On the fifth day of Whinemas, the troll gods sent to me...

5 doomed mice

Warning! Animals were harmed in the making of this whine. Contains references to animal research. Not suitable for vegetarians (yes, sadly, including me...)


read on


When I started my thesis project I had to choose whether to use human or mouse cells. Since you're not allowed to kill humans to get their cells, I originally tried to use the human cells. Unfortunately, since you're not allowed to kill humans you have to use an immortalised cell line.

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We interrupt this whine to bring you a short science lesson on the difference between cell lines and primary cells:
Primary cells are those that are taken directly from a live animal (including humans) and generally can only be used for a short time before they start behaving differently and eventually die (that's why animals die of old age eventually). Cell lines, on the other hand, will grow forever, given the right conditions. These are either cancer cells (their immortality is what causes all the problems when they're growing inside an animal) or other primary cells that have been modified to become "immortal".
If you use a cell line, you don't have to deal with live animals and it's easy to get a lot of them, but there can still be other ethical issues. One of the most widely used cell lines, known as HeLa, began as a tumour sample taken from Henrietta Lacks shortly before the same cancerous cells overran her body and killed her in 1951. Neither she nor her family gave consent or received compensation for her cells being cultured and passed around the scientific community.
Primary cells have the drawback that in order to get to a lot of cell types, and in order to get enough of others, you have to kill the animal they come from.

We now return to your regularly scheduled whine.
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So, I tried using the nice, happy, no-need-to-kill-anything cell line for about 6 months. Unfortunately, the cells are so picky that feeding them on a different day or letting them get ever-so-slightly less uncrowded made them behave completely differently. I tried for a long time to figure out what exactly it was they were objecting to, but there seemed to be so many things it would be impossible to control (or I could spend my whole graduate career characterising their finicky-ness and nobody would give me a degree or job for that).
Supposedly, cell lines are more reliable than primary cells because they're a clone i.e. every cell is theoretically identical. In actual fact, the primary cells are much more predictable. When, after trying my best to make them do different things, my different sets of primary cells all came out the same, it was pretty obvious I had to switch to the mouse cells.
So now, once or twice a week, I have to take a cute little mouse away from its friends, stick it in a chamber of carbon dioxide until it suffocates to death and then cut it open to get the cells I need.
I hate, hate, hate doing this. In my lab at home, I flat out refused and made my poor, soft-hearted post-doc do it for me (while simultaneously making him feel bad about it), but it's harder to refuse to do it when I've decided this is what I want to do with my life...
Nobody else in the lab ever seems to have a problem with it at all. They tend to look at me perplexed when I suggest sharing a single mouse, and don't mind throwing out half the cells they get. I feel guilty just seeing the mice sitting around in their cages looking all cute and happy. It doesn't help that I had pet mice as a kid.
I try to justify it on the grounds that it's for a good cause, but my research is really very basic (as opposed to applied) so the "good" is pretty intangible. I also end up feeling incredibly guilty when an experiment doesn't work.
I'm not really a very good vegetarian because I'm too self-conscious about telling anyone, partly because it would require justification of my opinion, which we already know I'm no good at, and also because I don't want to cause anyone even the slightest inconvenience. I ended up eating meat when I went home, because I didn't want to interfere with my mum's cooking plans.
Justifying my vegetarianism is further complicated by my hypocrisy about killing mice for research. I know that the research, even basic research, is important for developing cures for diseases and improving human quality of life. There is no other way to do it, despite what animal rights activists claim. I know it's impossible to be perfectly efficient, too. But at the same time, there are a lot of experiments that don't show anything useful and I feel terrible for the waste of life.
I sometimes think my vegetarianism is just a symptom of my lack of self-esteem. I'm not important so I'm certainly not worth the life of a cow or a chicken. In particular, my desire for a particular flavour is absolutely not worth it. With the mice, though, it's not my life I'm sacrificing them for, it's the poor sick kids, someone's mother, brother, dearly beloved. Of course their life is worth more than that of a mouse that wouldn't have even been born if it weren't needed. Still, I wish there were some other way.

4 sentences
3 sad tales
2 blistered heels
and a huge lack of motivation

yay for blogger letting me go back in time so this would appear to be on the right day :)