by GARET LAHVIS
Scientists study animals to illuminate human psychology. So why are we blind to the mental lives of our caged subjects?
Of the thousands of bodies in this room, only five of us reflect the fluorescent lights. A low ceiling fan blows germfree air down onto the stainless-steel countertop and over three mice in an open cage, and their sister wriggling between my thumb and index finger.
As I pinch back the loose skin over her shoulders, her forearms splay outward. She pumps her hind legs as if swimming. I hesitate. Then, with a hole punch that I could use for office paper, I divot the lower edge of her right ear. It’s a kind of branding, a way to identify her, mouse A, the first of four from cage 896. To collect her DNA, I use scissors to cut off a snippet of her tail. With forceps, I drop the snippet into a small plastic tube, a microcuvette marked with a Sharpie pen: 896A.
Beside us, her cage looks like a shoebox. Moulded from clear plastic, its floor is lined with a thin layer of paper bedding. Because her cage is difficult to cover while I’m holding a mouse, it lies open. In the dark behind us, shelves contain hundreds of shoeboxes just like it.
One of her sisters sits in the corner of the open cage. The other two scale its wall. One folds her belly over the rim, like a child pulling herself out of a pool. The other walks its rim, balancing as if on a high wire. I sense she’s working through options: ‘Leap from the cage I’ve spent my life trying to escape? Or retreat back inside?’ With freedom right there, they nearly always jump back to the familiar.
I am also working through options. I keep mulling over a quote by the American writer and muckraker Upton Sinclair, whose book The Jungle (1906) exposed conditions in the meatpacking industry. ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something,’ he used to say, ‘when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’
I don’t cut flanks from sirloins. As a professor at a medical school, I’m paid to teach and run a research laboratory of mostly grad students and technicians. My job is, at least, to try to understand.
We conduct experiments on mice to help determine what makes a person susceptible to autism. To identify its genetic causes, my lab invented behaviour tests to determine whether certain strains of mice enjoy the company of their peers. Our experiments generally go well, so long as we imagine how we might feel if we were in a mouse’s situation. For instance, since the students in my laboratory noticed that feeling stressed left us less sociable, we decided to test mice under comfortable conditions. Since mice are nocturnal – active and sociable in the dark – we would study them under red lighting, a hue they can barely see, amid soft bedding. Bucking the convenient approach for scientists – studies under bright lights on steel flooring – we got good results.
Lately, though, I’ve been questioning my research, wondering whether our studies of mice could ever help people with autism. My thoughts keep circling, scouring through the same, seemingly barren plot of scientific questions. What am I missing?
Aeon for more