Previously: Scientists are casually ruining mice’s brains.
“Researchers have found a way to make see-through mice, but you won’t find these critters scampering in your kitchen.
The transparent rodents aren’t alive and they’re for research only, to help scientists study fine details of anatomy. Before they are treated with chemicals, the animals are euthanized and their skin removed. Researchers made their inner organs transparent, but not their bones.”
“What’s wrong, Carol?”
“What?”
“I said, what’s wrong? You’ve been distracted all morning.”
Carol dropped the spoon against her coffee cup. It clattered, and she jumped. “It’s nothing.” She tried to laugh. “I’m just tired, I guess.”
Janice scooted closer to Carol on the bench. “Carol. Come on. It’s me here. What’s really going on?” She pulled out a lighter from her pocket and casually singed the eyelids off an American white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus), but its tiny screams didn’t even elicit a chuckle from Carol.
Carol rubbed her eyes. “I just sometimes — sometimes I feel like we’ve run out of ways to fuck with mice.”
Janice dropped the mouse, bleeding and twitching in agony, to the floor. “Carol?”
“Look, we both got into neuroscience for the same reason,” Carol said, “to –”
“To see what kind of shit we could do to mice,” Janice finished for her.
“Yeah,” Carol said. “To see what kind of shit we could do to mice. Sometimes I worry we found them all. And the ones we already know about just don’t thrill me anymore.”
“Don’t thrill you any more?” Janice asked. “What about when we tear off their feet and race them across flypaper?”
Carol smiled wanly.
“What about when we take out all of their blood and replace it with sand? What about when we–”
“I know,” Carol said. “I know. It should still thrill me. But it doesn’t.” She stood up. “Maybe it’s time I got out of the game. Let someone younger and hungrier about fucking with mice step in.”
“Carol,” Janice began, “I wasn’t going to say anything about this until I was sure we had perfected the process. I was actually going to wait until your birthday. But I think you need to see what I’ve been working on.”
“Okay,” Carol said, but without much hope in her voice.
“Come with me.” Janice led Carol over to a small walk-in closet and pushed back the curtains. “Take a look.”
Carol gasped. Spread out on the table were row upon row of transparent, gelatinous mice bodies. “It’s horrible,” she breathed in disgust. “Janice, you’re incredible. How did you do it?”
“Go ahead,” Janice said. “Touch one.”
Carol tentatively poked at the nearest twisted sack of gel-flesh and shuddered in delight as the material sprang back into place.
“It’s fairly simple,” Janice explained. “I pumped a series of chemicals through the blood vessels and spinal cords of regular mice…”
“Painful, corrosive chemicals?” Carol asked eagerly.
Janice chuckled. “Of course. And I created a series of mesh frameworks to keep the gel-tissue from collapsing and allowing the mice to escape into the merciful arms of death. Took about a week.”
“And they’re in unbelievable pain and confusion?” Carol said, grinning.
“Unimaginable,” Janice said. “I wouldn’t have made them any other way.”
“Do you think–” Carol began, then stopped.
“What is it?”
“Do you think we could put them under the X-ray machine until they develop brain tumors?”
Janice smiled. That’s my Carol. “Of course we can.”
Tags: body horror, i have no mouth but i must scream, mice, science, why though
NOOOOOOOOPPPPE
Well, that was upsetting.
“Look, we both got into neuroscience for the same reason,” Carol said, “to –”
“To see what kind of shit we could do to mice,” Janice finished for her.
I think this is brilliant satire, and want to send it to my boyfriend who works in a cancer research lab where he gets stuck leading/carrying out a lot of the experiments with mice and rats (because seriously no one likes leading those projects). I’m not sending it to him though for fear that he will collapse at work.
I have every intention of sending this to my old psychology professor from college. She always spoke so fondly of her work with rats…
They should really go hang out with Karen, Trish, and the other hiring managers.
Anyone else notice that Carol is supposedly drinking coffee at her bench? (Actual mouse-torturing scientists are not allowed to eat or drink in the lab, or wear open-toed shoes).
I mean, I’m a postdoc in a research lab at a Serious Institution and a not-insignificant amount of our time is spent sneaking in, concealing, and drinking illicit beverages at our desks. And I’m currently wearing open-toed platform wedges so YMMV.
Fair enough, maybe the labs here are unusually strict 🙂 Or more commonly doing work with highly carcinogenic toxins – I don’t think anyone is trying to sneak beverages in, although a lot of time is spent socializing outside the lab at the Table For Beverages
“Carol, do you think you should be drinking coffee in here?”
“Look closer,” Carol said, holding out her cup.
Janice peered in through the steam to see a cup full of clear, hot broth, stirred by the frantic flailing of drowning, scalded mice.
