I open the lab door, flick on the light switch, and watch a herd of cockroaches scuttle for cover. It’s seven in the evening, when most of the university’s workers have left for the night. Even so, after I lift each rat from its cage, I place it in an unmarked black box, its temporary home for the journey from the sub-basement to the surgery room upstairs. Should anyone see me wheeling the box down the hall, they won’t be able to guess what’s inside. In fact, most people don’t know that my lab exists.
All is quiet in the surgery room except for the rustle of the nine rats. My fingers are sweating. Suddenly, I’m tired. I just want to go home. Swearing to myself, I move aside a jar of sterilized scalpels and reach for a Metallica CD. Gradually, the music hardens my mind as I mix chemicals behind a plastic shield. I can’t allow myself to think.
The first black box has an ID tag that reads JSmPFC1. Two months ago I injected a neurotoxin into this rat’s medial prefrontal cortex. I’ve finished testing the animal for learning problems, and now I have to check that I damaged exactly the right part of its brain. This requires a very specific procedure. I mark an X beside the ID number and open the box. His whiskers twitch inquisitively. He’s accustomed to my smell, and not so likely to bite as he was when he first arrived here as a 200 gram youngin’ from the breeding colonies.
I tap the bubbles from the syringe out of habit, then realize it doesn’t matter whether he gets an air bubble inside him now. Grasping him by his waist, I swing him back and forth until his little rat feet ease into a submissive position. He’s so dizzy from the swinging that all he can focus on is trying not to puke. When I plunge the needle in his abdomen, he can only offer a little squeak and a stream of piss. Two minutes later, the limp, warm mass offers no resistance to my prodding. I place it on its back, checking that its breathing remains strong.
The first snip is the hardest. After that, the skin and muscle part easily in a line straight up the middle. Each rib yields between my scissors with a dull snap. I pin back the rib cage to give myself more space around the quivering heart. Separated from its connecting tissue, the heart hops rhythmically, and it’s hard to grasp while I poke a hole in its receiving side. Instantly a stream of blood wells up and flows over the side of the chest, splashing into the collecting bucket below. I must work quickly now. I must flush the blood from the body before the heart dies. Next, I inject a pint of saline solution into the intact side of the heart, and the saline treks through the rat until it spurts from the heart’s opposite chamber, a little pinker from the blood it has rinsed. A quick glance at the lungs – yup, a nice bright white. No blood left there.
The heart has slowed a little, but still pulses. Time for the next syringe. Formaldehyde to pickle the tissues. I need the brain fixed in its exact living state to be able to analyze it properly. The needle goes into the same hole in the heart, sending the fixative through the animal’s circulation as its life slips away. I’m dizzy.
I lean against the edge of the sink. It could be the effect of the toxic chemical fumes that sting my eyes behind my safety goggles. More likely, the cause of my dizzy spell is the rat, splayed-open before me, writhing and twitching in an eerie dance. Its hands open and close, its teeth gnash, it rolls on its side. Its intestinal muscles spasm, and their contents spill out like grey sausages. Its movements are involuntary – a natural byproduct of the pickling process.
The rat is dead.
One of the legs kicks while I wrestle with a pair of rusty garden shears. The neck is hard to crunch through, and the severed head almost rolls off the edge of the counter. The fur on the head rips easily from the crown to the space between the eyes. It makes a sound like tearing sheets. With the skull exposed, I pick away at the bone with tweezers, careful not to disturb the chick pea-colored brain beneath. A sideways tap with a knife frees the brain from the optic nerve. I lever the brain from the skull and plop it into a bottle that’s smaller than a film canister. Later, I’ll freeze the brain, slice it with a machine, and place the segments onto slides to examine under a microscope.
Believe it or not, I’m proud of my job. I’m advancing the frontier of human knowledge, however feebly. Rats share much of our evolutionary past. We can test their brains to learn about ours, and thanks to this kind of research we’ve built up a huge list of brain areas that correspond with certain abilities. When you study neuroscience long enough, you realize that we remain pretty clueless about the most basic thought processes. That’s what makes my work so exciting: the potential to chart undiscovered territories of the mind.
But that’s not stuff that I can afford to think about right now. I must repeat the entire process with eight more animals before I can go home for the night. I transport the stiff, dripping, slightly warm mess of a headless rat into a black garbage bag. Then I pick up the next one, and begin all over again.
Jessa Gamble defected from front-line research to journalism 15 years ago, and hasn’t forgotten why she left.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Jessa: Thanks very much for writing about this. It can’t have been easy, dredging up these vivid and wrenching memories and then putting them out there for all of us to see. I think most of us just don’t want to know that such experiments are going on daily to advance science, and we need pieces like this to remind us and push us to examine the ethics of animal research. Surely there must be other ways to gain knowledge and advance science, and if there isn’t, we need to find them.
I think you’re right that it’s a willful denial, and the toughest part for me was parsing what gratuity would mean in this context. But whenever we read of a drug having proven effective in a human study, it’s important to understand that this exact procedure has been performed on hundreds of animals before the drug got to that human study phase.
We — and I as well — eagerly accept the resulting knowledge, but the daily grind of medicinal research and more basic biological enquiry is often morally deflating.
