Killing mice.
(As aired on All Things Considered, June 6, 2002)

 

When I started working in AIDS, it was about people, politics, psychology, culture, power. But as I continued, I became more and more obsessed with the most basic elements of the epidemic: a virus destroying immune systems. And eventually, I decided to stop being a filmmaker and a community organizer and start becoming a physician and a researcher.

I was taking an introductory class in immunology lab techniques when I first saw someone kill a mouse. Before our teacher took the mouse from its cage, she warned us, "This is tough to watch, and I understand if you don't want to be here for this. But if you want to be an immunologist, you're going to have to kill a lot of mice." My teacher was right. As soon as I started working in a lab, learning to kill mice was at least as important as when you start work in a new office and have to learn how to use the fax machine.

Learning how to kill a mouse properly takes time, because there's subtlety involved in not hurting the mouse before you kill it. The basic idea is that once you have a mouse in the right position, you quickly and firmly pull the tail down and push the skull up. This severs the spinal cord and kills the mouse instantly. It's a vivid and strange thing to see, and even more so to do, but the idea isn't so different from a common mousetrap. A mouse is small; most don't weigh more than an ounce. Once you learn how to do it, breaking its neck requires about the amount of strength that it takes to undo new button-fly jeans.

There are more hands-off approaches, like gas or injections. Many of these approaches are easier for the scientist, but crueler to the mouse. Others damage experiments by altering the internal chemistry of the mouse. And so in the lab where I work, we snap their necks and we make it quick.

When I started, sometimes I had to go walk around the lab building afterwards to take a breath and gather myself. Now it still upsets me whenever I have to kill mice, but I'm used to it. I think that probably some scientists do get over it completely; the mice become tools. Other scientists hire technicians to handle and kill the mice. The researcher works with the cells of the mouse once it's killed, but never encounters the living mouse.

But that's not how we do things where I work. In fact, the people I get along with best in my lab sometimes even talk to their mice. While we're herding a mouse towards one side of a cage or another we might say, "Come on, sweetie." Maybe if we're injecting a mouse with something and it squirms, we say, "OK, OK. It's going to be just a second." When we put it back in its cage, we might say, "There you go." And while the mouse is sniffing and inspecting its cage mates, we say, "There's your buddies." I was in the mouse room with a colleague of mine and I noticed her doing this. And I said, "You talk to your mice, too." She said, "Doesn't everybody?"

But as every 4-H Club kid learns, the destiny of most hogs is ham. And so, too, is the destiny of most laboratory mice science. They're windows into vast mysteries of our own biology, our bodies' frailties and strengths, and the reasons for our own deaths. And so now my fate as a researcher and the mouse's fate as a mouse are inseparable.

copyright 2002 joe wright
broadcast and transcript, copyright 2002 national public radio