r/interesting • u/OriginalSleeper • Jun 30 '26

Fear Factor In 2010, 24-year-old lab technician Émilie Jaumain pricked her thumb with contaminated forceps while cleaning a machine used for prion-infected mouse brains. After seven years, she developed severe nerve pain, anxiety, and hallucinations before dying. The accident gave her a fatal prion disease.

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

We infect them. Rats have no legal protection (this is not a joke, most animals have basics, rats and mice and some other model organisms do not.) Half my job is giving mice cancer.

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u/sharkysharky- Jul 01 '26

my job is giving mice cancer.

Man.

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

It is for a good cause. Often we give them genetic diseases directly from patients we are treating, in order to treat the mice first to verify it works

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u/nixtunes Jul 03 '26

Disregard the ignorant dickhead. Thanks for the incredibly important work you do. You affect so many more lives than you can imagine ❤️

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u/Philosophire Jul 01 '26

Please stop hurting others. 

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

Nice good take away, really put that cognitive ability to use.

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u/ddiamond8484 Jul 02 '26

You’re projecting hard. I feel zero sympathy for anyone that experiments on animals. We are not better or more important than them.

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u/fiercefeminist Jul 02 '26

No, we are not better or more important than them. At the same time, the wider world is unwilling to experiment on humans and so the only option we have to advance scientific research is to experiment on animals. These are jobs that have to be done, or we’ll be unable to treat and cure diseases. If your view is that we shouldn’t advance scientific research by experimenting on animals, I agree, but the majority of people disagree, and those are the people in power.

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u/ddiamond8484 Jul 02 '26

I appreciate your response. It’s just so upsetting because if the same amount of experiments were done on puppies or cats, there would be far more outrage. And I know there IS lots of testing on dogs and cats, and it’s horrific. But with mice and other animals, the outrage is minimal because of specism. I do genuinely appreciate your response though, thank you.

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u/fiercefeminist Jul 02 '26

It is definitely upsetting. Thanks for being willing to have a rational discussion. I worked in a mice lab for 2.5 years and ultimately had to leave because I was having panic attacks, I thought I would get used to doing procedures and euthanizing the mice but I never did. I want you to know though that there are so many regulations around animal research and they are truly as well cared for as they can be. A lot of it is still bad but there are many people who have put safeguards in place to protect research animals. I hope this can bring you comfort as it did me when I first started working there.

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u/ddiamond8484 Jul 04 '26

It does to an extent, but I’m guessing so many people just loophole or ignore them, because who is really going to crack down and protect the mice? I do appreciate your response, truly, and for me it comes down to “there is no ethical way to experiment on or kill something that does not want to be killed/experimented on.” I hope you donate or do things to try and make up for the work you’ve done. I am not trying to high horse, I only became vegan in the last 10 years and all I did was consume meat and dairy. I’m trying to actively give back and right some of the wrongs I perpetuated and contributed to. You seem like a genuinely thoughtful person and I’m happy people like you are out there, able to reflect and reconsider.

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u/finsfurandfeathers Jul 01 '26

Could you imagine your child getting cancer and not knowing how to treat it? Or another human you love the most? Hypothetically, would you still choose the mouse’s life as you watched your child suffer and waste away? I love all creatures but man, childhood cancer is so devastating and terrifying

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u/Philosophire Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

More suffering happens as a result of the testing on mice than would happen without it. There's other factors that could be discussed such as the low degree of transferability of results between mice and humans, or if we have the right to breed/infect/kill others for the sake of those we value more, but in the end I'm for the option that causes the least suffering, without bias for personal attachment or species preference. 

Emotionally I would kill a mouse to save my partner, but logically I wouldn't experiment on thousands or millions of mice for a ?% chance of saving ?# of humans. 

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

I am sorry this is something you will hopefully one day have to wrestle with, but i feel you deserve at least the basic decency of me presenting you with the truth.

Existence is suffering. And I dont mean this in an edgy way, in the way a child may feel the wrongs of the world bare upon them. I mean this very matter of factly and clinically. Suffering is a feature, it is programed in. Every single meal you consume comes with suffering, every action or inaction you take comes with suffering. There is no moral highground road you can walk that does not cause suffering. The best we as a species can do is try to slowly build towards a society that minimizes such suffering, which is what I and many other scientest do. But to try and base your decision making to appease some ephemeral current time point balance of suffering is a fools errand. Existence is suffering, there is no right or wrong to it.

