Scientists have finally found a way to implant false memories in mice’s brains, for important scientific reasons.
“…And then they start to associate the second chamber with the fear response. See, he’s shaking. Pretty cool, right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s great.”
“You don’t seem that excited.”
“No, I am. I am. It’s great. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“Well, it’s just like, at what point does what we do stop being science and start being just…seeing what we can do to mice?”
“Are you saying there’s no scientific value to this project?”
“No. No. I’d never say that.”
“Because there is a lot we can do with these findings. We can inject false memories into squids, we can inject false memories into stoats…we could make rats think that they’re bacteria. We can make mice feel responsible for the deaths of other mice. We could make jellyfish think they’ve read Flowers for Algernon. We can do a lot of things, scientifically speaking.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s up with you? You were so excited when we finished the grant proposal. Nobody thought we would get funding to do that to mice. Remember? How we talked about it after we saw Gaslight together? And you said ‘This gives me a great idea f–’”
“For our mice, yeah. I remember.”
“You said it gave you a great idea for our mice.”
“I know. I know I said that. It’s just…”
“We don’t have to give them false memories if you don’t want to. We could grow human ears on them again. Remember when we grew all those ears on the little guys?”
“Yeah.”
“And they just ran around wobbling because it messed with their center of gravity? And then they’d start screaming, but then they’d stop screaming because their hearing was so hyper-sensitive, because of the extra ears we sewed onto them?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. That was pretty great.”
“There he is. There’s that smile. There you are. I was worried about you for a minute.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s fine. It’s fine.”
“I am sorry, though.”
“I know. Hey. Hey. Do you want to go put some mice in a maze with no exit?”
“…Yeah.”
“I’ll even let you administer the random shocks.”
“No, not this time. Let’s give them diabetes this time.”
“You have such a flair for these things. Diabetes it is.”
Tags: mice, science, things we could do
Seriously?
I don’t understand what the question is in reference to, but I bet the answer is “no”. Just guessing though, it’s really not my place, never mind. I’ll keep my nose out of it. Hey they should put a human nose on a mouse. My nose, on a mouse. That’d be it for me, there would be nothing left to accomplish in this life.
Would they then attach both the nose and the mouse back to your face? Serious scientific inquiry.
Yes. You just gave me a hypothetical reason for hypothetically continuing to hypothetically live.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of reading melis comments/posts/tweets, it’s that she’s pretty much always completely dead serious.
Yes. This is precisely how science works. Except you left out the part about the jealous PhD student in the next lab over, who slowly and with great subtlety sabotages every experiment. Maybe by giving the mice insulin and little mouse workouts at night. http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100929/full/46751…
and little mouse blood-glucose meters and mouse-sized ‘how to cook for diabetics’ books.
“Low Glycemic Index Diets.. for Mice!”
This article makes me so angry. So angry!
At least a Nature citation will always be on the top of his google results.
I have a friend who gives mice heart attacks and does tiny tiny surgeries on them. Immediately sent this to her.
NO SHE DOESN’T
THAT IS THE TINEST
AND WORST
AND HORRIBLEST
AND ADORABLEST THING I HAVE EVER HEARRRRD teeny tiny mouse heart attaccccks
If You Give a Mouse a Heart Attack something something something
[I’ll show myself out]
She does.
Heart surgery. On mice. It’s bonkers.
There are complicated reasons involving heart attack meds and circadian rhythms. Mostly I just know that she does mouse surgery.
So when people ask her what she does for a living, does she say “I do research on heart attacks” or does she say “I do rodential* cardiac surgery?”
I know one is the likely answer, but the other one is funnier.
*I just made this word up
I’m pretty sure she says that she gives mice heart attacks. She’s that kind of lady.
murine is the word you need. more obscure.
Thanks, I was trying to figure this out and failed completely.
Being a long-standing Douglas Adams fan I can only think is that the mice are running some long-con experiment along the lines of ‘What stupid thing can we get them to do to our clones now?’
Neither witty nor cynical as this comment may be, I’ll just say that I’m excited to use this research in my work on behalf of (innocent?) death row inmates.
My husband has a family who delight in super-mean pranks. One of the infamous family pranks was pulled on a cousin who was working in a research lab with mice. Apparently this cousin was sad one day and let slip to another family member that one of his mice had died and he was feeling broken up about it. The next week that cousin got a package in the mail. It contained a letter to Jimmy Mouse, c/o said cousin. The letter was ostensibly from the mouse’s parents, congratulating him on being “the first mouse in the family to go to university” and saying how proud they were of him for doing “important lab research.”
Oh my goodness. That is awful, but so funny. Poor mouse. I’m glad to know that the cousin truly cares for the mice that he has.
Most scientists don’t do things just because they can. These scientists didn’t implant a memory just to see if they could, they did it to test a hypothesis. They hypothesized that these neurons could generate a memory, even in the absence of an experience. They then devised a beautiful, elegant experiment to test that hypothesis. No mad scientists here!
And it’s not so much false memories as changing the associations linked with a memory, which could lead to new treatments for trauma victims. I’ll be fascinated to see how all this develops.
Yeah dude, the article is a joke article by a humorist. I know people often moan about how we waste our tax dollars on [research topic they don’t understand] but not only is the author quite a bit smarter than that, the research’s value is so self-evident that I really doubt even the most ignorant person out there is saying “BUT BUT BUT WHAT ON EARTH WOULD WE POSSIBLY WANT TO STUDY BRAINS AND MEMORY FOR????” Pretty condescending to go through and explain the concept of the scientific process, damn.
Oh my goodness. That is awful, but so funny. Poor mouse. I'm glad to know that the cousin truly cares for the mice that he has.
We can make PERFECT SLEEPER AGENTS. *shudder NOTHING GOOD HAS EVER COME OUT OF GIVING ANYONE FALSE MEMORIES.
I think we’re starting to get to the point where a science fiction English course should be mandatory for all research scientists, no?
We can make PERFECT SLEEPER AGENTS. *shudder NOTHING GOOD HAS EVER COME OUT OF GIVING ANYONE FALSE MEMORIES.
I think we're starting to get to the point where a science fiction English course should be mandatory for all research scientists, no?
I’m a scientist and I study breast cancer. One of the things we do is test anti cancer drugs in mice before the drugs are tested in humans. A post that demonizes scientists like this- what are you trying to accomplish? Your post leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I know some troll is going to say, put your big girl panties on and quit your b*tching, but I think this needs to be said.
I understand that this is a humor piece but I think it’s really sad to put this sort of thing out there. especially when it can be (and is) misunderstood. Right now the NIH is poised to lose 10% of the NIH budget, which is less than 1% of our national budget, and a lot of research that should continue will have to stop. I understand the point of this piece is to make fun of Sarah Palin types (SP: did you know we fund fruit fly research? Yes, Sarah, the kind that contributes to neuro research to understand your child’s Down’s Syndrome…), but I am NOT amused.