I appreciate this post, as it goes a long way to countering the idea that animal researchers are somehow indifferent to the suffering of their animals, and that they’re not using more humane methods because they’re indoctrinated and/or unimaginative and/or sadists. It’s emotionally draining work (you have to build a relationship with those animals in order to experiment effectively, after all), and I’m sure any life-sciences scientist would leap at the chance to use any other effective model. I’m glad you posted this, it deserves wide circulation.
A very beautifully written essay about a necessary evil, well done (though the warning should probably be posted before picture of the rat).
Jessa this is powerful stuff. At a microchip technology conference I attended a few years ago, there was a seminar on neural implants to treat depression, parkinson’s and the usual suspects. The guy presenting was from a big research school, and they were working with cats. He was discussing their findings, which basically stated that you *absolutely* must have external power sources for brain implants. Trying to make a small, self contained implant could result in power surges, and for devices inside the brain, he said with a deep and shockingly sorrowful grimace, “that is not something you ever want to see.”
This was after he had been fondly talking about the lab cat, which in the pictures wore a little electrode cap on its opened skull but otherwise looked like it was having a nice time hanging out in the lab.
It stuck in my mind because that researcher looked like he was in so much pain when he told the capacitor story. He actually stopped after he said that line and cleared his throat. And that was the first time I ever really stopped thinking about animal research according to the Madonna-whore paradigm, that is, that you’re either a heartless bastard who experiments on animals or a savior who can’t bear to harm a hair on their fuzzy little heads.
I still feel confused by the whole thing. My main problem is that I simultaneously agree with every position on the spectrum: we need to do this kind of research to help people who are tortured by horrible diseases. But I also wonder how we know we are so great that it’s worth destroying all these lives to (maybe) save our own.
Confusion is probably the appropriate response to ethical complexity. I think working with cats would have been beyond even my tolerance level, and I don’t know how anyone gets through primate research unscarred. The very fact that we’re trying to extrapolate to humans through testing these animals acknowledges that the difference between their experience and ours — their consciousness and ours — is one of degree, not of kind.
Thank you for the essay. I think it is brave of you to post this. I’ve done the same thing with mice and even with still-hairless pups. It was heartbreaking and difficult, but like you said– I was proud to be contributing to research on autism. We cannot forget that we do this, or why we do this.
Jessa, thank you for your candid insight.
At least in this profession the act of killing is personal, something whose weight is felt. I find the unsettled feelings of the casual observer to be somewhat disingenuous if, for instance, that observer isn’t a vegetarian. Killing animals in the name of science has an ostensibly noble end. Killing animals for food slakes an epicurian lust. We don’t *need* to eat animals, but we do, because we have. We tolerate this because the act of killing is so far removed and abstracted from the final product.
Contrast that with animal testing: this is something that legitimately needs to occur yet does not benefit from the same set of comfortable illusions.
I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this contrast.
As a matter of fact, rats are physically incapable of puking.
(Don’t click unless you have a strong stomach, although if you’ve got this far in the post you probably do.)
Excellent piece Jessa. I think it is essential to share the message that animal research is necessary, and that the people that do it do not necessarily enjoy it but see its importance. I rarely talk about the animal aspects of my research. In truth, I’ve sacrificed 100s of mice, pups and, more recently, fish (and the fish experienced severe stress situations) in the name of science. Yet, I’m a huge animal lover, and am very much opposed to the inhumane treatment of animals. I think one very important message is that research animals are protected under very tight regulations. If there’s another means of doing the study (cell culture, computer models), animal use will not be approved. And, in life, research animals are offered far more humane treatment than, say, the vast majority of agricultural animals. Still though, it’s a tough issue. Once, during my mouse-raising days I met two beagles (they were being used for diabetes research) as they were on their daily walk through the halls of the animal research facility – the highlight of their day… that was not a good day for me.
Great post, Jessa. I think that a lot of animal rights activists are well-intended, but act out of ignorance and emotion rather than foresight and reason. Conveying that it isn’t necessarily fun for the scientist is paramount in light of the importance of the actual research. Well written piece, this certainly had my heart beating along for the ride.
Thanks for the very candid post. Oh, the memories this brings back – not good ones. I did what what was expected of me as a graduate student, which included perfusions and unanesthetized decaps. I had temper tantrums on kill days. I would close my eyes and steel myself against the “crunch” as I’d bring down the guillotine lever (not a safe practice, I am aware). I shook and cried over the sink as I chipped away the skulls. I hoped that someday, the information we got from our studies would help someone, somewhere. I’m not sure I’ll ever see that day, but I hope it wasn’t all for nothing. The mental anguish was too much and, for this and other reasons, I left the bench. Whenever I’m having bad days at my current job and I’m feeling sentimental for the lab, I try to remember this — and it makes my current situation much more tolerable.
I came here after watching your ted talk on sleep rhythm. I sleep 4 hours then work 6 then sleep a few hours then work 6 more, i do this around the clock day after day, i dont know why.I thought maybe i would find something inciteful here instead read this horror story. Reminds me of Poe, only more gruesome, im going to have nightmares now LOL.
Back when I was reporting for “The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), I talked to a number of researchers (nearly all women btw) willing to share their discomfort about killing or disabling animals, though they all fully recognized the need for & value of animal research. Not an issue that is discussed enough IMO, probably for fear of providing ammunition to anti-vivisectionists.
Now I can’t remember how I stumbled upon this post. But glad I did. Heartbreaking and uncomfortably thought provoking. I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t already been said by everyone here.