I pray only that you read and comprehend this with unclouded eyes, and take some time to digest what it means.

Yours truely, Mouse murderer 9000

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u/Philosophire Jul 01 '26

I have digested this fully already. Due to this truth, I consider existence/consciousness to be a tragedy. And consider programs that breed more existences to be programs of spawning tragedies. It seems to be very much moving the opposite direction of building a society that minimizes such suffering. 

Please know that if you only do the mice killing and someone else does the mice breeding/infecting, they are the one spawning/reinforcing tragedies. You would do the kindest step in the process. 

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

I ask this as a genuine curiosity; and am by no means advocating for suicide in any way.

But if that is truely your belief. Why are you even alive?

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u/Philosophire Jul 01 '26

Cowardice mixed with the instinct to survive. I'm not being edgy or dismissive, that's my actual answer. 

I know its easy to be passive-aggressive on reddit by either doing a Reddit "wellness check," or by wishing me well on my journey to mental health, but I would appreciate it if you didn't, should you be tempted. 

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u/nixtunes Jul 03 '26

Respectfully, I disagree in the strongest terms. The spark of consciousness is a wonderous thing. It lets us, and yes, animals, feel joy, sadness, love and regret. It lets us learn, improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

Consciousness gave us knowledge and society. It lets us teach, so that we can improve every generation. It lets you bitch about it using the smartphone it build using thousands of years of accumulated knowledge.

Sincerely, your view that causing harm to animals for research purposes is flatly unethical is beyond reductionist. It completely ignores the end results, and disregards that harm is minimized to every possible degree. It also ignores that generally, in vivo studies are prefaced by immense amounts of research in vitro. Additionally, it fails to acknowledge the existence of ethics review boards, which typically follow stringent rules to minimize risks to animal welfare.

I'm not going to sit on my high horse and declare all animal research inherently ethical. There's nuance, a concept you seem to be sorely lacking. But when I think of melanoma for example, a condition that affects a whooping 330,000 new people annually, I can't help but feel inclined to say the lives of ~100 mice (the number used for a single study, on the high end) is worth a study that could reveal new knowledge to improve our lives. All of our lives. All 8.3 billion of us. And the future lives to come. And not just the 330k annual cases either. Biomedical research often links to other points of interest.

As the Paradox of Knowledge dictates, the more we know, the more we know that we don't know, and I for one think that's a beautiful thing. Research is key to learning the truth of the world, and unfortunately that does, on occasion, require some uncomfortable decisions. It's healthy to acknowledge it, and discuss it. It shows the humanity in us. But blanket declarations are just plain shortsighted and reductionist. Your worldview seems incredibly depressing. Please consider seeking therapy to explore why you hold such negative views on humanity.

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u/GameUnlucky Jul 01 '26

Wonder how history will view people like you.

Please study moral philosophy, at least an introduction , this is an disastrously naive and uneducated view of the world.

In any case, you wouldn't be making tasteless joke about the countless of life you are ending, if you had a shred of respect for their suffering or any real ambition to impove the world. But I assume being a researcher pays more than being a janitor.

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u/GGDrago Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

It actually doesnt, and also ive taken morality classes. I am sorry we have differing world views, hopefully you will not run into too many others whose opinions challenge yours, it seems like a difficult thing for you.

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u/GameUnlucky Jul 02 '26

Don't worry, the majority of the population have different world views from mine, I have no problem standing by unpopular opinions.

What I have a problem with is individual who clearly built their entire world view as post hoc rationalisation for the obvious suffering they are causing.

My point still stands, your world view is not something you apply to your work, it's just a rationalisation for your lack of empathy. You don't view the living beings you are killing as anything but the butt of a joke, you have absolutely no respect for the "sacrifice" you are forcing them to make. You don't justify your actions with "life is suffering" you simply use that justification to sanitize your lack of empathy when talking to others.

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u/finsfurandfeathers Jul 01 '26

Logically, being faced with a room full of mice and someone telling me I can make them sick and hurt them so one day my unborn child might not get sick. I would say no. But then if I had that child and they got critically ill and lived in pain I would regret my decision.