“I’m thinking this will have applications in treatment for Alzheimer’s or whatever.”
““Researchers have found a way to make see-through mice, but you won’t find these critters scampering in your kitchen.”
thank fuck. I’m already pissed about the mice breaking into my cabinet to eat my everything bagels. the last thing I need is one of those fuckers scampering around my kitchen, poppyseeds on display, TORMENTING ME
Mallory didn’t say they’re not scampering around on your floor; just that you won’t find them.
Last Christmas at our lab party I was talking to a husband; his postdoc is mostly killing mice. He chops their heads off in a little guillotine and then drops the heads in liquid nitrogen. I think. I was a little tipsy.
He still has emotions about it, which I assume is why he hasn’t gotten a fellowship. Gotta double down on mice death.
A staff assistant in my dept was a bio major. And she told me about a course she took where the class went out to a field away from the city. There they caught mice, and then CLIPPED A TOE OFF, so that they could identify the mice they had already caught.
I do not know the point of that class other than being horrifying.
Secret lizardmen may control the government, but academic biology is still firmly the domain of cats wearing suits and rubber masks.
It’s not even rubber. They just have a fake beard and maintain neutral expressions really well, until grad students propose something with lots of scurrying rodents.
Wow whatever happened to a little collar around the neck?
They die a lot more often than the ones where you clip a toe off. Collars get caught, collars can choke, collars can get lost.
Or that’s how it is with lizards, anyway.
My hampster, who is like a slightly-fuzzier, stub-tailed mousie, is getting an extra cuddle and corn tonight ):
I wish I could like your comment more than once and also I am about to give my puppy two treats because he is the only animal in my care and this makes me feel guilty for just being a human that hates mice experiments yet benefits from mice experiments (do I even?).
Plus since they are happening and I am alive am I somehow colluding in them even though I don’t want to be?
Oh I feel quite certain we are all benefitting from mice experiments.
GOOD
MICE MUST BE ELIMINATED
YES, THANK YOU.
I lived in a mouse riddled flat for many months. ELIMINATE THEM ALL.
oh god oh god oh god
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
….
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
You realize if you think for even one second about “Maus” vis-a-vis this post, it becomes as upsetting as one could possibly imagine.
What I’m saying is that scientists are Nazis.
I WAS LURED HERE BY CHEERFUL CARTOON MICE AND YOU GIVE ME THOSE JELLY ABOMINATIONS?!
I thought it was going to be a defense of the National Mental Health Institute.
Well, this is the most horrible thing I’ll read today. I’m out.
Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it.
You maniacs! You fucked up the mice! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
Oh my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it.
You maniacs! You fucked up the mice! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
I worked with animals in college in a non-torturing environment. There were all sorts of animals, but I was especially interested in working with the snakes. At one point, I impressed my superiors enough to get recommended for a job in an all-snake lab on campus. I was so excited! Yes! The big time! Snake city!
Then I learned the snakes in the lab were there to test their bite strength, which involved figuring the exact amount of pressure it took to break their jaws and then euthanizing the snakes. [tiny screams] [[probably also tiny silent snake screams]]
I didn’t take the job.
I’d make a bad neuroscientist.
Ugh I have really conflicting feelings about stuff like this because I’m vegan and a biology undergraduate and I also work in a lab studying leaf cutter ants and other animals that sometimes are killed for research and I don’t like that. But I do like science and figuring stuff out but not at the expense and pain of animals! (I accidentally squished some ants the other day and I’m still sad about it.)
A+ upsetting perfidy! D:
A+ upsetting perfidy! D:
I know the Toast often takes an irreverant tone but I’m a scientist who works with mice and there are a lot of misconceptions about animal research so this just ended up annoying me! First off, it even says in the bit quoted that the mice are euthanised before the procedure starts so they don’t experience the ‘painful, corrosive chemicals’ or spend a week in agony before ‘escap[ing] into the merciful arms of death’. This is just something that is being done to their corpses. Secondly, working with animals involves a huge amount of paperwork and oversight. If someone wanted to torture animals it would make far more sense to do it on their own time. I will admit that scientists get pretty desensitised to what we do but that’s very different from actually enjoying causing pain to animals.
And am I the only one who thinks this is really cool and potentially very useful?
Yes, you are the only one, and you are a monster; “euthanize” is Greek for “heightens their senses so they are extra alive and feel extra pain as horrible gel-beasts.”
100% of scientists kick mice on their way to work every morning
I just read Everyone is Absolutely Beside Themselves, so this is… timely. (Although my comment is not.)
I was reading http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-ba… and, when I read this part…
To their shock they found instead that – implanted in the brain, testis or eye of a mouse – the embryo went wild.
…I of course recalled of you all.