October 19 2012 03:39 QuanticHawk wrote:
Why don't they gas them again if they didn't kill them the first time?
It's an ethics issue. In practice, you'll probably never know this happens because before they can wake up, you've already disposed of the mice in a bag and frozen down the carcasses (to prevent decomposition). But if they do, imagine the trauma if the mouse finds itself surrounded by carcasses of fellow mice, slowly getting colder and colder because it's in a freezer. That's why federal regulations say that if the mice wake up, you're in big big trouble.
On October 19 2012 03:57 ZeaL. wrote:That's why I work on bugs. I do feel kinda bad when I have to kill my guys, especially when I drown them in ethanol but they're still just bugs. Unfortunately bugs don't translate well to human-related stuff so we can't replace all the mice with aphids or something .
I'm working in Immunology. Bugs don't have an adaptive immune system, so yeah I can't use them. Some things in mice don't translate well to humans too, but then you can't simply conduct these experiments in humans..
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Maybe you should try out lampreys, they have an adaptive immune system (though its not very close to ours)! The downside would be that you're working with lampreys lol.
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On October 19 2012 04:05 ZeaL. wrote:
Maybe you should try out lampreys, they have an adaptive immune system (though its not very close to ours)! The downside would be that you're working with lampreys lol.
Well there are people working with lampreys, but they're mainly studying the evolution of the immune system. As you said, their immune systems aren't very close to ours, so any research is gonna be pretty pointless, so the lampreys will get sacrificed for nothing.
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On October 19 2012 04:14 Heh_ wrote:Show nested quote +On October 19 2012 04:05 ZeaL. wrote:
Maybe you should try out lampreys, they have an adaptive immune system (though its not very close to ours)! The downside would be that you're working with lampreys lol. Well there are people working with lampreys, but they're mainly studying the evolution of the immune system. As you said, their immune systems aren't very close to ours, so any research is gonna be pretty pointless, so the lampreys will get sacrificed for nothing.
If you don't mind me asking, what are you studying exactly?
I did about half a Master's in Immuno before I realized 'fuck academia and being in a lab/non-social setting' my whole life,' but what I did was interesting nonetheless.
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On October 19 2012 05:03 WaveofShadow wrote:Show nested quote +On October 19 2012 04:14 Heh_ wrote:On October 19 2012 04:05 ZeaL. wrote:
Maybe you should try out lampreys, they have an adaptive immune system (though its not very close to ours)! The downside would be that you're working with lampreys lol. Well there are people working with lampreys, but they're mainly studying the evolution of the immune system. As you said, their immune systems aren't very close to ours, so any research is gonna be pretty pointless, so the lampreys will get sacrificed for nothing. If you don't mind me asking, what are you studying exactly? I did about half a Master's in Immuno before I realized 'fuck academia and being in a lab/non-social setting' my whole life,' but what I did was interesting nonetheless.
T cell development. I have the opposite reasons to you, the reason I chose academia is because I didn't want to be bound to a desk job my whole life.
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On October 19 2012 05:14 Heh_ wrote:Show nested quote +On October 19 2012 05:03 WaveofShadow wrote:On October 19 2012 04:14 Heh_ wrote:On October 19 2012 04:05 ZeaL. wrote:
Maybe you should try out lampreys, they have an adaptive immune system (though its not very close to ours)! The downside would be that you're working with lampreys lol. Well there are people working with lampreys, but they're mainly studying the evolution of the immune system. As you said, their immune systems aren't very close to ours, so any research is gonna be pretty pointless, so the lampreys will get sacrificed for nothing. If you don't mind me asking, what are you studying exactly? I did about half a Master's in Immuno before I realized 'fuck academia and being in a lab/non-social setting' my whole life,' but what I did was interesting nonetheless. T cell development. I have the opposite reasons to you, the reason I chose academia is because I didn't want to be bound to a desk job my whole life.