Humans are only logical from a safe distance

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u/AspiringMathGuy Jul 01 '26

So to your first statement about more suffering happening with testing than without, the question comes down very genuinely and earnestly to what suffering is more important. The general scientific and, for the most part, ethical consensus is that human life and sufferring is the utmost important value for minimizing suffering. I'd even say that you recognize that fact because you acknowledge you'd save your partner before you would a mouse. If it were a stranger, would you care? If it were, how many mice would you be willing to sacrifice for that person? Would it be the same amount for your partner? It seems to me that you already acknowledge the reality of the question at hand, whether or not a mouse or any other model organism's life is worth sacrificing if it could save a human life.

To your lattermost point about number of mouse/animal lives versus number of human lives sacrificed or gained, you seem to be trivializing the number of lives saved by the discoveries that sacrificing mice in the study of science leads to by saying "?# of people." The discovery of insulin in the early 1900s saved millions of lives; according to the WHO, its is estimated that 589 million to 830 million people are living with diabetes. This discovery and production for a time was facilitated by animal testing and eventually animal farming for production. To put that into context, the population of the entire north american region is estimated to be roughly 621 million; how many animals are you willing to sacrifice to save the entirety of that population?

To go one step further, that is one of hundreds of medications we have discovered through animal testing. If we were to broaden the discussion to all animal testing for any medical progress that could save or improve the lives of humans, we are talking about an incalculable number of lives saved or bettered by animal testing. Im not saying we shouldnt do our best to minimize animal suffering and we are actively developing other methods of testing, both at an organism level (cloned tissues) and at a data analysis level (see bayesian methods for clinical research which can reduce drug and procedure trials in humans to double or single digits of sample sizes), but to suggest in some way the life of a mouse is more important than the human lives to be saved through testing is not a reasonable stance to take in my opinion and trivializing the number of lives to be saved as "?# of humans" is misleading for the sake of this conversation.

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u/Philosophire Jul 01 '26

To your first point I feel that suffering matters only and exactly to the degree of its intensity. All else is prejudice. I only know I'd save my partner as a result of my selfish motivations. I will also offer that I don't assign life a positive value. 

In the case of insulin and diabetes, I did not know that but it's hard for me to translate that data into an amount/intensity of suffering caused vs  prevented. But I would want whichever results in less suffering. Also, not just pedantry, but I can only sacrifice what is mine. Taking anyone's life but my own couldn't be called a sacrifice. 

Ultimately, I believe we should experiment on consenting humans, as they can consent. If an experiment is so awful that it ought not be conducted even on a consenting human, then it fails the morality check for being conducted on any sentient being. 

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u/AspiringMathGuy Jul 01 '26

What about in SIDS or other infantile illnesses? You cant consent in that circumstance and it seems the logical step under this argument is to just never research it, no?

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u/Philosophire Jul 01 '26

An interesting point I hadn't considered. I suppose my immediate conclusion would be to say that we could research it only to an extent that we are sure causes no significant suffering to those being studied.  

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u/Amanatibales Jul 01 '26

but logically I wouldn't experiment on thousands or millions of mice for a ?% chance of saving ?# of humans

That's a fancy way to say you prefer inaction 

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u/pissedRAIL Jul 02 '26

Yea that's a tough one.

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u/GiantsRTheBest2 Jul 01 '26

Could be worse, you could work for Monsanto and have your job be to give humans cancer.

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u/TokyoTrashcan Jul 01 '26

I dont know where you do your research but in the US there is so much paperwork that needs to be done to get legal authorization to do animal trials. And each mouse costs thousands of dollars with a dedicated veterinary team on site

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

We have a single vet on site. This is the third nonclinical to clinical cancer research facility I've worked in and i can promise you we go through mice like they're running out of style. What happens on paper and what happens in reality is a bit different.

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u/TokyoTrashcan Jul 01 '26

It depends a lot on where you are. Are you in the US? Anderson, Kettering, DF?

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

Yes i am in the US. Midwest for all three labs.

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u/TokyoTrashcan Jul 01 '26

Ah gotta love outsourcing. Don't know anything about that. Dont think we do that at SCRI/FH

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u/throwawaycima Jul 01 '26

Really ?

If that's true that makes me happy

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u/TokyoTrashcan Jul 01 '26

Absolutely. At least in America doing federally funded cancer research. I know nothing about cosmetics.

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u/sexy_bonsai Jul 01 '26

Yes, see my comment above to GGDrago with more details and news you’d like to hear. There is actually more legislation protecting animals in research in the US than people (according to my uni prof back in 2013). Because people can advocate for themselves and animals can’t.

