Patrick Chase2 said:God, I used to love those animal physiology labs!!!
The whole concept was nonsense, honestly, just the way they sold it to us. Proving something that’s already been proven a million times over.
Actually, the point was just teaching us how to do the dirty work. We wouldn't have learned how to prove things in vivo.
It didn't bother me much. It was actually quite a rush... seeing something alive opening up under my fingers, revealing all its inner workings!!!
Gray mice and white rats... sourced directly from some top-tier research institute in the USA.
To make sure everything was scientifically sound, reproducible, and comparable to studies done halfway across the globe, we needed the samples to be as genetically similar as possible. Ideally, they’d be identical clones, but the tech wasn't there yet... besides, who’s going to shell out that kind of cash just for students to play around?
Instead, they’d been breeding their own rats and mice in a basement for years.
They called that wing of the basement "The Stable."
The rule for getting a pure line was simple: you always mate siblings from the same litter.
That’s actually how they got the "prototype"... hell, I can't even remember the exact name of the "strain"... something like CBGJ-6754.
It took about fifty generations of sibling mating to get genetic consistency suitable for serious scientific research. Once that happened, the institute would license the "strain"... and distribute it to labs worldwide to run their experiments.
Every now and then, because of natural mutations, they’d have to "refresh the bloodline" with original samples from the reference institute.
(If the ventilation in that basement ever died, the whole campus would smell horrific. I'm not even sure if it was the mouse and rat waste, the urine, or the standardized food they were fed...
(To be continued...)
We used chloral hydrate for sedation.
Intraperitoneal.
The injection went straight into the abdominal cavity.
You had to hold them steady—one person would grab the rat by the tail and the scruff of the neck, while the other drove the needle into the abdomen and pushed the drug.
Their bite is no joke.
If you scaled the volume of that syringe up to a human based on the size of a rat... it would be catastrophic.
Animals would usually just shit themselves from the stress.
Then came the pinning. We’d secure the
specimen to a Styrofoam pad using thick, short pins.
And finally, opening the abdominal cavity.
It was fascinating... organs still functioning... performing these mindless little experiments, like counting how many drops of urine would leak through a needle inserted into a bladder after injecting glucose... stuff like that.
Two semesters worth of this...
Even knowing full well that there was a living creature pinned down in agony, sedated and twitching, and that the experiments were pointless—that the results could be read in any textbook—despite that eerie feeling, it was genuinely gripping.
That sense of exerting influence over a
living system...
The smell of warm viscera and blood... (to be honest! : *smirk* ...somewhere deep down...)
Some students were disgusted and left the work to others; some were just mindless nerds who did it mechanically and complained about having to do it.
Others did it while cracking tasteless, bloody jokes.
And then there were those who didn't sacrifice the mice and rats—all for nothing.
I guess they learned *something* from that "sacrifice to Mercury."
Of course, at the end, you had to perform a pneumothorax—a lethal cut through the diaphragm with scissors, so that...
The specimen chokes from lung collapse and dies.
Sometimes someone just doesn't do things right. The rats wake up, their guts spilling out, crawling out of the trash bags and making a mess...
(More to come...)