Heh my undergrad thesis was a measure of the somatic mutation rate in a human T-cell line, and my to-be Master's thesis was going to involve TdT in some way but there were a lot of complications...couldn't find a great way to test SNPs and their effect on n-addition in VDJ recombination.
It was all pretty interesting, and I did sort of enjoy the lab work, but there was no way I could do it for a living...I guess I'm just more of a people person and want to be able to help people directly rather than through minute discoveries and papers that may or may not have any effect on the scientific world. (No desk job here, future optometrist!)
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On October 19 2012 05:37 WaveofShadow wrote:Show nested quote +On October 19 2012 05:14 Heh_ wrote:On October 19 2012 05:03 WaveofShadow wrote:On October 19 2012 04:14 Heh_ wrote:On October 19 2012 04:05 ZeaL. wrote:
Maybe you should try out lampreys, they have an adaptive immune system (though its not very close to ours)! The downside would be that you're working with lampreys lol. Well there are people working with lampreys, but they're mainly studying the evolution of the immune system. As you said, their immune systems aren't very close to ours, so any research is gonna be pretty pointless, so the lampreys will get sacrificed for nothing. If you don't mind me asking, what are you studying exactly? I did about half a Master's in Immuno before I realized 'fuck academia and being in a lab/non-social setting' my whole life,' but what I did was interesting nonetheless. T cell development. I have the opposite reasons to you, the reason I chose academia is because I didn't want to be bound to a desk job my whole life. Heh my undergrad thesis was a measure of the somatic mutation rate in a human T-cell line, and my to-be Master's thesis was going to involve TdT in some way but there were a lot of complications...couldn't find a great way to test SNPs and their effect on n-addition in VDJ recombination. It was all pretty interesting, and I did sort of enjoy the lab work, but there was no way I could do it for a living...I guess I'm just more of a people person and want to be able to help people directly rather than through minute discoveries and papers that may or may not have any effect on the scientific world. (No desk job here, future optometrist!)
So you wanted to create mutations in the germ line sequences of the V(D)J segments and observe its effect on n-nucleotide addition? Yeah that's kinda difficult. You could create a knock-in mouse that has 1 V,D and J segment and then sequence the recombination junctions, but you need to create 1 knock-in for every mutation tested and that's wayyy too much work for a master's project.
Yeah lab work isn't for everyone. Low pay, irregular hours, feeling like a blue-collar worker, low success rate.. the list goes on. As long you find a job that suits you then that's good.
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oh man, that's tough
acquire all this knowledge just to be a butcher huh
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On October 19 2012 06:06 PUPATREE wrote:oh man, that's tough acquire all this knowledge just to be a butcher huh
On the bright side, if he didn't kill the mice, someone else probably would.
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The amount of knowledge gained from studying primary cells is worth far more in my opinion. Dogs and criminals (chemical warfare) are used in scientific experiments as well but think of the advancement in medicine thanks to those sacrifices. Probably a lot of people oppose this opinion though.
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imagine how those doctors who perform abortions feel
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I work with bacteria...I guess I have it easy when it comes to the euthanasia part of the work. I've sent billions of them to the autoclave and never really given it a second thought.
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On October 19 2012 07:17 Artline wrote:
The amount of knowledge gained from studying primary cells is worth far more in my opinion. Dogs and criminals (chemical warfare) are used in scientific experiments as well but think of the advancement in medicine thanks to those sacrifices. Probably a lot of people oppose this opinion though.
I wouldn't really compare experiments done under the guidelines of authorized protocols with barbaric tinkering that didn't care about the sanctity of human (and animal) life..
On October 19 2012 10:00 thehepp wrote:
imagine how those doctors who perform abortions feel
Not really good...
On October 19 2012 10:47 Lemonwalrus wrote:
I work with bacteria...I guess I have it easy when it comes to the euthanasia part of the work. I've sent billions of them to the autoclave and never really given it a second thought.
I worked in a microbiology lab for my undergrad thesis.. bleached so much bacteria..
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EPT