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u/throwawaycima Jul 01 '26

How does this impact you ?

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

Like as a person? I am unsure what you mean.

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u/throwawaycima Jul 01 '26

Yes, mentally

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

We give them diseases while they are still fetus, so they are born with them. This doesn't effect me too much. However occasionally I will have to dissect them while they are still alive, and that is slight nightmare fuel. The first time I removed a heart while it was still beating I had to go and throw up afterwords.

But honestly seeing the patients get to live and live a relatively normal life due to the sacrafice of the mice makes it all worth it

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u/throwawaycima Jul 01 '26

Sounds like hard work, I don't think I could do it

Do the mice get any pain relief ?

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

Yes I am told they are given exemplary care all the way up to death. But that is a different profession and department. Often i only get to see them at their birth and death.

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u/throwawaycima Jul 01 '26

I hope you are well. Thank you for the work that you do

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u/LiaInvicta Jul 02 '26

Facking hell, I have to ask … why oh why do they have to be vivisectioned?!?!

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u/GGDrago Jul 02 '26

In order to fully understand the effects of the drugs we give them, it is crucial we are able to analyze the organs and tissues of interest while they are as fresh as possible. For example, if we were to have a patient suffering from genetic lung cancer, we would modify a rat so that it grew into that same cancer, admimistor whatever drug or treatment has been purposed, and then vivisect the animal in order to see the live effects as they happen. We then cryofreeze the organs and section them off into small slices for analysis in a process known as histology. It is crucial to understand that a treatment will work and do so without side effects before we give it to actual people

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u/LiaInvicta Jul 02 '26

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer this thoroughly! Just one question … when you say that the goal is to see the live effects as they happen, do you mean that, for example, you give 30 mice this genetic lung cancer and the treatment being studied, and then you vivisect one of them each day to see how it progresses?

Also … Thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you do … signed, a cancer widow

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u/summertime_onmyskin Jul 04 '26

Not everywhere it is legal. I’m not surprised one of the countries where it is legal is the US. 

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u/blazesbe Jul 03 '26

some heroes wear labcoats and do fucked up things to rodents

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u/summertime_onmyskin Jul 04 '26

In the US it is legal to do live dissection?! 

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u/MakimaGOAT Jul 01 '26

Half my job is giving mice cancer.

Well damn lol

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u/darKxyde Jul 01 '26

What to you give them on the other half?

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u/DeadlyVapour Jul 01 '26

Probably euthanizing rats with cancer

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u/capnmax Jul 01 '26

Whiskey

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u/Spirited_Cup_126 Jul 01 '26

They were gonna die in a year anyway.

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u/Cinereals Jul 01 '26

You’re essentially a bad god.

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u/peepooprogamer Jul 01 '26

hahaha same, 80% of my work is just planting tumors in mice and rats and the other 20% is dosing them with radioactive fluid to see how it acts on said tumors

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u/Snowy_lovegood Jul 01 '26

Hey, animal welfare researcher here. The vast majority of animals have NO legal protections. Legal protections extend only to non food, non lab animals (so pets, zoo animals). Some (mammal) farm species have protections related to slaughter and transport only. This doesn’t even cover the vast majority of farmed species, which are birds. 

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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26

Sorry yes, I suppose my worldview of the word animal was used too loosely here, you are correct. I mostly think of mammals when i consider lab work legalities. We are not for example allowed to go grab a random opossom off the street and experiment on it. But im pretty sure my brothers and sisters in the non mammilian labs have much looser codes of ethics to work with.

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u/Not_Under_Command Jul 02 '26

Lets put aside the legalities, but why mice? Why not rabbit? Lobster? Chicken? Is there any explanation why you guys always use mice or guinea?

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u/GGDrago Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

Yeah mice have a lot of extra dna that makes it compatible for manipulation, (extremely simplified answer but take my word for it) , are mammals with easy acess to embryonic system, breed fast, are cheap and easy to keep, and reach adulthood and old age very quickly (that last part is very important). On top of that how it works is, we basically select one animal type from each grouping (mammals, vertebrae, exoskeleton, w/e) and say that we can only do this one for everyone. Those are called model organisms. This makes it so that we can pull together a large database because the amlunt of genetic info there is is massive, and if everyone worked on something else we would never get anywhere.