Research mice are the bedrock of research into human diseases. Pick a disorder, an illness. There’s a mouse model created specifically to study it. So as labs began closing, an SOS went out to save these mice. whyynews
Back in mid-March, when most of us were hearing the words “shelter in place” for the first time, research labs across the country were busy with what they call “saccing.” It’s short for sacrifice, like for science and the greater good.
“I’d say maybe we only actually use like a tenth of the mice that we breed,” Allman said. “Euthanizing these mice on a regular basis is just part of the job, and it’s not a fun part of the job, but it is a necessity.”A transgenic mouse produced by The Jackson Lab “It’s actually very simple. You take their cages, take off the tops, put it in a machine called the Euthan-X — which I have a lot of feelings about, but it’s essentially just a CO2 chamber,” Allman said. “And you turn the button on, and you wait for 20 minutes to half an hour, and they die.”
The animals’ deaths didn’t hit her on that level. Before you get the wrong idea about Allman, know she’s a self-described animal lover, a vegetarian; one of her pet cats scurried across her laptop during an interview. But she didn’t mourn the euthanized mice, so much as the science the mice represented.
Pick a disorder, an illness. There’s a mouse model for that, a mouse created specifically to study that disease.“So whatever disease you can think of, you know, epilepsy, obesity, metabolic syndrome, anything that you can think of, we have a mouse model that you can genetically engineer to recapitulate that particular disease,” Lutz said.The Jackson Lab is a nonprofit where many labs get founder mice to start colonies of their own for research.
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